If it’s August, it must be my turn, and I may not be the right person for the job this month. Still, I’m happy to take a shot at it. I’m a little short on movie recommendations and recipes, but I have plenty of life to share and since ALSSI is really just about #womenslives if you boil all the church talk away, I’ll share a little about mine.
Forrest Gump’s mama said life is like a box of chocolates—you never know what you’re going to get—and I think that’s a sturdy enough metaphor. It holds up, in my experience. But as I texted Cynthia last night, life feels to me more like a salad bowl with every blessed thing in it. One bowl, all the everything. Personally I like to curate my salad a little more carefully than that, but all-the-things all-the-time seems to be what’s on the menu no matter what we order. At least with chocolates you have a choice whether to eat any. Life is an all-you-can-eat-and-keep-eating-until-closing salad bar containing everything you can name, but also all the things you don’t have words for.
I knew this a month ago, but I know-know it today.
We’ll start here: My mom died July 17, just an hour or so before Cynthia and I were scheduled to have a photo shoot—the kind of pics you need for promo stuff when you’re in the podcast biz. If you ever wonder what you’ll do right after you get the phone call that your mom just died, I’m going to suggest that you probably won’t know until the minute it happens. What I did is put on a little lipstick (which I never wear) and go for pictures.
There’s something about a bit of normalcy when the world turns upside down that can be lifesaving medicine.
I’d gotten the call that something was up with my mom—and it wasn’t good—the morning before, standing in the roller coaster line at Lagoon amusement park. Well, adjacent to the roller coaster line, holding my 2 year old granddaughter who was waving to her mom a bit nervously as the line snaked away, and also trying to put her fingers all over my sunglasses because she found that to be the funniest thing she could think of to do when you’re plunked in grandma’s lap and your mom walks away.
Maybe everyone should have a giggling two-year-old in their lap when they get that kind of phone call. It keeps the “and” in plain sight.
I answered the call as best I could, and absorbed the news as best I could. I didn’t know what to do. We were at Lagoon as part of our first full-family vacation ever: all the kids, all the grands, together for a week in Utah. (We’ll still be paying for it next year—100% worth it.) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
I’d spent the day with my mom two days before, going to Dairy Queen and playing Rummikub, and I hadn’t even hugged her when I left. I’d just said, “See you next Friday!” Which of course I wouldn’t.
I didn’t get another goodbye.
When I got the call the morning after Lagoon that she was already gone, and I’d missed it, the only comfort I could think of was the memory of helping her in the bathroom in some very personal ways 3 days before. If that’s not a hug and an I love you, I guess I don’t know what is. She’d said to me, as we struggled together to get her garments back where they belonged, “This is when you really want to have a daughter. Sons are good, but you want a daughter when it comes to this.” And as the one there helping the regal woman I’d always thought to be the most beautiful in the world do what amounted to changing her diaper, I thought “There are people who come to work every day and do this job. I can never thank anyone on this staff enough.” At the same time, I felt an unexpected wave of gratitude for having the opportunity to do it myself.
As I pushed her wheelchair up to the sink to wash her hands, she said, “Don’t look in the mirror after 60. Just … don’t.” It was the last—probably very good—motherly advice I’d get.
3 days later, I thought of that advice as I put on my awkward lipstick in the mirror, knowing it couldn’t do a thing to save me. After all, Cynthia is 10 years younger than I am and a good 6 inches taller. Plus, let’s face it—she has some truly worthy hair.
Blakelee—our photographer in addition to everything else she does for ALSSI—did her best to always put me in the most forgiving light, running us through a bunch of poses, assuring me over and over that I looked a-mazing. Remember me telling you how my daughters claim they could tell I was lying to them when they were kids because my voice went too high? Well, there it was, proof from the photographer’s mouth.
Anyway, at one point Blakelee said, “Now look serious,” and I said, “Serious like my mom just died, or some less-serious kind of serious?” And we all laughed. Sometimes laughing with women you love is all there is to do.
I didn’t jump in the car and race down to be with my dad and siblings who’d gathered in St. George to take care of the to-do list that suddenly materializes when someone dies, and that’s because of the aforementioned trip I was on with my own family, but also because of the reason we were on that trip.
We were in Salt Lake to celebrate my other-mother’s 90th birthday with an event so extraordinary, I can’t quite put into words just how special it was. My mother-in-law is much more than just that title in my life—since I was 18 years old, she’s nurtured me at times in ways my own mother couldn’t.
She helped me find my creative footing, taught me the value of my own hands and helped me learn what they could do, gave me perspective and understanding of the ways women’s handwork has saved their lives—and spoken the volumes they couldn’t—across history.
She is largely responsible for my relationship with art, and learning I could make it. In so many ways, this woman introduced me to the self I’ve become.
To celebrate crossing the threshold of her 10th decade, her children put on a quilt show, a retrospective of one facet of her lifetime of creative work. She’s a quilting purist in principle and practice—no machine stitching, no marking pens or adhesives or rotary cutters or synthetic fibers or fancy tricks or shortcuts of any kind. There were 80 quilts in the show, give or take, a remarkable body of work to say the least.
