This Mother’s Day Will be Tough

Who am I kidding? All the Mothers’ Days for all the rest of my life will be tough.

Me with my mother on her 90th birthday.

The sun has gone down now on this Saturday afternoon. There is to be a reckoning. I will wake up tomorrow for the first time in my 70 years without a mother to go see on Mothers’ Day. I think it’s going to be tough, since I’ve already been weeping about it. Maybe I’ll be all out of tears by then.

I thought about calling my sister and seeing if she is ready for it. But we’ll just end up with both of us ugly crying and trying to say the things going through our heads and hearts between sobs. I may still call her. I don’t know. I’m dreading it for her as much as for me. I have, we have, so many memories around mother’s day. As with all the other holiday details of when we were growing up, the memories are rich with images of our industrious and energetic mother.

Our dad died four days before my sister’s birthday, and it so happened her birthday fell on the same day as his funeral. But that was 17 years ago, and we’ve dealt with it more or less — at least we are used to feeling of loss. As much, I think, as anyone ever deals with death, we’ve dealt with daddy being gone.

But Momma. She only left us at the end of October, so spring without her is a new experience, and Mothers’ Day. Well, it hurts everywhere I go and everytime I see something that reminds me. Even seeing people shopping for their mothers is a little traumatic.

All we can do for our mother is put some flowers on her grave, which my sister and my youngest daughter did today. I cannot go to the cemetery yet. I can’t. I just keep telling myself that my mother is not in that concrete box in the ground. My mother was long gone before that box was sealed.

Decoration and Dinner on the Grounds.

From the time we were little girls, mother and sometimes dad, took us to St. Joe, just north of here, where my mother’s ancestors donated land for a church and a cemetery. Mother came from a large Scotch-Irish bunch, (or Scots-Irish if you’d prefer) who immigrated and then settled on a pretty good-sized homestead of a little community called Atkins, Arkansas. They had a homestead from the government and farmed many…