In Loving Memory....

I said goodbye to my mother in October. To those of you who have been with me on this journey for the past few years, I thank you for your love, prayers, emails, and messages.

Though she had her shining moments—times I’ll always be thankful for—my mother and I had a difficult relationship for most of my life, and that’s putting it mildly. So, I was truly surprised at how the Lord used her illness to bring a healing between us. I honestly never saw that coming.

Despite the difficulties, affection, long since gone, began to grow again in my heart. And I believe in Mom’s too.

This isn’t sentimentality speaking just because she’s dead. I’m well aware of the anguish that comes with losing a parent where there are unresolved issues. It’s the worst; but that wasn’t the case with Mom. I have peace with her passing and few regrets. It was my honor and privilege to help care for her as she declined.

If I’m being honest, and I am, there were many times over the past five years I railed at having to live (even temporarily) under my mother’s roof again. I had long since before, moved hundreds of miles away from her. I would visit her periodically, but she only visited me a few times in almost twenty years, … and that was only because she had other business in my area.

Yes. That hurt.

But the truth of the matter was, toward the end of her life she needed me, and God gave me the strength to move back into her house, even when I didn’t have the “want to.”

But amazingly, the “want to” eventually came. Trust me, my duty as a daughter didn’t make me want to, even though I did what was needed and gave my mother the best and kindest care I could. The miracle came when I wanted to be there with her. When I felt affection for her again. And when she appeared to feel affection for me and wanted me there with her.

Now that was something.

For the better part of two years, I wasn’t sure she knew who I was. She had a long while ago stopped calling me by my name and referred to me only as “The Girl.”

Before that, even when she couldn’t always remember my name, I knew she knew me because she would call me by my birth order, “Number One.” But for most of the last two years, I’m pretty sure that, most of time, she thought I just the hired help.

She asked me once if she knew my mother. I told her she knew my mother very well. So, imagine what a blessing it was when she finally spoke my name again, just a few weeks before her passing.

At the time, she was rarely opening her eyes anymore—we had to coach her to open them—and of all things, she recognized my voice. And, despite advanced Alzheimer’s and end-stage dementia, managed to connect my voice with my name, a name she had not spoken in well over a year, maybe even two. The time blurs. I’ll never forget that moment when, lying there with her eyes still closed, she said, “That’s Jocelyn.”

That was all, just, “That’s Jocelyn.”

I will treasure that moment as long as I live.

I miss my mother. I mourn her passing. And that’s something I hadn’t thought for years could happen. Some of you won’t understand this. Others will, and gain hope from it for yourselves.

As for me, I marvel through my tears as I look forward to seeing my mother again, in the resurrection, free from the scourge of Alzheimer’s. Free from the fears and oppressions that robbed her and her children of what God intended us to have together. In the resurrection, where we will finally experience the meaning of the words, “O death, where is thy sting?”