The Mother I Still Have

Thursdays at two o'clock, for four years.

She takes the same route, she parks in the same place, she signs the same book at the desk, and she puts the same brand of hand cream in her bag because her mother always used that one and the smell of it still does something.

Her mother is seventy nine and she is sitting in the third chair from the window and she is in excellent health for her age.

She does not know who her daughter is.

That has been true, fully and finally true, for about fourteen months. There was a long stretch before that where it came and went, and there were afternoons in that stretch that she would give anything to have back, including one in a parking lot in October when her mother said her name, once, clearly, out of nowhere, and then said nothing else for the rest of the visit.

Now it is settled. She is pleasant. She is often quite cheerful. She calls her nurse. She sometimes calls her daughter Margaret, which was her own sister's name, and her sister has been dead since 1994.

And here is the thing this daughter cannot say to anybody.

She is grieving, and there is no death.

There was no phone call. There is no date on a calendar. Nobody sent flowers. There is nothing to tell her friends, because nothing happened, or rather everything happened, over about three years, in increments so small that no single one of them was ever a thing that could be announced.

And she cannot mourn out loud, because her mother is alive. Every instinct in every person she knows says that a woman whose mother is alive and safe and well cared for is a woman who has not lost anything, and every one of them is right, and every one of them is wrong.

She said something once, carefully, to a woman at church. And that woman said, warmly, oh but you still have her.

She has not said anything to anybody since.

If anybody has driven home from a Thursday like that, stay with me. There is a verse in Isaiah that says the unsayable part out loud, and it says it in the middle of a promise.

The verse itself admits that a mother may forget

Here is the line, and I want to sit on the middle of it, because everybody quotes the end.

Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee.Isaiah 49:15

The question is rhetorical. Can a mother forget her own baby. Of course not. That is the whole force of it, and every reader for three thousand years has answered it the same way in their head.

And then God does something extraordinary. He answers His own rhetorical question, and He does not answer it the way the reader just did.

Yea, they may forget.

He says it plainly. He does not preserve the comfortable version. He acknowledges, right there in His own promise, that the thing everybody assumes could never happen does happen. Mothers do forget.

That clause is in the Bible, and it is in there for people standing in exactly this room.

You are inside a verse that admits your mother can forget you, and you were inside it through all fourteen months when nobody would say so out loud. Isaiah 49:15 is the written word conceding yea, they may forget in the middle of a promise, and the Spirit who breathed that clause is in a day room on a Thursday afternoon at two o'clock.

And then the second half, which is the ground she has been standing on without knowing it. Yet will I not forget thee.

Not: she will remember you eventually. Not: it will come back. The comfort offered is not a repair of the forgetting. The comfort is that there is one memory of her that is not stored in a failing place.

Her mother's memory of her is gone. God's memory of her is not.

You are held in a memory that cannot fail, and you were held there on every Thursday of the four years. Isaiah 49:15 says yet will I not forget thee immediately after conceding that a mother may, and the Holy Spirit does not keep His record of a daughter in a place that can go.

You still have her, and you have also lost her, and both are true

Now let me handle the sentence from church, because it has silenced her for a year and it deserves taking apart carefully.

Oh but you still have her.

That is true. Genuinely true. She still has a hand to hold on a Thursday. She still has a face she has known her whole life. There are people in that same building whose mothers are in the ground and who would trade places in a second, and she knows that, and it is part of why she has stopped talking.

And here is the other true thing.

She has lost the person who remembered her at four. She has lost the only human being alive who knew what she was like before she could talk. She has lost the phone call on a Tuesday. She has lost being somebody's daughter in the ordinary daily sense of it, which is a status she has held since 1971 and does not hold now. She has lost the one person she could have talked to about this, which is the particular cruelty of this specific loss.

Both columns are full and neither cancels the other.

And the sentence oh but you still have her does not weigh those two columns. It just picks up the first one and hands it to her, and walks off, and leaves the second one on the floor.

You are permitted to hold both of those at full size, and you were holding both of them on every Thursday since the visits changed. Ecclesiastes 3:4 says there is a time to weep and a time to mourn and puts no condition on it about whether the person is still breathing, and the Spirit of God does not require a woman to choose between gratitude and grief.

God counts a loss that has no death certificate

Now the thing this whole site exists to say, and this is the article where it goes furthest.

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?Psalm 56:8

Tellest means counts. And there is no qualifying clause anywhere in that verse. There is no event that has to have occurred. There is no threshold, no certificate, no announcement, no minimum.

David does not say, put my legitimate tears in thy bottle.

So the Thursday afternoons are counted. The parking lot in October is counted. The name Margaret is counted. The hand cream in the bag is counted. The drive home is counted, all four years of it, every Thursday, and not one of those has ever been mentioned to a single living person.

You are keeping a grief God entered into His own record long before you dared to name it, and you were being counted on every drive home. Psalm 56:8 puts the tears in a bottle and in a book with no question asked about their cause, and the Holy Spirit does not sort a woman's grief into the kinds He will count and the kinds He will not.