Thank You Notes

Tonight my sister and I sat at my dining room table and wrote Thank You notes, notes of thanks for the outpouring of sympathy, love and support we have received over the past two weeks. Two weeks. Two weeks in which our mailboxes filled with cards, our homes filled with flowers and food and our hearts, broken as they are, already show the slightest evidence of healing.

We sat together and laughed as we tore up one note after another. One message after another with words misspelled, words omitted and words out of order. We wrote and rewrote our thanks for the love people had for our mother and the love they have for us. We thanked them for chicken soup, for rhododendrons, for cake, for lasagna, for fruit and for simply being part of our lives. We thanked them for coming to us, for sharing with us, for being with us. We thanked them for what they did, what they brought and tears they cried. We thanked them for the music they played, the words they spoke and the hugs they gave.

As we sat at my table, our mugs of tea within reach (my sister uses the Sister mug at my house....I use it at hers) our mother was with us. She was with us in our thanks, she was with us in our tears and she was with us in our laughter. Yes, laughter. We laughed together at silly things, things like misspelled words and the inability to put words together in a sentence. We laughed at things our mother would have laughed at and then cried because she isn't here to laugh with us.

We are thankful for so many things, like how we are loved by so many and how blessed we are to have been born into our family. We are thankful that we have each other, our husbands, our children, their spouses and their children. We are thankful that we have friends and extended family who care so much. We are thankful that we did our best for Mom. We are thankful that we are finding our laughter again, subdued in a way that is foreign to us, but it is there. We are thankful that with this return of laughter, smiles more than laughter (remember how I told you we jump into laughter full force...we're not there yet!), we are assured that we will heal, we will always miss Mom, but we will recover. We will recover because she taught us to do that. She taught us to live and love and laugh and heal.

I remain sad and continue to lean toward seclusion but tonight I felt better, I felt normal, I felt like I used to feel when my sister and I would sit at my dining room table and drink tea and talk and laugh and share our lives. I felt that way for only a moment but it was a moment longer than all the moments of the past couple of years. I hold that moment tonight and know that I will have other moments like this and those moments will grow and eventually they will all link together until they outnumber the other moments, the moments that have engulfed us and held us in their grip. The moments when we knew what we were losing. The moments before we lost.