Mary Wells | 05/08/2008 10:10 am

'Eight Months After She Died, She Appeared – Promise Kept!'

I am my mother in most ways – except she would have preferred to be blond. We are the kind that keeps going.

The house can fall down, the trees can turn red, the men in our life can disappear, the money can run out; we keep going.

My blessed editor at Knopf, maybe the best teacher I ever had, once asked me what I thought my book was about and I said, "love," and she said, "Oh no, it’s about going on. You always keep going." She was so right. I got that from my mother. Her German parents wouldn’t send her to college – the boys went. She showed them. She married a Norwegian from Minnesota who had just returned from Paris and the war.

She thought he would give her a glamorous life. When he couldn’t muster the ambition, she waited a while and then she and I gave her and us a glamorous life — not with diamonds — with experiences. She loved to learn and wanted to see and know everything. We had an agreement that whichever of us died first would return and, with a code that only we would understand, we would let each other know things were just fine. And about eight months after she died, she appeared at the end of my bed in France in the early morning and said, "Mary, I think you should know Cass died." Cass had been a friend when I was small in Poland, Ohio. No one knew her except my mother and it had been forty years since I had thought of her. So I knew my mother was fine.

Once, I meditated on my mother and was wondering what she was up to and I heard a voice say, "She misses not knowing where you are." Which I thought was a very funny reply. In her later years she used to want to know everywhere I’d been. I guess now she knows everywhere I’ve been. So, happy Mother’s Day, Mom. I bet you’re wowed by these women!

Oh, no! You forgot your Mother!? We didn’t!!!

The wOw Mother Lode

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I’ve had communication with all my loved one’s who have passed to the ‘Other Side’….. But a very sweet one I would like to share with all of you is about my Mother. Mom was almost 94 when she died……. My sister and I spent the night in the hospital by my mother’s bed side. The next morning we decided we would take turns to go home and shower and then return to the hospital…I went home first. Showered and got dressed ready to leave to go back to the hospital. The phone rang…….My sister saying Mom had just died. I went out to my car…..the minute I closed the door I heard my mother singing to me. (an old song I hadn’t heard since I was a little girl) “I’m so happy, here’s the reason why, Jesus took my burdens all away..Now I’m singing as the day goes by, Jesus took my burdens all away” She kept singing all the way back to the hospital. When I pulled into the parking lot and opened my car door she stopped. It was so sweet, I had tears running down my cheeks. I think my mother waited to die after I left the hospital so I didn’t have to watch her die……My husband had just died three months earlier and my sister in law 12 days before. I think she wanted to protect me from that intense pain. She was the sweetest and kindest person I have ever known. I wish all children could have a Mother like her.

By Dona Howlett on 05/09/2008 2:10 am

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I love your descriptions of your mother - she sounds like the kind of mother that I want to be, and hope to be.

By Bella Mia on 05/09/2008 8:03 am

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Thank you for sharing this Mary. Every once and awhile imagine my Mother shaking her head looking down at me as I sometimes plod and run through life. Cheers Mary.

By CJ McDonald on 05/09/2008 9:30 am

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Mary Wells, your experience is a comforting visual I have filed away to call upon when times require a sense of something more pure and sensitive than the price of gas or political yammering. I collect these and bring them to the for when I need to remind myself of our transcendent lives. I’ve also registered Lesley Stahl’s entrancing desciption of her sharing the “Cistine Chaple” moment with a gorilla of the mist. My own involves my parents who passed away within nine months of each other, and though I was in my fifties, I needed some time to negotiate living on this planet without them. One spring day in the midst of some clutter huddled at the entrance to our garage I spied two roses rising up through that tangled mess. We never planted roses, but my dad did. What a wonderful way to say we’ve made it, we’re save, carry on. peace and grace, friend

By beth willis on 05/09/2008 12:02 pm

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safe, of course…they were long past saving and would have it no other way.

