Happy Birthday Mother

Helen Elaine Kern Markwart
July 31, 1921 - May 6, 1999.

Shortly after mother died I was fortunate to be able to join a mother/daughter grief group. This was a wonderful experience where adult daughters shared the sadness and loss due to the death of our mothers. Each of us brought a unique experience to the group. I was and am grateful for the experience.

During the group I often doodled in my journal while listening to the others share their thoughts and feelings. In spite of the sometimes strained relationship I had with her I was able to think of many things for which I am thankful that I had the mother I had.



During the early days of my grieving, I spent time making a lamp shade with old buttons that she had. Doesn't every mother have a collection of old buttons? Touching all those buttons, many I remember from my childhood, was a healing experience. Sewing each one, one at a time, onto the shade was meditative as well. Later I found the perfect lamp base and the whole thing is magnificent. After I die, I wonder who will want mother's beautiful lamp.

Father's Day 2008

This morning Stephen asked me to describe my happiest memory of my father (1915-2001).
We were driving across the Bay Bridge on our way to Grace Cathedral for the 11:00 Liturgy.
On our way there we always pass by Tadich Grill on California St. I imagined it being 1938 and Dad having lunch there.
A block from the Cathedral is the Mark Hopkins Hotel. I imagined Dad there with his friends for an evening at the Top of the Mark.

Fast forward circa 1958 - I said that for me my happiest memory was sitting on the arm of the big black chair watching him work a crossword puzzle and listen with him to the Lucky Lager Dance Time radio program. I sat on the arm or sometimes at his feet, while wafts of smoke would drift from his lit cigarette and envelope me in a haze of who he was and what he enjoyed. I remember it as though it were yesterday and to this day I too love crosswords and the music of the 30's, 40's and 50's. Thanks Dad.

Happy Father's Day Dad I thought of you today. I love you.

I like this poem. It speaks to me on a very basic level.

Take Care
"When a man dies, it's not only of his disease; he dies of his whole life." Charles Péguy

Our neighbor Laura Foley used to love to tell us, every spring when we returned from work in richer provinces, the season's roster of disease, bereavement, loss.
And all her stars were ill, and all her ailments worth detailing. We were young, and getting up into the world; we feigned a gracious interest when she spoke, but did a wicked slew of imitations, out of earshot.
Finally her bitterness drove off even such listeners as we, and one by one the winters nailed more cold into her house, until the decade crippled her, and she was dead. Her presence had been tiresome, cheerless, negative, and there was little range or generosity in anything she said.
But now that I have lost my certainty, and spent my spirit in a waste of one romance, I think enumerations have their place, descriptive of what keeps on keeping on. For dying's nothing simple, single. And the records of the odd demises (stone inside an organ, obstacles to brook, a pump that stops, some cells that won't, the fevers making mockeries of lust) are signatures of lively interest: they presuppose the life to lose.
And if the love of life's an art, and art is difficult, then we were less than laymen at it (easy come is all the layman knows). I mean that maybe Laura Foley loved life more, who kept so keen an eye on how it goes.

by Heather McHugh, from Hinge & Sign I Prefer © Wesleyan University Press. Reprinted with permission.