And so many people her quilting—and I think more importantly her being—have touched through the years, showed up. Hundreds of them. You read that right. Women flew in, some who had been in her neighborhood quilting groups as she’d moved around the country, many who (like me) trace their own creative lineage to her. Each quilt was displayed with a handwritten card identifying the pattern and giving a little background, maybe some insight into why she made that quilt at a particular time in her life. She’d also selected quotes that influenced her work, scattering them among the quilts.
A small table held her well-worn tools: needles and scissors, thimble, white cotton thread, and the flannel-covered lap board on which she works. I heard that when she woke up the morning of the event she said, “My tools are at the show. What am I supposed to do all day?”
The family gathered for a dinner the night before (my mom had died that morning). When we arrived, I found my mother-in-law on her porch swing and sat down beside her. We didn’t really say much, just watched what seemed like 100 grown-up cousins happily milling and visiting while their children hollered and chased.
She reached over, took my hand, and just held it.
Swing, swing, swing.
It was the “and” I needed to stay upright.
A few days later, we had the ALSSI live event. Talk about worthy stuff, there’s just nothing in the world better than the women in this community coming together over cake and questions! More healing balm.
The next morning I got up and drove to St. George. My mom didn’t want a funeral, so we weren’t sure how to celebrate her. For her 60th birthday, we had written a roadshow about her life—an irreverent musical roast, which she accepted with grace and humor, as she did most things. We reserved a ward, gathered up all the grandchildren, had a few memorable (and mostly useless) rehearsals, and surprised her with the show. We’d invited a few of her best friends; she looked radiant in a birthday tiara, laughing and crying by turns.
So the Friday after Mom died we gathered—31 years later, those grandkids all adults now—set up a keyboard, and sang the roadshow again in the theater room at the assisted living center. Her favorite white cake with raspberry filling (I didn’t come from nowhere!) completed the evening. Was it the tribute she would have wanted? I don’t know. Sometimes laughing with people you love is all there is to do.
Now, if you’re the kind of person who enjoys connecting life’s dots into little pictures of meaning, you may appreciate this detail: at the exact time my mom passed, all my kids and their kids were on a little family history field trip, caravanning past the house I grew up in. That house was one of the great joys of my mom’s life. My grandkids will never meet her—I like to think she waved from a window somewhere as their cars went by.
I can’t write all the lifey things that have happened in the weeks since. For whatever reason, I’ve been in one of those stretches where everything’s suddenly dialed to 11: good and bad, beautiful and absolutely not, heartbreaking and life affirming. I’m navigating the best of times and worst of times in a few ways and places—my mom’s death is just one. But in my experience, the light thrown off from these life-periods of intense paradox can be better quality than the light I navigate by most of the time.
For one example, I’m finding myself newly aware of the goodness of people. Who knew we could be so thoughtful, so tender in our handling of each other? I have felt seen and loved on a level I’ve never experienced before. More than just surprised, I’m blown away every day by some new kindness. Apparently, I still have much to learn about the care and handling of others, and I hope I can.
Just this morning, I was crying in the McDonald’s parking lot for no reason—as one sometimes does—and received this message from someone you may know as Pastor Stan (whom I’ve never actually met):
“Woke up this morning to a video memory of Mom from three years ago; thought about you … and all of us in this place of gratitude and releasing. Anyway, just wanted you to know that I am sending love as you adjust your heart and life to this new reality.”
Stan Mitchell is someone who moves through the world witnessing and binding-up wounds; it’s the work of his life and ministry. How does one become such a person? Well, in this case I know he lost his own mother not long ago, so he’s sensitive to my fresh wound. It takes one to know one, as the kids say. But reaching out to do something about it when it crosses your mind? That’s next level, and I haven’t quite beat the level I’m on yet.
It’s like this every day right now: someone reminds me that I’m seen and loved, and I’m left standing all amazed. Even though in some ways I feel I’ve been initiated into a specific club with the loss of my mom, what’s actually happening is I am seeing in a new way that there is only the human club, and we’re all in it.
“The great illusion we must all overcome is the illusion of separateness. It’s almost the only task of religion—to communicate not worthiness, but union …”
—Richard Rohr*
One bowl. Everyone and everything in it together.
Please let the eyes through which I see both—people and the stuff of life—be changed by this light.
When My Mother Died
There were flowers to be tended, trimmed and ribboned, pinched and placed, arranged, admired, water clouding green then greener, needing to be changed
They broke down, bent, drooped, sagged, smelled, spilled, shed pollen tears, forgot themselves in petals on her tabletop and chair
You will try but you won’t keep what has been cut from life for long—
I have older friends, women who’ve seen things, who didn’t send flowers to sing this loss, this life event, they sent a blanket, an artifact, a plain
and patient souvenir from decades further down this path—someone is always ahead, someone is already living the thing I’m about to learn
—Susan
*Find more from Richard Rohr on the illusion of separateness here.
This is gorgeous. There is so much going on in our "dashes". May you love what's in your salad bowl. 🥗
Oh! I had not heard. I am so sorry for the loss of your mother. I am in awe at how gracefully you are able to write about the turbulent salad this summer has served to you. Thank you for sharing these tender moments. And for being ahead and living the things I have yet to learn.