I have wanted to write for so long.
I have wished I had the bandwidth, the vulnerability, the courage and the energy to write.
But these things are never mine on the same day. So maybe I will have to try while I'm still stretched a little too thin, feeling guarded, scared and weary. And maybe I will hit publish, and maybe I will just try.
I've never been one to believe in receiving "signs" from people who have passed away. Neither did my mom. In an odd conversation that left us both wondering if we had seriously just agreed to this, I remember her telling me how she wasn't a big believer in signs from the other side, either. "But if you can send one, will you?" I asked. "If I can, I will, but I don't think I will be able to, so don't spend too much time looking."
When the calendar rolled back around to the day my mom died a year ago, I knew I didn't want the day to be like every other. But I didn't know how I wanted it to look differently. It wasn't a celebration. It wasn't a memorial. The kids and I ended up meeting my dad at the cemetery. It didn't bring comfort. Seeing the years of her birth and death carved into stone was a visual reminder of the finality of her time with us here. People use the phrase, "Nothing's carved in stone" to suggest options remain. When you stand before the stone, and it is carved, you are reminded that no options remain. We remembered her, and missed her, and sat with the heavy absence and the heavier weight of grief. And there wasn't much to say or do, just be.
I planned for us to go across the street afterward to a park to find a geocache. I didn't know how we would do at the cemetery and I suspected we'd want to end on a different note than the one I thought the visit might evoke. I still had my three kids with me, after all.
We found the cache and my dad had the wits and patience to figure out exactly how it had to be shaken to guide a key out of this complex internal maze and out a tube to unlock it. It was so clever. So tricky. I really doubt we ever would have gotten it open without his clear thinking. I would have just kept shaking it, hoping for dumb luck, and just as I may have figured it out, don't you know one of my kids would have insisted it was their turn?
Larger geocaches come with all kinds of trinkets-stickers, little balls, happy meal prizes, little plastic toys. Usually there's nothing of value, or even of interest to my kids. We've seen all of it before. But on that day, there was a silver key chain with a single silver die, studded with diamond rhinestones.
Now to most of you reading this, a die with fake, but sparkly gems where the numbers should be doesn't lead you to much. For me, it was a profound moment of recognition. It was her sign.
My mom was an avid Farkle player. (a game in which you roll six dice for combinations like Yahtzee and Bunco). She collected all kinds of novelty dice and little containers to put them in. If a new player rolled a particularly rare combination, or won by a stunning amount, or seemed to enjoy the game even a little, she'd pull out her collection and urge them to pick their own set of dice and the container to store it. She had little boxes from around the world, vases, handmade pottery jars, leather pouches, miniature suitcases. She had dice as small as an eraser head, dice as large as walnuts. She had wooden dice, marble dice, hollow plastic dice with dice inside them...the girl loved her dice. But it was more than that. When something really pleased my mom, she just couldn't help but share it.
So back to the geocache and the sparkly, silver dice. To me, it was like my mom's insider way of saying, "Things are good. Oh, and all that stuff about streets lined with gold? Yeah, that's kind of real. Things are so stellar here, even the Farkle dice are studded with diamonds. Diamonds! Can you believe this? And I'd love to share it, but I can't right now so I'll just arrange with the higher ups to put a mock-up in a container I know you'll love. And you can work together and shake it out and marvel at the mystery of how it ended up there one year to the day since I've been gone."
We remembered her, and missed her, and sat with the heavy absence and the heavier weight of grief, but it was a good day.
