Mama Butterfly

            She loved butterflies. My dad and I don’t know why my mom loved butterflies so much, but her affinity for them is evident throughout my parents’ home. There’s a metal butterfly hanging outside of the carport. There’s a stained glass one sticking out of a plant in the living room. There are shirts with butterflies embroidered on them, along with a butterfly wallet in her drawer. And now there are butterflies on the bulletin for her memorial service. 

            Mom left us nine days ago, and in those nine days, the world has completely changed — or at least my corner of it. My mother once told me that she thought that she was invisible. Though I understood why a southern, soft-spoken, confrontation- averse woman would think that, I never thought that about my mom. Even when Alzheimer’s tried to erase her, she was anything but invisible. Now she is everywhere. 

            I see her on Union Street when I drive past the house where she bought my pageant dress secondhand. I see her when I pass the CVS that stands on the land where my piano teacher resided. I see her at the McDonald’s where we ate pancakes before cheerleading at Saturday morning football games. I see her at the library where I read my way to a free Carowinds ticket when I was nine years old. 

            At my parents’ house, I can smell her, and when I’m brave enough to look at her bed, I remember the last few days of her life and then the last minutes. I don’t like being that brave.

            I suppose there’s no perfect way to die, but mom’s last night went as smoothly as it could. I was sitting on the bed with her, and my husband and dad were also in the room. The hour or so before she stopped breathing, I spouted out a David Letterman-like Top 10 list of our best times together — Christmas Eve dinner at The Waffle House, going out late in New York City after we called dad to tell him we were in for the night (her idea), singing Moonlight Bay in the round during bath time, playing hide and seek behind bolts of fabric at The Remnant Shop. All of it. 

            And then I told her it was okay for her to go and that we would take care of each other. As stubborn as my mother was, this is a woman who told her Hospice nurse that she wasn’t ready for a walking cane yet, she took her last breath and took off to a new world. 

            One of the best and worst things about being from a small town is that everyone either knows everyone or is related to them. In this case, it was the best thing because the man from the funeral home was one of my mom’s best friends’ sons. When he got to the house, we reminisced about the trips my mom and his mom used to take together. Though they are now both gone, their stories live on, and I needed those stories so much that night. 

            I have no idea what heaven is. I know that my mom will live in my heart forever, and I also know that I’ve seen an awful lot of butterflies since she left. Dad saw a yellow monarch flying around the back door a few hours before she died, another one brushed my windshield as I drove back from the funeral home and another one greeted me after my run yesterday. 

            Two days after her service, my son’s teacher presented the class with a caterpillar that will soon evolve into a beautiful butterfly. (They named him Larry, which my mother would have thought was hilarious.) These colorful winged creatures are my mother’s way of letting us know that everything is going to be okay, even though right now it feels like it never will be.

            A friend told me earlier this summer that you don’t have to be with someone physically to feel their presence, and I believe that that’s true. I know my mother is watching over us, protecting us as best she can, and I know she would want us to get on with things. So with each new day we try. Some days we try harder than others, but every day we keep our eyes open for the fluttering flash of a yellow butterfly, a Wink of Goodness from my beautiful mother. 

NOTE: Weekly Winks will return next Friday. Even though this past week has been one of the hardest in my life, there were too many winks to count (butterflies, a rainbow, a covered dish dinner cooked by United Methodist Women and the list goes on). My dad said it best yesterday. “It doesn’t make sense that people are mean in this world when there is so much love.”