By beth willis on 05/09/2008 12:08 pm

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Reading all your fantastic stories about your mothers made me sad, but also gave me a glimmer of hope. I have had times in my life where I actually liked my mother, but we have grown very very far apart over the past three decades. I was extremely angry with my father who died when I was 17—for leaving me “alone” with her. I knew that he had been her “slave” and that I was about to inherit that role. She has always been mean-natured, and hit and tormented all my older sisters. Although I never received the blows, I believe I sustained another form of abuse by proxy as a witness to her treachery growing up. I carried that around for many years. My father came to visit me in a dream. He was gorgeous, young, fun, with dark bouncy curls swaggering across his forehead which illuminated his piercing green eyes. He apologized for leaving me so young. I rolled my eyes at him and said, “Just answer me one question before you go.” He nodded. I leveled a look at him and queried, “Why her? (Why did you pick her to marry) A sly grin crinkled his left cheek. “The sex was great.” I burst out laughing so hard that I woke myself up laughing, and he was gone, never to be see again. I still shudder at the thought of my parents together though.

By Amelie Poulain on 05/09/2008 1:10 pm

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My Father raised me…and I lost him when I was 36. I spent 6 weeks sitting with him before he passed. I had planned to stay until he passed away, but he told me no, I needed to go home to Virginia. He didn’t want me, his only child, to see him die. He made me promise I would NOT attend the funeral, because he said he wouldn’t be there! I didn’t. Years after he passed, I noticed a pattern…when ever I had a difficult decision to make, I would dream about my Father. When I was selling my home in the country and moving to town, I had signed the contract for my house in town and was having serious doubts…that night I dreamed about my Father, and in the dream he was walking through the “new” house with me, telling me what should or could be done in each room. I knew I had made the right decision. It is that way to this day, 12 years after his passing. I only dream about him when the going gets tough and a “Daddy’s Girl” needs her Daddy’s wisdom.

By J B on 05/11/2008 11:48 am

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I so miss my mother today and each and every day. She was a woman with a huge intelligence and great elan. She was one of the first women judges in the country. She was devoted to the well-being of children, including six of her own. Proud as I am, immensely so, of all her professional achievements, I remember her, above all, as Mommy. And what a lovely mother she was, intuiting even from our voices over a telephone how we might be feeling. On and off the bench she went, fielding “emergency” calls from us about bug bites and bicycle falls. One time, thinking it was one of her precious children on the line, she interrupted a trial to take a call. It was from the cook and the housekeeper who were arguing over whether to use a dry or wet mop on the living room floor. Mommy listened to both sides and then, with her usual equanimity, issued her verdict: “Whichever.” People who worked in our home stayed for thirty years, in part because they so respected and loved her. And she never stopped thanking them for making it possible for her to work outside the home. Daddy was working day and night at his own law practice so it was left to Mommy to oversee a household of six children, three dogs, two cats, one turtle and two parakeets, gardeners, poolmen, electricians and plumbers, not in that particular order. In addition to her many judicial awards I think she should have gotten one for all those hours of watching the six of us try on clothes and shoes as well as shepherding us through airports on holidays. It is six years since her death, and I ache for her. One morning I felt a kind breeze, and I knew it was her trying to soothe me. I love you, Mommy.

By Patricia Burstein on 05/11/2008 12:59 pm

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We lived in a “railroad flat” in Northern New Jersey that was quite old. Our heat sources were the kitchen range, (heat came out of the side of it) and a space heater in the living room. My Dad got up at 5 AM to light the water heater so we would have hot water to get ready for school. I remember my Mother holding my robe against the side of the stove so it would be warm when I first got up. She worked second shift in a ribbon factory and got home around 11:30. She ironed our blouses and touched up our uniforms (Catholic School) while she watched Johnny Carson. She was an only child and raised like she was a princess (which she hated), married a handsome, charming, intelligent gambler, had six kids, and always worked just to make sure we had what we needed. She was born to be a mother. And I thank God she was mine.

By Kathleen Kimok on 05/12/2008 2:47 am

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A good mother,rich or poor, is someone to be treasured.

By Patricia Burstein on 05/13/2008 4:43 pm

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A good mother, rich or poor, is someone to be treasured. My mother didn’t cook or iron. But she knew how to love us, and we in turn loved her back. And, as a child of Jewish immigrants, who didn’t speak English, she managed to become a judge all the while attending to the six of us. And, she was gracious enough to understand that she had a lucky life with our father. After her death many women who knew her in the court wrote, thanking her for always lifting women on the ladder below her up. Her greatest achievement: being our mother. I can remember her going from room to room all night to check up on us after an outbreak of a stomach virus or the measles. Good mothering knows no economic distinctions. I thank God she was my mother, and I hold her in my heart forever.

By Patricia Burstein on 05/13/2008 4:56 pm