Feeling my mother's essence

Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash

I was talking with my sponsor the other day, who has recently lost her mother, and she spoke about how she can feel her now, her presence.

She paused, and then said - “I can’t really explain it.”

I replied, “You don’t have to.”

Because she doesn’t; I get it.

I explained, “I too have felt my mother.”

And I have felt her essence, her unique aura, and the energies of other loved ones who have walked on at other points

She said, “It feels like the very best of them.”

It was a perfect way to describe it.

Because I have used some similar words when trying to depict it to others.

I recall once reading—perhaps in the Shack - when they were describing souls of people who had passed on that could be recalled by their colors emanating forth from their spirits as much as their corporeal memory.

When bodies are gone and all that remains is their souls, their spirits, that author depicted them as colors.

I always found that apt—that there is something even deeper than someone’s body, smile, laugh, the sound of their voice - that we grow so accustomed to understanding to be the defining thing about another’s person/essence.

But, really, they are so much more than that. Deeper. Beyond the corporeal and temporal space here.

I described the feeling when I felt my mother like this -

Do you know that feeling that you get when you’re around someone that you love deeply and they love you, you know each other oh so very well, and it is pure and you feel safe and happy, and they make you feel different than anyone else does -

And you identify that feeling as only being with that person - how they make you feel happy and loved and full of warmth and affection and inside jokes and a lifetime of memories and stories that only you two share and understand?

That - THAT - is that feeling that I felt when I feel my mother.

And though I miss her terribly - and I often wish I could call her and spend time with her -

She was also suffering and so unwell for so many years, especially in the last five years of her life.

I not only don’t want her to suffer, because she certainly earned her rest and peace from her body and her hard life and tortured existence.

But - it also is strangely comforting - it’s odd that, through death, I also feel like I have regained the essence that was my mother - more than I had of her in life, at least at the end and what her life was, and who she had become.

That makes the grieving process easier for me - as paradoxical as it may sound.

I miss her oh so deeply, it often aches inside of me- but I also know that she is so, so much better off. I know that. I can feel her.

Her aura and love and spirit encompasses me sometimes, and I can feel her pure joy and relief and peace.

And I know that she’s okay. She’s better than okay, she’s finally free.

But I am grateful that she drops by to let me know that too.

Because I don’t have her purview, the first hand experience to understand all that she has, where she is, that she’s okay.

But even through the glimmering glimpses, I know it’s beautiful.