Reason #365:
She lived her life with grace.
Whether she was setting the table for Thanksgiving dinner or remembering to get birthday presents for the neighbor children, she did it with grace. When she walked away from a bad first marriage at the age of twenty-seven and when she insisted on still having a Christmas two days after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, she did it with grace.
When I was in New York and she’d remember to call the moment after I was supposed to hear good news, that was grace. Whenever I wasn’t there to pick up and she’d leave a message, she’d ramble on for almost a decade and—well, on second thought…there was no grace in those voicemails. There was just eleven goodbyes and then three and a half minutes of her trying to figure out how to hang up the phone before finally dropping it under one of the car seats.
But when I came home from New York and she left out a towel and bought all my favorite foods and turned down the bed and left a note welcoming me, that was grace. And when I would leave again, back to New York, and she would wait on the curb smiling and waving and giving the sign for ‘I love you’ until I was completely out of sight, well, you get the point…there was a whole lot of grace involved.
She just had it. Grace was just something she had.
And if she was ever lacking any, she always had an extra tea light handy or that one “Sounds of the Seasons” CD she played nine months out of the year, ready to turn on.
From the years she raised me and my sister alone while she supported herself and finished college, to the family trips where she just laughed as luggage flew off the roof of our Aerostar van because it wasn’t bungeed down properly, to the way that she died.
She did it all with grace.
She was a lovely woman to have known and a lovely mother to have had.
So thank you mom. I’ll be seeing you.
