Only Love Matters

For the past month, I’ve been in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, sorting through my mother’s clothes and belongings. Six months ago, just a week after I had visited, she was incapacitated by a stroke. When I returned on this trip, we had some wonderful and precious lucid moments together, before her health went suddenly and steeply downhill. It was almost as if she had been waiting for me. Her final journey took 11 days, and she had excellent palliative care.

As I was clearing out the house, I took bags and bags of her clothes to a charity re-sale outlet. (Canadians will be familiar with Value Village — it’s my favourite store!) It took just a few moments to unload it all from the car, and then suddenly it was gone. Just like that! The same thing happened with a load of “stuff”. (“Pack rat” doesn’t even begin to describe my mother. I think that happened to a lot of people who grew up in the Depression Years.)

How can a lifetime of stuff disappear so quickly? Because it’s just that — stuff. It isn’t who she is. As I cleaned out her closets and drawers, I found the evidence of a woman seeking to deal in dignity with a body and a brain that were breaking down. The loss of her eyesight a few years ago was a terrible blow, because her favourite activity was reading. But she didn’t allow herself to sink into depression. She did her best to carry on. Her body increasingly caused her discomfort, embarrassment and pain, but again, she did her best to carry on. Her loss of memory became more and more difficult to manage, but she carried on. For 91 years, she gave life her flat-out best. I am in awe of her courage.

My mother and I never got along very well. As I cleaned the house for my Dad, I at first felt as if I were cleansing my mother’s influence in my life. After a couple of days, I realized that what I was really doing was exorcising my own bitterness about our relationship. History is “stuff” too, and it went out the door with the bags of clothes and knick-knacks. What’s left is simply the amazing strength of her spirit. That’s who she is, not the stuff, and not the history.

My mother loved her family passionately. She was, however, the recipient of a stern, rigid, ultra-practical Scottish-heritage upbringing. My Dad has explained that, confronted with a wildly emotional dreamer of a daughter, she was afraid for me, afraid that the big, bad world would do me wrong. She was determined that I would be strong, disciplined and self-reliant. As a result, she was very hard-line about who and what she felt I should be. But her motivation was love. Every available surface in my parents’ house is covered with photos and memorabilia of the people who mattered so much to her.

A few days before Mom left her body, I was sitting on the side of her bed. She reached up with her good hand and stroked my face. It was a gesture of tenderness such as she had almost never allowed herself in my lifetime.

What I am left with is only love. I love her for who she was and who she still is. In the final analysis, everything else is irrelevant. The self-conscious fear for ourselves, the defensiveness at criticism, the worry over things not turning out the way we want them to — none of it ever made anything better. Only love has power. It’s love that enables you to stand in front of an audience and let ‘em have your vibrant spirit with both barrels. It’s love that allows you to present your material and have fun with it, because the “stuff” is just not that serious. It’s love that lets you speak and live with passion — passion that connects at depth with the people around you and enriches their lives. It’s love, in its millions of guises, that makes a connection and stays in people’s hearts.

In the long run, only love matters.