Eulogy for Mom

Dearest Beloved,

I want to start by acknowledging there are no words to completely express the feeling surrounding loss of my mother, Martha. Just this morning, a whole new eulogy came to me that started with “In the last days of my mother’s life, I saw her begin to see her own light in a way she hadn’t seen before. She was at an inflection point in her growth and she became fascinated by The Four Agreements. Always be impeccable with your word. Don’t take anything personally. Don’t make assumptions. Always do your best.”

No amount of new eulogies will be able to truly match the note of loss sounding in my heart. So here’s the tapestry I’ve been carrying in my phone all year. The sound it makes is the note which sounds like the simple fact of all our being here today in grief and in celebration of my mother Martha.

So, I will begin by lamenting that today, I am in the wilderness without a map. I am lost with no map and only a compass that does not point North.

I want to define this compass. I love to consider my heart a perceiving organ. An eye and an ear unto itself. It is a cathedral which holds space for the blood which has been all around the body. 

My heart holds my blood, it listens to the stories, confessions, longings, faith, prayers and celebration told by the chemistry of that blood which knows my organs. My heart responds mysteriously with hormones and electrical signals, adjustment to pressure. 

The heart is always hearing and speaking exactly what needs to be said to the body. A benevolent guide, the heart listens with absolute curiosity, the heart takes in, and the heart pumps out precisely what it means to say. The heart is never lost because it is always lost, the heart is always listening.

I want to begin with an invitation to listen to your heart which is always listening, always whispering what needs to be heard, which is different or all of us.

I say all this because when I said goodbye to my mother in her final hours, all she had to speak was a fragile heartbeat, amplified over a monitor. Her heartbeat is all I had to listen to, all I could speak into as I peered over the edge into the free fall of loss I am shouting from today.

I want to open by saying my mother Martha taught me to lose, and that only when I’m lost, do I get to really listen. 

Every day I would wake up and walk down the stairs, my mom would have a mug of strong hot black coffee in my hand before I sat down. She’d keep my mug full and warm all the way until noon and then, when the morning couldn’t get stretched any further, she would ask what I would like for breakfast. She showed me how to have fun just getting lost in the morning.

My mom taught me how to lose a game of checkers, too. I lost to her at arm wrestling. She taught me how to lose a set of keys and how to improvise at a grocery store when you lose your shopping list. She taught me how to be lost in a car by losing the last page of MapQuest directions. 

She taught me I can be lost and still wake up early to watch the sunrise, that the wilderness is full of beauty to photograph, and that you can caption even the most dire moments with a joke, given the right timing.

When I was a young boy, my mother told me that if I ever lost control of my wheat truck and it started to flip over, I could say Shit as many times as I wanted. 

My mom taught me how to lose a part of myself when she lost her body. I thought that having a body was important for living, but now I believe my body is only a scaffolding, a chrysalis for who I really am. 

I want to close by saying that the thread I have followed in my grief is that loss is not the end, it is not something to be feared or corrected. That being lost is full of jokes and laughter and good music just like home. Losing is surrounded by love. Losing still offers the gift of life.

I want to close by saying, Mom, here I am lost in the wilderness. Here we all are. All our beating hearts. Taking in the sound of the wilderness of having lost the way you were and losing the way we all got to be around you. 

I want to close by inviting you to be lost with me. To be right here with me. To ask what is here today? To listen for the answer not with your ears, but your heart, see what it is you need to hear, and sing out what you find there is to say.

A photo taken by my mother of the view from
her favorite spot to drink her black coffee.