Reflection / John Shaughnessy

The love at the heart of it all

When you’ve lost someone you love, what do you miss most about them?

If it’s a close friend, is it the person’s smile you miss most? Their laugh?

If the relationship was more intimate, is it their touch you long for, their embrace you crave most?

There are other questions, too.

Does a cup of coffee taste as rich as it once did when you sat across from that loved one and shared your day and stories with them?

When you unexpectedly catch a whiff of a loved one’s perfume, after-shave or the fragrance of their soap or shampoo, do you instinctively turn in the direction of the scent and maybe, even for the briefest moment, joyfully anticipate the loved one being there?

Such random questions have filled my thoughts in the past two months since my mom died.

There are no regrets about her passing. At 96, she lived a full life, including sharing the abundance of her love with her family of four generations during this past Christmas. She also kept her spirit and mental sharpness to the end. At the same time, her physical challenges and a weakening heart led her to question God, in the weeks before her death, as to why he wasn’t already ready for her to come home to him and our dad. When God graciously obliged, she was surrounded by her five children and a circle of family members in her home.

Yet while there is no regret—and the gratitude is immense for her long, joyful life—there is still healing that is needed as this first Mother’s Day without her nears.

The healing has been helped by the greatly appreciated condolences I’ve received from people, including a note from a friend who once shared a fun and favorite memory of his mother.

Growing up, he and his brother were given chores by their mother to help clean the house, including flipping cushions on the furniture. As an incentive, his mom always hid coins in the couch for her sons. And she later jokingly told him and his brother that even after she died, she would leave coins for them as a sign that she was still with them. Years after her death, during tough times in his life, he has often found coins on the street, making him think of his mother, and making him believe in her continuing presence in his life. Later, he takes the coins to the cemetery where she is buried, and places them at her gravesite.

In sharing that story, my friend had given a glimpse of his answer to the question about his mom, “What do you miss most?”

A couple I have long known once showed me another side of the answer to that question.

On that day, I came to a funeral home to pay my respects to them, for their infant son who had died. The child was born with severe respiratory and neurological problems. He also had other birth defects, all of which led to him spending a significant part of his less-than-one-year life in a children’s hospital.

Some people said it was better for the infant and his parents that he died. Surely now, the thought was, the infant will have the peaceful, beautiful life that all children deserve. But when the infant was alive, his parents never gave any indication that it was better for their son to die. Instead, they loved and cared for him. And they swear that he returned their love—and taught them through his pain and suffering.

Standing with the infant’s father at the funeral home, I noticed a stuffed animal had been placed in his coffin. I asked the father if it was a favorite toy of his son. He answered, “No, that’s a new one we got for him. We were kind of selfish about his toys. We wanted to keep them for ourselves, to have something of his.”

In those words, it was evident that his son had touched their lives, that he was already dearly missed.

Which leads me to the question regarding my mom, “What do I miss most about her?”

The roots of my answer take me back long ago, to my senior year in high school when I was accepted into the University of Notre Dame. For years, my mom had endured how the mood of an autumn Saturday would change for my dad—and then also for me—depending upon whether the Irish won or lost a football game that day. And while she joined in the celebration when my acceptance letter came, she took no joy in having her older son move 600 miles away from our family’s Philadelphia-area home.

During those four years, most of our connections were by phone—weekly calls home on a Sunday evening when the phone rates for the then-expensive, long-distance calls significantly decreased after 6 p.m. on Sundays. And phone calls continued to be a primary source of staying connected after my graduation, as I’ve lived and made a home in Indiana for more than 45 years.

All through those years, the sound of her voice was a source of joy, comfort, support and love. And after my dad died in 2019, my phone calls with her increased even more, becoming daily—usually between the early evening times of 5:15 and 6, a good time for her before her dinner. Often, that connection involved rushing home from work as she said she heard the voices of me and my wife easier on our landline phones.

There was one other ritual tied to that connection—almost exclusively, I called her. A rare exception to that ritual involves one of my favorite memories of all time.

The moment happened on a late Saturday night in the fall of 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Minutes before, Notre Dame’s football team had just upset the number-one-ranked Clemson University team with a dramatic, come-from-behind win in double overtime. My wife and I were still hugging, high-fiving and dancing in our living room when the phone rang. I figured it was one of our children or one of my Notre Dame friends calling to share in the joy and the excitement.

Instead, it was the last person I expected to be calling—my mom, who was 92 then. The reason I say she was the last person I expected to be calling had little to do with her age. It’s because she had long been a charter member of that group of mothers who live their lives like the old U.S. Army slogan: “They do more by 9 in the morning than most people do in an entire day.” She usually woke up at 5 in the morning and headed to bed at 8 at night. And her routine never included staying up to watch any kind of game.

Yet here she was near midnight, phoning me, talking excitedly about how she had watched the game, what a great game it was, and how much we all needed something so joyful like that to happen in the midst of a pandemic. Then her voice lowered as she mentioned my father, who had died 18 months earlier. “I hope your dad saw that game,” she said. When I assured her that he had, her joy returned. She ended the call by saying she just wanted to share that joy with me.

It wasn’t until later that I thought about the true extent of that gift from her. In all the years of my relationship with my dad, the tradition of calling each other after a Notre Dame game never wavered. And my mom was doing her part to continue that ritual that I still miss.

I cherish that phone call even more now as I try to adjust to coming home from work and not being able to call her.

Those phone calls and especially “her voice” are part of my answer to the question, “What do I miss most about her?” At the same time, I know it’s much more than that.

Whether it’s the memory of a shared cup of coffee, an intimate embrace, a hidden coin, a treasured toy or a phone call, what we miss most is the love at the heart of it all.
 

(John Shaughnessy is the assistant editor of The Criterion.) †