All Things Bright and Beautiful

“Oh, okay, fun, good food”

My mother died on Sunday, June 11, and this was her last text message to me.

But not just her last text. It is the very last thing she ever said to me before she died.

She sent it to me at 5:59 PM, and me, thinking I had all the time in the world, didn’t respond.

Then, about 9 hours later, sometime around 2 or 3 AM, she had a massive stroke, brought on by her stage 4 cancer. She’d been diagnosed a year before, and she’d already had several strokes by this point, some major, most minor. The cancer was terrible, and was responsible for the strokes. The first one, back in March of 2022, damn near killed her, and forever changed the woman I knew as my mother.

It’s one of the strangest things I’ve grappled with in the past few months since her death, and it’s hard to explain why. Seeing her last text in my messages, my subconscious mind still thinks it’s fresh, and that any minute now, she’ll be sending me another message; telling me about her day, sharing her thoughts on something she saw, or asking me what I’ve been up to and how her granddaughter is doing.

But she’s not going to. That message, “Oh, okay, fun, good food,” is the very last thing she’ll ever send me.

And the finality of that knowledge cuts deep. It was just a simple response to some pictures I sent her from the Lebanese festival I’d gone to with my wife and her family, and it’s kind of famous for the amazing food you can find there. Lots of music, lots of dancing, and of course, an incredible array of Mediterranean food. I wish our last message had been something more personal, meaningful, something deeper. But by that point it was hard for her to text anything at all, and most of what she sent was in very short, broken sentences.

The strokes had taken away a large part of her ability to communicate. She did a remarkable job recovering, and before the final stroke she was nearly at a point where she cold almost hold a totally normal conversation. Some days were better than others, and she would often stumble over words, but she was all there, on the inside, and you could tell.

Our technological age is both a blessing and a curse. Most of the time, I feel like it’s gone way, way too far, and invaded so much of our lives that it’s hard to see a way out. It’s taken over every aspect of our day to day living, and you can’t really escape things like smart phones and computers anymore, integrated as they are into just about every interaction we have, and creating small but permanent records of everything we do and say. There is a silver lining, however.

I didn’t see my mom in person a lot over the last few years. She lived several thousand miles away in the Bahamas for about 15 years, and then when she moved to California, she still lived about an hour away from us, and with San Diego traffic, that’s significant. We’ve always had a long-distance relationship, and at one point, I went 7 years without actually seeing my mom in person. We were always close, but it was the kind of closeness that didn’t require us being together. We kept in touch over Facebook, or through emails, or in text messages.

And now, all those conversations and messages are preserved, forever; a permanent record of everything we talked about. And that’s a real blessing, even if it is painful to go back and read them now, knowing that everything she’s ever going to say has already been said. Nothing new will be added to the conversation. She’ll never share another recipe with me, or send a funny picture of a horse or some puppies, or a vista from some faraway country that she insists must be my next travel destination with my family.

And that’s one of the toughest, and most unexpected parts of this experience of losing her: watching her conversation with me in my texts slip lower and lower as more recent messages come in. Where she was once consistently at the top of my texts, now her messages are falling further and further below, and it hits me like a lead weight in my chest, knowing that she’ll never send me another message ever again.

My mom was an extremely talented artist. She painted a lot over the last few years, and although she intended to sell her paintings, she never got the business side off the ground. But I’m very grateful that her business acumen never rivaled her creative abilities, because now I’m left with a house full of her incredible artwork, and I have it hanging all over our home and in our daughter’s room. She may not remember her grandmother, but she’ll grow up surrounded by her paintings.

The title of this post comes from one of my favorite memories of my mom. It’s from an old Christian hymn, which reads:

All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.

It’s also the title of a series of books by James Herriot, a British veterinarian who published his diary from his experiences tending animals in the Yorkshire Dales in the early 20th century. I listened to the audiobooks over and over again with my mom growing up, and they’re some of my absolute favorite memories. She had the softest heart, and was so loving and kind towards animals, and held such a reverence for nature and God’s creations. I know she passed it on to me, and I hope to pass it on to my children as well.

She was Christian, and I know that God called her, and I know she’s in a better place. But we weren’t done with her yet.

For me, my mother will always represent all things bright and beautiful.

I sure do miss you mom.