Fifteen years ago, my mom’s best friend, Lyn, died of cancer.
She had battled it a long time, as it spread through her body, starting as just a back ache that ended up being more.
My mom went with her on a cruise after the diagnosis to laugh and make more priceless memories:
One more piece of her to keep forever.
I went to her house every few weeks to help her clean it, and to listen to secrets she had told no one.
When Lyn died, though, we were not expecting the suddenness of it.
We were helping care for her granddaughter while her parents were on a trip to Africa when we heard that Lyn had slipped and fallen, and had hit her head on a paving stone in her driveway.
We picked up my daughter and her granddaughter from school that day early.
It was Crazy Hair Day.
Something so frivolous as Pippi Longstocking braids seemed out of place in a hospital waiting room.
I remember feeling the dissonance.
For days we sat by her bedside in the hospital, wondering if she could hear us.
My mom was holding her hand as she breathed her very last breath, and told her how much she loved her.
She has spent the last 15 years showing that she meant it.
This is a story about love.
Lyn was married to Phil, and their history and story were pretty complicated, as marriages go.
There were many reasons a person could have to be mad at Phil, but Lyn had stayed when others questioned, loved him sacrificially,
and for a purpose.
Because of this, my mom decided to show love to him, also.
When you truly love someone,
the things they love matter to you, as well.
When other people turned cold and unforgiving to Phil for his transgressions, my mom would always see him in the aisles of the grocery store, and put her arms around him, asking how he was holding up in that house now, all alone.
He cried every single time that she asked him.
We always walked away after those encounters imagining the gorgeous garden they once had,
now overgrown, and a kitchen full of take-out containers.
We imagined a home that felt hollow.
Lyn had always been the color, and the music,
as is the case for most anyone who chooses to let love be who they are, and what they do.
He had done wrong, and had hurt people who loved him, but he was sorry for it.
You could see the grief of the past hanging on him like a worn out, pilling cardigan.
He was lonely, and sad.
You could see he craved the simple inquiry.
Several weeks ago, after only occasionally seeing him around town for those 15 years, we heard the news that Phil had also died, and so their only son, Aaron, would be coming up to try to sort through the house;
It would be a difficult task, being that he suffers from Parkinson’s, and as soon as my mom heard about this, she got in touch with him to volunteer to go this week, and do anything she could to try to help him.
She has spent the entire week standing,
at 77 years old, after a knee replacement,
sorting, and listening to Lyn and Phil’s two children as they have cried over things like finding the untouched closet of Lyn’s clothes.
She packed boxes as she heard two other sides of their complex life story.
On and on, the tale of a person’s life goes.
Every day this week she has hobbled in my door around dinner time, asking to use my foot massager.
I make mental note of the actions of my mother, and of this story about a family,
and it further presses and molds my own thoughts of what it means to truly love.
Aaron had asked me if I would be willing to paint some old cobblestones to say
“In memory of Lyn and Phil”
that he could give to some family at the memorial.
My mom delivered a wheelbarrow full of them,
and I got to painting, only to have her come to stand beside me, and tell me that those stones had originally come from London to be laid as cobblestone streets in San Francisco.
I imagined the journey, spanning two sides of the earth, that they had been on, and all they had seen, and held, and absorbed into their stone.
I thought of the people who had traveled across them on their way here and there.
I thought of quiet, rainy nights when they sat in the dark overlooking a city all alone.
And there I was,
painting that piece of history;
– very much like I am doing now with these words –
When the city was set to pave over the streets due to progression, Lyn and Phil, knowing their value, had snuck in the night and confiscated the cobblestones for their garden.
Their entire story felt to me like they had held onto stones saved from paving.
They saw value in something that other people did not know.
My mom quietly said she wondered if it was one of those stones that Lyn had hit her head on, as I painted, and both of us sat with the memory for a while.
This was a woman whose life had burrowed deeply into us.
As I painted the last of the stones tonight,
I thought about what a powerful story of love it all was:
From their marriage that lasted through what some felt was impossible,
to my mom loving her friend enough to be sorting a lifetime of boxes 15 years later out of undying live for her.
My mom, having always been faithful to let Phil know she cared about how he was doing.
Their story had bled into our own.
This is all the real kind of love:
Complicated, not always easy.
Setting aside self for the care of another person that others might toss away because of the work it takes to care for them.
This is the example I have seen through my life of the way you show up for others in need,
and you give of yourself, even when you are tired;
That you sit at bedsides until the end,
and you stand hugging sad people in grocery aisles.
This is a love that is still out there, as the world feels increasingly dark around all of us.
We might have to sneak in the night and smuggle it to place it amongst the flowers.
The saving of it might rely on us.
Love is patient, and kind.
It suffers long, and never fails.
It weaves threads through our scattered histories, and can binds us all back together as one.
My mom told her friend she loved her,
then she stayed to finish out her whole story.
Another thing love does is carry on.
May my love be that steadfast.
May that also be my legacy.
It is worth saving.
Let love be the stones.
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
