A Painful Text Message and Heart-healing Truth

I learned about my mom’s death from a text. Like black splinters, the teeny print on my phone screen proclaimed the end of one of the most precious people in my life.

I had been expecting the news and wasn’t surprised it came the way it did. It was spring, 2020. The world had just been shuttered by the pandemic. While in any other time my siblings and I would have flown immediately to be with Mom in her final days, it was exactly that period when jets had been grounded and flights put on hold indefinitely.

For weeks, we had been receiving text updates from my sister Carolyn on my 88-year-old mom’s diminishing health. With eight siblings living in three Canadian provinces, one state in the U.S., and the Central American country of Belize, we had agreed to relieve the communication burden on my sister and join a group chat. Carolyn was already going through the most as the daughter who lived closest to my mom in Belize.

It was painful not to be near my mother in her time of greatest weakness and vulnerability – the woman who had been near me, a gentle, reassuring presence in my worst moments – as a preteen blindsided by culture shock after our move to Canada and, later, as a young adult shattered by the death of my twin. In both those times, my mom would have been struggling with her own adjustments and grief, but she never stopped showing up.

Every morning, she rose, brushed her hair, and slipped on a clean blouse and pants. Then she’d quietly putter in the kitchen, stirring up aromas of coffee and toast. I would find her reading devotions in the living room. I’d see her leaving the house, sitting beside my dad in the pick-up truck as they ran errands together.

Never until now have I understood how much those simple, non-dramatic acts of hers would have helped me cope.  I realize now they were some of her greatest gifts to me.

My mom did so much for me all my life but in her final days, I couldn’t show up for her. I was thankful, of course, that she had my sister, who spent hours at her bedside, holding my mom’s hands, repeatedly singing her favourite hymns in a hushed voice. Two of my brothers also lived in the area and visited often.

My mom died just before dawn in the long-term care home in Belize. A few hours before, thousands of miles away in Ontario, Canada, I suddenly awoke. As I lay in the dark I wondered if my mom’s spirit was leaving this earth.

In the morning, the phone screen was splintered with the sharp message.

Our family has experienced the deaths of several of our close loved ones over the years – my twin, my oldest sister, my dad, and my nephew. Every time, the grief mashes the spirit. But in all those moments, we as a family could come together. Our spirits could draw strength from our physical bodies sharing the same space, from looking into one another’s tear-wet faces, grabbing one another’s hands, clutching each other in fierce hugs.

This time, we couldn’t have that. Stuck in my pandemic-forced isolation, I would be grieving my precious mom without the comfort of my siblings.

I remember the day my mom died as being overcast - a dull sky, the air still, not a single bird or cricket sound.

And then a new text message unfurled across my screen from my brother in Belize. They were planning to bury my mom the same day with a small service on the hill. Would I be willing to write her eulogy that day?

My family of seven living siblings could have picked anyone to write my mom’s eulogy. They picked me, the youngest. They all know I write as hobby and it’s quite likely that’s the main reason they asked me, but I believe the Holy Spirit might have moved them as well. He knew just what I needed to help me get through that day.

I spun a text back to my brother exclaiming yes, please, of course, I would love to. Then I hunkered down at the end of the dining room table, clutching a pen over a stack of lined paper, a glass of water at my elbow. My spirit and thoughts strained towards realizing this new aspiration as I earnestly set about to do my very best work.

As I stitched in mom’s birth date, my imagination swung back to her beginnings, long before my birth. I remembered the stories she’d told us of growing up on the shores of Lake Erie in a brick farmhouse with five sisters and four brothers. My heart ached as I felt the breezy sunshine off the shore and heard the children’s laughter and singing of long ago. I couldn’t write all the stories in her eulogy, but they came crowding round my spirit, skimming off a sweet longing.

I did add a line about her choice as an eight-year-old to follow Jesus.

As I wove in her wedding date, her years of raising children on a farm and then travelling as a missionary family for decades unrolled around me. Again, I felt a strange anguish in my heart as I saw her watching over her young children while they played.

The hours in the silent dining room tiptoed by as memories flocked round. I tried to yank them down onto my page just right, in a way that did them justice, that did my precious mom’s life justice.

Of course, in the end, I was not completely satisfied. Pausing for a swish of water, while I reread my work, I noticed the messy sentences and not-quite-perfectly-placed words. I tried to straighten up my writing, quickly swiping at that smudge of a wrongly placed verb, smoothing down that stray not-quite-right adjective.

But my family was ready for the eulogy. I had to send it.

With the tap of my computer mouse, the Word document appeared on my brother’s phone in Belize.

My siblings streamed the funeral over Facebook so that those of us who couldn’t be there physically could join with our eyes and ears.

The wind from thousands of miles away thumped at the camera’s microphone, snatching away words and parts of songs as the minister and my siblings and their children held the funeral service for my mom on a sunny hill. The sky behind them rose a white-blue.

A granddaughter, Amy, played on a keyboard teetering on the dry, rocky ground beside the grave. The music felt like a cool cloth on a fevered head.

And then it was time for the eulogy to be read. “Michelle wrote this today,” my brother said, before starting to read. The wind pulled away many of the sentences from his mouth even while it flapped the paper and rustled his hair.

After that, the grandchildren, young men, carried my mother’s casket to the graveside and slowly lowered it. It was when I heard the first shovel of dirt hit the wooden top that I cried. Dirt thudding on a coffin proclaims, this is the end.

I hadn’t cried all day.

All day, I had been swathed in memory and creating, in love and hope. Writing my mom’s eulogy had given that me, and I was so deeply grateful, especially and even more since I couldn’t be with my family.

You could say this was one way the harsh morning text message had been redeemed.

But there was another way.

What was the most important line I had written in my mom’s eulogy? She asked Jesus into her heart.

Because of that line, because of the choice she had made as a little girl, I could cry, and I could miss her, and I could mourn that I wasn’t grieving with my siblings, but not as one without hope. I could say, as millions of Christians have said before me, “O, death, where is your victory? O, grave where is your sting?” (1 Cor. 15:55).

The splintery text message I had received that morning had proclaimed: “Mom’s gone.”

But the message I sent back at the end of the day, at the very end of the eulogy I had written, exulted in the words of a poem my dad had written long before:

“The trials at last all are ended

The service on Earth here is done

Victorious with all of God’s people

Eternity’s blessings begun!”

A fact had flown across the cellphone wires that morning, splintering our hearts.

But Truth raced back across the world that evening, slowly starting the process of stitching them back together.

This article was originally published in Creativity & Chaos: Artistic Endeavours for Trying Times. It is reprinted here with permission.