Weird this morning to wake up to the fact that I have no sermon to write for tomorrow. They have given me the day off for Mothers Day! A newish reader has taken up the slack! So a free Saturday morning! I have been out with the dog, pruned some frost damaged trees and unpacked some new ones. None of it has taken my mind off the fact that tomorrow is Mothering Sunday.
I really don't want to sound like a wimp but this is a hard day for me and has been since my daughter died five years ago.
I suspect that all of us who have lost children find this day challenging. Some might even dread it.
My daughter Roz died of meningitis in February. The first Mother's day was just a few weeks later and I was preaching. That was the hardest thing I've done since I joined the church. I wanted to talk about the caring, nurturing side of being a mother but it was hard. I can't remember now what I did preach about....its gone from my consciousness which is probably just as well but I do know that before the sermon I took a very deep breath and plunged into it, praying that I would not weep before I got to the end. I didn't. The congregation who knew me well and knew about my loss were careful at the end...Kindness is the worst thing to start off the tears. There were a lot of well dones and some excellent hugs..but I did it. I got through the whole day punctuated by small weeps until at the end I was able to let rip.
Now I have my daughter's grave stone down at St Just and I talk to her regularly. My son is taking me out to lunch tomorrow and we will talk about times gone by. And probably do a bit of crying too. Its the first time I've seen him on Mothering Sunday since he was a teenager...but I'm glad he's around this year.
1 comment:
I sympathise with you loss at this time, the loss of a loved one is something no one ever truly gets over. This January saw the tenth anniversary of my father's death. My mother says that Grief is like a disease. When you lose a loved one, you get all the symptoms; sadness, anger, hurt and loss. As time goes by, the symptoms fade as the body builds up the antibodies of pleasant memories that protect you from recurrences of the grief, lessening the symptoms and speeding on the recovery when it does strike.
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