1) The way my mom looked laid out at the funeral home - perfectly normal, like a person who had never been sick
2) Seeing Christopher cry at the funeral
3) The streak of white in her hair she wouldn't let her stylist color over because she thought it made her look more elegant
4) How much I now know about wheelchairs
5) The line "in our dying and our rising, until you take us home" from Matt Maher's "Leave a Light On"
6) Whether I really believe what I heard on a Bible podcast the other day from theologian Mark Hart - that each of us has a vocation, a calling from God, and after we've completed that vocation He takes us back home . . . thus far the only theory I buy for why my mom, of all people, had to have this happen to her. Maybe she was just . . . done. She had done whatever she was supposed to do (more than most people do in their lifetimes)
7) The relationship between kids and mothers. How does my identity change now? Am I still my mother's daughter? Can I be a whole person without the person who gave me half of my genes, my good hair, my love of antique stores, tea, Daphne du Maurier, and old rosaries, and my stubborn, judgmental nature?
8) Skin and hands. My mom's hands got prettier as she got sick - when she was healthy, she was out in the garden doing yardwork, or cooking, or washing dishes, or any number of other things, and her hands were a mess. As she used them less and less, they became white and soft like the hands of someone who's never done a days' work in their life. Like her entire past was just erased.
9) The correct system for Christmas decorations, which only she and I fully understood and which is totally on me now. There's no one to correct me if I screw up.
10) Something she said to me years ago, right after she was diagnosed, and was trying to get me to face up to the fact that eventually she was going to be gone - "My kids are good. They're good to each other. All the rest is just stuff."
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