Mourning glory

 

She’s gone. On Wednesday morning, our youngest daughter flew to Brisbane to study and work for two years. She is 21 and it is time for her to head out into the world - and I’m glad and excited for her.  After weeks of angsting (I had to say to her one day “Lizzy, you know you’re not going to Mars, just to Brisbane. You can get home!”), on the day itself she was simply joyous. It was wonderful to watch her bright face as she waved and then turned lightly to step towards the airport gate.

The house seemed strangely quiet when we got home. I told Bruce I needed to be on my own, that if I had to make the effort to talk to someone I would break. He understands that, and he left quietly for work. The dogs and I sat on the couch and watched Wicked. After that, I was together enough to take a deep breath and walk into her room, switch off the salt light, unplug the fairy lights, gently close the door of the empty wardrobe. 

This is what parenting is for, to prepare our children to launch into the world. I wanted her to go freely, unburdened by worrying about us or her grandparents. I know what it’s like to feel constrained, to feel that your parents can’t manage without you. I watched Josh, Lizzy’s boyfriend, shoulder the weight of his extended family’s grief (no-one in their family leaves Whanganui, and his mother looked at Lizzy like she was stealing her boy). I’ve carried that weight all my life, and I do not want that for my children.

These last two years have been all about closing doors. Some have slammed, suddenly and unexpectedly, like work. Some have slammed so hard, I've felt pain, as if my hand were trapped in the door - like when I had to take my mother to dementia care. The end of being child of the mother I knew. Others have been a slow creaking, like the church I left behind. But this parenting door has closed so softly. I have had just a few months short of 40 years with children in my home – longer than most parents ever have, because of my two bonus babies. Forty years of parenting, perhaps more than half the length of my life. If I close my eyes, I feel overwhelmed for an instant by all the times I have failed, but then there comes with a rush a kaleidoscope of joyous movement.

The scent of babies, the dancing of toddlers, homework and music practice and cricket and the singing of bright-eyed children, and conversations with curious adolescents whose burning questions about the meaning of life always seemed to erupt just when I was ready for bed. So much to treasure.

 

  This closing of doors has been disconcerting - perhaps because they all seem to have closed at the same time! Three years ago I was a professor, a solver of other people’s problems, a contributor to endless committees, a preacher and elder in a large church, a mother, someone's child. Now I am…..well, that’s part of the question, isn’t it?

What I can see – an I’m only just learning  - is that the closing of doors should be mourned. The grief and loss are real. But they are never the whole story. And for me right now the doors that are opening are different to those I would have recognized in the past.  

Last Sunday, I was the preacher at lovely little St Oswald's church for the Feast of the Presentation in the Temple, or Candlemass. Candlemass is a pivot point: we look back to the light and joy and hope of Christmas and forward to the grief and pain and loss of Lent and Holy Week. We must have both. And it is in the tension between the joy and hope of beginnings, and the grief and loss of endings that resurrection happens. 

There is an invitation to quietness now, to take my time, to sit in wonder before a mystery. To paint my mother’s fingernails a disgraceful scarlet and read her favourite books aloud, to gently place a host on her tongue. To imagine my father as an outrageous adolescent, with a literal gun in his pocket, as he tells his stories. To walk in the streets of my childhood home with an old and loved friend. To sit among the bluebells, to listen to the soaring music of Evensong in an ancient Cathedral.  To simply watch the fish in my fish tanks, rejoicing when each new translucent baby appears. To see childhood in a completely new way as I build a house of sticks on the beach with my grandson. 

I’m unused to this quietness, these unfamiliar doors, and sometimes I fret. “Have I lost my edge?” I asked Bruce anxiously this evening. “I haven’t noticed’” he said, not looking up from his book. “What if this is an early stage of dementia?”, I ask Anne. She nods at my concern, “don’t worry – I’ll tell you.”

But mostly what I feel is peace. And a sense that I’m being rewired by hands unseen, by a voice that bids me rest.