On this day

We decided to make Heidi’s birthday on November 30th every year, because it was this day a year ago that my mom died. We didn’t want the day haunted by sadness forever. Heidi is six today, my mother would have been 75 this December 28th. Tin’s guardian and our dear friend brought him a book from Germany to explain to him about my mother, his Mimi, passing. It is Jutta Bauer’s Opas Engel and it is the story of a grandfather who is ill in the hospital, and he loves to tell stories so he is telling his grandson about the time he almost got hit by a bus, but it just missed him, and then how he almost fell in a ditch or got beat up by a bully but was saved by some invisible presence, perhaps an angel, and the story proceeds to talk about his Jewish friend who went missing as it was the Nazi era, and all the while, the angel looks after the grandfather.

I never thought about angels before my mother died; never believed in them except to accept the gods and goddesses who stood behind the heros in Homer’s depictions of war. I liked the image, but didn’t subscribe any belief towards it. But I know that Tin has an angel looking after him, I have felt her presence since the moment my mother left this earth, here with me, with him. I was reading this morning that you have to fully grieve for the loss of your mother otherwise it can affect your job, your relationship, your daily life. I didn’t have a moment to grieve since Tin came so quickly into my life, but suffice to say, today on the one year anniversary of her death, with the cold rain outside (yesterday it was 80 degrees), I feel my mother here with all of us, she’s smiling, she’s caressing Tin, she is patting me on the back, she is taking a nibble off of T’s sweets and she’s dancing when the music is playing.

I forgot to light her candle this morning when I woke up – I was distracted by having a houseguest – mom’s Yahrzeit candle – but I will get it now to let her know I am remembering her.

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