For My Mother: The Wild Iris

I lost my mother on August 31.  That sounds so strange.  She passed away but she is not lost or misplaced.  Indeed, she is in many ways closer to my heart than ever.

It took a few days and then as I was lying down, “spirit tired” as my friend put it - tired as when the person who birthed you, shepherded you through the shoals of childhood, who was the “magic” person you always thought could solve anything, who you never thought wasn’t able to make a dinner, who you thought could make swimming holes appear in summer, isn’t there -  I realized she was part of me, inside my bones as it were, literally and figuratively. I am her DNA.

And with that it became easier to bear the loss, to feel her as part of me, to incorporate the parts I wanted to keep with me, to know I look like her, though also of course like my Dad.  I always thought I was physically more like my mother.  Indeed, we joked that if something happened to her body, that it would also happen to mine.  I share the shape of her legs, our builds, the stomach paunch that she had even as a young woman, and her luscious full hair.

Here’s a picture of my mother that my dear childhood friend took.  I spent a week in New Hampshire, where my mother lived, visiting friends and family. It was the week before my mother went to the hospital with pneumonia and passed away five days later.

But during that week, and I marvel at how it unfolded that so many things happened with a timing we never could have planned, I spent a number of days with my mother.  My childhood friend, who my mother had not seen in many years, came to visit, to my mother’s delight. My sister, who lives in New Hampshire, and I sat with my mother and went on a walk with her to the beautiful garden pictured here that my sister, a spectacular gardener, made for my mother.  The garden was like a cosmic plan, not too lose, not too tight, full of perfect symmetry.  One row began with orange osteopermum and then the row next to it was planted in reverse, the osteopermum on the opposite side.  There was harmony, order, symmetry, beauty.  And that is much the way my mother lived her life.  We walked a lot that week.  My mother wanted to visit the garden plots the residents of her retirement community made.  She’d had one into her eighties.  She opened the metal door of the fence that protects the garden from animals, and with her walker took an almost running leap to get over the entrance and onto the uneven grass between the plots.  “You need momentum,” she explained to me.

And she had momentum.  She was a quiet woman, self-contained.  She wrote beautifully and we shared our love of writing, of poetry, and of the outdoors.

She gave me some advice years ago, which I found hard to follow, which was “write whatever you want, no matter what,” meaning it was ok to write my own truth.  I think in a way “Write with a Feather,” embodies that spirit, because its point is to write without over-thinking, over-editing.  So, I will re-connect to that.

So much I could say about my mother.  In one of our conversations years ago, we talked about Louisa May Alcott (LMA) and her family, especially her mother.  We were both LMA fans and as wonderful luck would have it, in her forties and fifties, she lived in Harvard, Massachusetts right near Fruitlands, where LMA’s family attempted to build a utopian community.  We talked about how so little was written about the real “Marmee” of Little Women, the ideal mother, who also confesses to having anger issues, making her even more ideal, because not perfect.  And Marmee tells the heroine Jo (her daughter) that she learned to curb her anger.   My mother wrote a biography of Marmee called Transcendental Wife: The Life of Abigail May Alcott.  In it, to my surprise, was the unidealized Marmee, one who was difficult, irascible, but loved her family, who took care of the poor, yet was also a bit entitled.  My mother liked to have things neat and organized, including emotions, and wrote a biography that took in the complexity of this woman.

One of our fun moments was when she suggested to me I read Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell.  That was her favorite book in older age.  She read it numerous times.  I read any book she recommended.  I knew I’d like it.  I suggested it to my book club and my mother was delighted when I told her how much my book club enjoyed it.

The week of her passing, my sister, brother, sister-in-law, and I sat vigil with her. I was able to cry (which I don’t like to do) and tell her “so much of who I am is because of you.” The doctors and nurses were beyond wonderful.  They showed a level of compassion I was unprepared for.  One nurse, the night my mother died, tucked her in with two stuffed animals peeking out above the sheets.  She passed away in comfort.  My brother was able to say to her that it was ok to go, that she was safe.

And the day after she passed away, my sister and I met my brother and his wife at the Hilton Garden Inn where they were staying near the hospital.  There was an outside patio that looked onto a meadow.  We sat in the early afternoon glow and talked about my mother.  My brother recalled, “I will always remember your beautiful loving faces in the crisp summer light.”  And none of us were thinking about time, which was perfect.  I checked to see when the bus was leaving for New York City and it turned out it was thirty min from then and close to the Inn.  If I’d spent the day trying to make it to the bus, the time we had together would not have felt like the sacred time it became for us all.

When I was in New Mexico years ago, I stayed at Ghost Ranch, part of another story, and was looking in the library and found a book of poetry by Louise Gluck, who I’d never heard of until then and found “The Wild Iris.” I told my mother about the poem and how much I loved the last stanza:

“from the center of my life came

a great fountain, deep blue

shadows on azure water.”

She said that was her favorite poem.  I looked I up and read that it was about passing.  My daughter painted these beautiful purple flowers.

I loving memory of Cynthia Hodgson Barton 1930-2024.

It is good to communicate with you,

Pam