The first trip home to be with family was less than one month after mom had died. I flew on a ticket I had purchased months before her death, a visit that was planned so she and I could just hang out and prepare for my son’s wedding. Instead, I came to be with my siblings to pack up Edie’s house and since “home is where mom is” and she was no longer with us in this life, it did not feel like home to me and never will again.

Being back with family on that first visit gave me the opportunity to really begin the task of grieving and to mourn with those who knew her best, her children. We ate meals together, we packed boxes together, and we cried together.  A visit to her cabin on the lake, a place we call “the lakes”, was bittersweet.

That day at the lake just felt like the color gray to me.  The geese honking as they swooped down on the lake just sounded like crying to me.

Here are some entries we all made in the cabin journal mom kept.

A dear friend gave me a book by Harold Ivan Smith entitled Grieving the Death of a Mother.  This little book is filled with so much wisdom!  Smith’s interpretation is that grief is what we feel and mourning is what we express.  Grieving is ongoing and my mourning has lessened, but sometimes hits me like a wave knocking me back on the beach.