"Mother's Spring"
This piece is very personal but is meant also to move out into the spaces beyond my own life into places where others have experienced life like this. On this path through my heart perhaps you can also find a new way to follow your own path.
My mother was an artist who loved beauty, she was a singer and musician who loved music, a gardner and an exhubrent lover of life, a mother who loved children—everyone's children, anyone's children.
Then before she was sixty, she began slipping rapidly below the waters of Alzheimer's. She lived to be 80, but for most of the last ten years of her life, she lay in her bed and stared ahead into the air.
And yet the brightness of her spirit seemed to filter out around the cracks in the disease. When you came close and sat by her, her hand would reach out and caress your arm, your shoulder. Sometimes her eyes would pull back briefly from the un-place where they usually rested and seem to see you, and she would smile. We would sit beside her bed and sing the hymns she had so loved to sing herself.
When she passed away, a stillness flowed through her body, her face became serene, and a gentle smile emerged.
In the days following I began to have a recurring sense that her living spirit, that running, laughing, joyful being whom she had always been throughout her life, was once more released, unteathered, beautiful and brilliant, dancing jubilantly around me, carressing my spirit, kissing my soul, as I walked my life.