Originally published in the Deseret News National Edition.
My mother passed away about a month ago. The passage of time has allowed me to reflect about, internalize and process the experience. I finally feel I can write about it and want to share an experience from the final years of her life. My thoughts start and end with women and song.
As context, let me provide a little background. I’m the youngest of 11 children, which tells you my mother was a warrior of sorts. Truly nothing intimidated her. My mother lived a nigh-perfect life — great marriage, loving children, spunk and spirit, a love for mankind and world travel and a sure commitment to her maker. She died at 93 in her own home, surrounded by her children, in perfect peace. While leaving a pit in my heart, her death was a beautiful experience because of the life she lived.
My mother and I shared many things in common — one of them was an ability to play the ukulele. Not only is the instrument easy to play; it has a certain humility about it — simple, folksy and real. My most treasured inheritance is a handcrafted Kamaka eight-string uke my father gifted to my mother and my mother left for me.
For the past several years as my mother was “in decline,” as she liked to say, we shared a Thursday-night ritual. I would take her dinner on my way home from the university, we would talk about the issues of the day, and then I would strum the ukulele as we sang together. The singing part was magical and joyful.
My family’s faith tradition benefits from many easy-to-play spiritual songs that lend themselves well to the unassuming, humble and bare sound of the ukulele. Religious songs are for everyone, not just the musically gifted. I would turn page after page of the songbook and play to my mother — sometimes singing solo, sometimes singing together, but always connecting, eye to eye and heart to heart. Mother to daughter, daughter to mother. We were both lifted by the experience.
After each song I would ask, “What do you want to hear next?” I would then turn to the page, review the lyrics to refresh her memory, and read the attributions for the text and music. After a few weeks of doing this a trend started to emerge. When I read a song’s author, names like Annie, Eliza, Emma Lou, Mary, Susan and Grace would jump from the page. Without knowing, my mother requested and found comfort in songs written by women! I found this fascinating.
The experience taught me a valuable lesson: Deep in our souls we long for and need the comforting voice of women and the feminine divine. Matriarchs matter. The feminine voice instructs us, comforts us, lifts our spirits and enriches our lives, perhaps in a way that nothing else can.
When my mother’s health started to fail rapidly, my siblings and I gathered around her. She was in a coma, peacefully resting in her bed for two and a half days. We spent an entire weekend in the family home — loving, comforting and reminiscing. And, yes, we sang. Boy, did we sing, song after song after song. We brought the ukuleles out. We harmonized. We sang as loud as our eyes were wet.
In the end, my mother left this earth with her children circled around her bedside, singing her to heaven with the same songs, many authored by women, we had been singing on Thursday nights. In a very real way, women lifted my mother to heaven.
I don’t know with exactness what it will be like when the rest of us get to heaven. But of one thing I am sure: The goodness, the beauty and the inspiration that come from our mothers, a women’s voice and the feminine divine will be very real and comforting to us all.