I HATE the Number 3

(I started this post on December 10, got seriously depressed and couldn't finish it until now.)

It's not often that I dislike something strongly enough to say that I genuinely hate it, but I hate the number 3. Bad things seem to come in triads, in triplicates. This week, this month, this year, my life is filled with overwhelming sadness thanks to the number 3, and I'm really struggling. September 9 (9-9) and December 12 (12-12), three months and three days apart, 30 years ago, I lost the two most important women in my young life. My maternal grandmother (age 55) perished in an automobile accident while trying to get home from vacation to be with my mother because my father was critically ill and not expected to live. 3 months and 3 days later, my mother (age 37) died suddenly and unexpectedly. They were buried 3 months and 3 days apart. In 3 months and 3 days, I lost the two most important women in my young life and that loss turned my world upside down in ways from which I have never fully recovered and probably never will. In a few days, I will have spent 30 years of my life without the most important person I ever knew in it.

Whomever coined that silly old adage that time heals all wounds was a liar of the first order! Time does not heal all wounds; it only makes them less visible to others. After 30 years, I still long for my mother. Not a day passes that I don't think of her and wish that she could reap some of the rewards of what I have accomplished in my life. She was my best teacher, for her love and encouragement laid the foundation on which the remainder of my character was built. She taught me manners, morals, and ethics. We had very little money when I was young, but she taught me the importance of sharing what we did have and to be grateful for it, no matter how much or little it was. Now that I am in a much better position financially, I long to share that with her, to have the opportunity to make her life easier, to show her how well I learned the lessons she taught me. I long to share secrets with her, to hold her, to hug her, to cry with her, to laugh with her, to love her, to see her, to hear her. Every day, every single day for the past thirty years, I have wanted my mother. No, time does not heal all wounds, but it does help ease pain into memories. And I have some beautiful memories of my mother. I have seventeen years filled with glorious memories of the most amazing person I have ever had the fortune to know.

My husband knows her because I have shared with him every memory that I hold. He has "seen" her dancing around the living room floor in her emerald green bedroom slippers and has "heard" her sing "Delilah" with Tom Jones at the top of her voice. He has "tasted" her pot roast and knows that with the invention of the roasting bag, bless her heart, she finally learned how to cook. My friends have "met" my mom and know that mine was the house my friend came when she ran away after her own mother told her that she couldn't listen to Elton John's music any more because he dressed like the devil (actually, he dressed like a duck when we saw him in concert but to my friend's mom, they were the same). My mom is the guilty party who got us started listening to Elton John (and Queen, Rod Stewart, Deep Purple, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and several others for that matter!), so she had to explain to my friend's mother how EJ's dress was just for show and that my friend wasn't a bad person for listening to his music and that if she would listen to it with her daughter like she listened to it with me, she might be able to bond better with her daughter. Mother agreed, picked up daughter, and their relationship blossomed. My friends have taken my mother's advice to heart and work to communicate better with their own mothers mostly, I think, because they see how I yearn to have a mother dispensing advice, wanted or not.

I have outlived my mother by ten years so far. She was only 37 when she left this life. For thirty years I have felt the hole that her death left in my life. For thirty years there has been a void in my heart that nothing and nobody could ever fill. Memories of her flit in and out of that void, frequently warming my heart, often bringing tears, always echoing the emptiness there, forever reminding me that once upon a time I knew the most perfect love a human being can ever experience -- the love between a mother and her child.