My Mom Died
Photoscribbles
“You can make many plans, but the Lord’s purpose will prevail.” Proverbs 19:21
Why do we make plans? I don’t know the answer to this question. I planned to send out several Photoscribble Throwback posts, but my mom died on May 12, 2025 and that changes things. Now I write to the moment.
Initially it is like a helium balloon. I am a faded sentiment like happy mother’s day, happy birthday, happy graduation and floating free up high to heavens unreachable, and within no heavy center tone, just lighter than air gas that catches wind and levitates for miles, above the heads of the milling throngs, the mourners, the fixers, the very good friends and panged sweet acquaintances. People are truly really wonderfully loving and I remember this as I float, float, no steerage or control, no direction home and a complete unknown1. No tether and no grounding, no balloon weight or yoke on my dented shoulders. It’s lifted, gone, launched and I’m garbage in the atmosphere, something very blessed and discarded. I am a helium balloon bound for where? Glory and tree tangle, a landing far away or right where I started.
Initially it is like a helium balloon, the invitation of spirited grief and God’s solid heartbeat in a child returned to him, an angel freed of delusion, wrath, misery, lamentations. There is peace in passing through to a silent mother and it is strange to stand there talking, expecting her always to intercede. She does not interrupt with the litanies of replayed aphorisms and old cycled inevitable thought. The tapes play no more.
I am a helium balloon floated far out the kitchen window and skyward unthought, undeciding, ungripped and learning to fly but I ain’t got wings.2 A soundtrack over state lines and over all decided and not mattering. Over demarcations and democracy. My mother was incredibly vexed by the state of the nation and sick with its mentalities and medications, paralyzed by patriarchies and prescriptions. Feeble coping skills leading to cycled stuck American agonies and pain, just chronic pain, chronic distraction, and a world gone wrong, but that’s not the whole story. The whole story won’t be told all at once. It will be scrawled by a 45 year old hand, a ruthless poet, and the child born at the right time3.
Initially, it is like a helium balloon and I was loved as much as humanly possible by a woman universal, a veil-ripping power and final surrender. It is early and yet finally. It is the earth to return to. And I am floating, floating—the sky tumbled wind gust, the transport of where you lead me, I follow, not my will, but thy will, not my trip, but thy trip4.
Initially it is like a helium balloon, left the wrist and left the gravity that had no hold on it anyway. Illusions ended and motor skills challenged. Giving thanks for the graciousness but floating, floating, floating far off and unmoored, unstuck, unburdened in arms with the weight of generations. All the ancestors put their hands up and pour love onto the streets.
The spring flowers burst up seeking sun and pollination. The maple trees release their scads of seeds to the windstorm and excessively cover the lawn and gutters and deck rails and windshields with abundant bountiful hope. Some will fall in rough soil and some will wash down the gutter of man’s strainer and fenced nature, and some will fall into deep hidden places with an unconscious kick, and some will grow maple trees where they landed and God wills it, and all is possible on sacred ground earthly rooted, loamy and sourced—but as for me, I’m flying, a bitter gratitude and an empty molecule of lift, fueled by the loving nurturance branch seed. The long grounded connections to a held back and warned of danger.
There is no danger now where the woman no longer speaks. There is only the balloon released from the party, lost to human hands skyward, upward and one day to fall back here, the joining of refuse and gravity of deliverance. It’s not time for me to fly away yet, so I’ll never be far, but God prune my branches that do not bear fruit. God take this surrendered saint to your staircase of sky and sky and all we can see sky. We don’t know the half of it but faith is sheer light like helium and it takes me higher, higher.
Initially it is like a helium balloon and the cord really cut. Rite of passage, rite of life, circle unbroken, cut. That’s a wrap. Good night my sweet mother whose every action was love. You didn’t hurt me, you filled me, and I go higher as you turn back. I go to miles unknown and the yoke weight remembered. I go to pen scrawl and storytelling but not yet, love, not yet, mom, not yet, just a floating. Cords cut and weights lifted and off to Oz or unknown everything. In faith I float and fall down with a freedom desired, but defeating. I longed so to escape, evade your judgment and interference, and now I have it, I’m lost to the sky.
Bob
Tom
Paul
Ram Dass