Restoring Mother

Katheryn Watson, 1991

Cancer stole my mother at the age of 61. Cancer also stole our relationship.

Mother was sick four years. For the four or five years before that, she had nursed her husband, who died from his cancer, as well. Mother never recovered her spirit. Cancer left our family broken. By the time my mother died, here is what I believed about her: She never said she loved me. She never hugged me. She expected too much of me. She didn’t protect me when I was most vulnerable.

I carried that version of my mother with me for the next 12 years.

Those were 12 hard years. God was knocking loud and hard on my door. My sister died. I turned my stepdaughter against me. My marriage ended.

When I was preparing to move, I pitched out everything that chronicled my life to that point. Years worth of journals. Letters from my sister, my grandmother, my father. Newspaper and magazine stories written by me and about me. Bitter and hopeless, I threw everything away to punish myself. In the process, I read it all, one last time. As I read my mother’s letters, even in that place of deep despair, my mother was restored to me.

There in her handwriting was everything I had ever needed from her, everything she had given with such abundance, everything that four years of her cancer had gnawed out of my heart. She never wrote a single letter to me without telling me how much she loved me, without telling me what a wonderful daughter I was, without telling me how proud of me she was. And I had forgotten all of it.

At that point even my mother’s love was not enough to heal me; the healing would come later. But her letters were enough to wipe out the lies I had told myself. She spoke love to me from the place where she waits for me and forgives me and continues to feed me with her belief in me.

On the eve of Mother’s Day, here is what I am remembering:

• the way, when I was a little girl, she and I could pick up in the middle of a conversation that we had abandoned weeks before, knowing, just knowing;
• the way she insisted on going to the hospital on the day of my 40th birthday, knowing it was the last birthday of mine she would ever see, because she didn’t want her cancer clouding the party my friends had planned;
• the way she told me she was tired of being the strong one, and asked me to be the strong one the rest of the way;
• the way I failed her, and she never said a word.

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