Mother's Day

A month after the death of my wife, I found in a drawer of her writing desk a stack of Mother’s Day cards, tied together with a string. They were buried under sheaves of ancient letters and mementoes of a well-lived life.

The cards on the top were handmade and constructed out of crate paper. They were made when our kids were quite young because the sides of the cards were uneven, indicating the makers were not familiar with scissors or straight lines. Each card greeted me with a yellow sun drawn with a thick crayon nub. Its rays shone down onto a pencil sketched stick figure, tagged underneath as “Mum.”

Inside, a greeting of "I love you, Mummy" was printed in a bold and primitive style below a big misshaped heart.

When I got to the middle of the pile, the Mother’s Day cards were no longer handmade but store-bought. The front of the cards displayed polished photographed shots of fresh-cut flowers and bold fonts proclaiming “For You Mother.” The interiors were as shiny as their exterior, and treacle verse slithered down to the bottom of the embossed paper-like maple syrup dripping into a bucket. The cards looked like they were bought in haste on a lunch break or just before the commute home from work. Their autographs at the bottom of each mass-produced salutation flashed love and a taken for granted belief that life never ends. At the bottom of the stack were Mother’s Day cards from the year of her death. By then, our children were grown and had lives of their own. But each card displayed a love as simple and as direct as the proclamations they made to her in their boyhood.

On the day my wife died and before the funeral director came to collect her remains, our children placed onto her still body one of their handmade Mother’s Day cards from boyhood. Our children did not want their Mum to feel alone and abandoned while she journeyed to the crematorium. My wife's final resting place is amongst the atoms and debris of the expanding cosmos, but with her in that dust is some of the love her children showed her in life.

Harry Leslie Smith’s Mothering Sunday Essay 2012