Bereavement

(Note:  This is a subject I decided to write on by myself, not one of the subjects drawn at random.)

My mother died almost two years ago, after falling downstairs.  She was in a hospital ICU for a week and seemed to be recovering, but she suddenly took a turn for the worse, then was gone.  She was almost 94.

If I could send her one message now, I think I'd thank her for teaching me, by her example, to take a sympathetic view of people. (She even felt sorry for Nixon!) If I'm a good person, it's in her image; if I'm not a good person, it isn't her fault.  And that's probably the most important thing anyone has done for me.

Yet I didn't cry over her death.  Not until last Sunday.  I'd been laid up with a severe cold for almost a week--I had to miss several performances by the Toronto City Opera, in which I'm a chorus member--and was looking at some old comic books from my childhood.  They were French-language comics about Petzi, a little bear cub who sails around the world in his little boat with his friends, a penguin, a pelican and a seal. (The original version was Danish, and he was called Rasmus Klump.) These comics are aimed at really little kids, at about the level of Barney the Dinosaur.  Back at the time, I read them to try to learn French, since the language was pretty simple.

In some stories, Petzi returns to home port and comes home to his mother.  In one I was rereading yesterday, just after an adventure in the Land of Sleep, he has what with a grownup would be called an anxiety attack:  he sits sobbing on the deck of his boat, explaining, "I want to see my mother again!" (He's usually a dauntless adventurer, not the sensitive type like I was.) Fortunately, just then they come in view of home and return, and he has a reunion with his mother, who hugs him and feeds him a huge stack of pancakes.

After seeing this little bear lose it on his boat because he missed his mother, I ended up losing it too.  I shed tears for a couple of hours and went through four handkerchiefs. (My cold didn't help.) So now I've cried over losing my mother.