The Wave's Return to the Ocean

View north to Mom's beach from Juno Beach Pier
June 9, 2017 

The third anniversary of Mom's death looms large on the horizon.  She died thirty-two months ago - on June 3, 2017.  Today marks my third birthday without her.  Do not cry a tear for me.  I had her with me for the first fifty.  While I would have preferred, of course, to have had her here for all of them, a half-century's worth of birthdays with your hero is a hell of lot more than a lot of people get. I made out far better than I deserved.  

In 2017, my birthday happened to fall on a Friday.  I was fifty.  Margaret and I did what we typically do on my birthday - at my insistence - which is nothing.  We spent the night down the beach, as we had planned, not because it was my birthday but simply because it is something we love to do.  Having no particular place to go, we hopped over to Bar A to grab a bite to eat during happy hour.  Mom called me while Margaret and I were sitting at the bar.  

As per usual, Mom fit everything she needed to tell me into a telephone conversation that ended less than two minutes after it started.  Her gift of brevity on the telephone was legendary. She could have taught a master class to kidnappers on how to keep ransom calls short enough to prevent the FBI from tracing them. 

Time's passage has done nothing to shrink the hole that Mom's death left in the charcoal briquette I euphemistically call my heart.  It shall not.  Every time I think of Mom not being here any more, it makes me sad.  Yet, it invariably awakens in me a memory of her - something she did or something she said - that makes me happy.  Without exception, the happy periods always outlast the sad ones. 

That is the way it should be, is it not? Someone you love dies. You carry just enough pain from that loss with you for the rest of your life to ensure that your love for them never wanes.  Not even a little.  It is timeless...

...like a wave and the ocean to which it belongs.

“Picture a wave in the ocean: you can see it, measure it,

its height, the way the sunlight refracts…

and then it crashes on the shore and it’s gone.

But the water is still there.

The wave was just a different way for the water to be

for a little while.

That’s one conception of death for a Buddhist.

The wave returns to the ocean, where it came from,

and where it’s supposed to be.”

 -Chidi Anagonye

(The Good Place) 

-AK