Just thoughts rolling through

There’s a breeze today. My daughter got me a wind chime for my birthday with my mother’s name on it, and I never could have guessed at the comfort it brings me. The smile when I hear that delicate sound is involuntary. It’s like she’s talking to me. Dropping by to say hello. It’s a free and joyful sound. Just projecting, I know. Self-soothing. I’ve always been good at finding the things that allow me to breathe, to find the peace. For a little while at least. I can’t quite wrap my head around the enormity of this transition, though. Her hand was small and soft and frail as I held it. I brushed the hair back from her forehead and said “see you tomorrow mama,” and it looked like she raised her eyebrows a bit like she heard and acknowledged so I said it again. I didn’t, of course. I didn’t see her again until I opened a box and saw a little gold butterfly engraved above her name on a piece of metal that sets the chimes to singing. There you are. And I used to wonder when someone died why everyone only spoke about the good in them. Why their smile invariably lit up every room, why they suddenly seemed to become almost saint-like in their perfection. I think love is just a forgiving eternal creature. The pointlessness of any frustration or pain over what’s past can’t really hold a candle to the strength of love. It doesn’t matter anymore nearly so much as the laughing times, the warm times. It’s the gift you remember, not the price of it. Her life enriched mine. Every part of who she was, no matter how I defined it at the time, made me better than I might have been. The sad struggles of her last years are over, and that very complicated human I often failed to give enough credit to in the deepest corners of my heart, is now as beyond me as that little gold butterfly. Beautiful in my eyes, seen now in a more correct light, undimmed by all the things that never really mattered anyway, and free as the breeze. With me, but unreachable. I find myself both wrapped in the warmth of love and incomprehensibly bereft.