George Santayana captured some of that feeling in a piece entitled "THE TRUTH OF A WOMAN'S LIFE." His words moved me to write this sermon instead of the one I was going to preach. I will save that for another time. Perhaps it is too soon to share this story with you for it is still unfolding, and perhaps not. Memory keeps one alive, and we need our parents, no matter how much we might protest. There is a confusion and mixed feeling many of us experience on the death of a parent, especially our mothers. He wrote:

When a woman's life is over,
It remains true that she has lived;
It remains true that she has been one sort of woman, and not another.
A woman who understands herself under the guise of eternity
knows the quality that eternally belongs to her and knows
that she cannot wholly die,

even if she would;

for when the moment of her life is over,
the truth of her life remains.

Mom was a complicated women, at once loving and nurturing and then anxious and paranoid. That is part of the truth of her life, but oh there is so much more to know and understand. My understanding of who she was is yet to be written in chapter and verse. For now, what I possess is only a glimpse, a bare outline of who she was in life and who she is now in death.

I know that my grief is visceral, in my gut and heart. The tears have come and will continue no doubt for months yet to be. No matter how prepared any of us think we are to hear the words, "Mom is dead", they come as a shock, a body blow, only slowly understood.

The death of a parents is one of the most profound sad events of a child's life, no matter how old we are. My siblings and I had been anticipating mom's death not for day or months but years. She was 40 days shy of 93 and we always joked she would live forever. She almost did.

When someone lives that long, quality of life issues become paramount. Many of you, while advanced in age, and troubled with many an ailment can, in moments of clarity when pain subsides, still appreciate the joy of living and being. When someone is imprisoned by dementia or Alzheimer's, we can only imagine what that existence is like. Most of us want no part of it. We suffer along with them, but do they suffer at all, or is their non attachment a kind of bliss, finally unconscious of all life's trials and tribulations. Most of us would say that's not for me.

The death of any of our mothers is perhaps ever more profoundly sad that that of our fathers. I suspect that is true but I am too new to being an orphan to really understand what that means. It doesn't yet resonate as it likely does for some of you sitting here. I am sure it will, but not yet, I am not ready.

My sense is that the death of our mothers is more traumatic for she gave birth to us, she is the font of our existence, the source of hope springing forth out of her body, the flowering of our very existence, planted by our fathers. Our blood is hers, in the womb that nurtured us in darkness and fluid safety from which we sprang forth into the light of life. Our connection is not only fundamental to our existence but as we grow, her nurture becomes more complicated and complex. We want connection, we want approval, yet we want to be set free to make our own life, our own mistakes. We get angry at the control Mom seems to wield, yet if she shows no interest we feel unloved, uncared for. Wow, not an easy balance for any of us to maintain.

So how do we love our mothers? With our whole hearts but perhaps cautiously and carefully. For the power to hurt is there. I was always a little off guard when it came to my mother. We all talk about unconditional love but life is rarely without conditions and reservations and often the mother child relationship has many layers forever being uncovered and deeply complicated. Fortunately for all of us it isn't always convoluted. Sometimes it is just what it seems to be, loving, relaxed and satisfying.

My mother was at times a very funny woman. She could tell a joke as well as my father but never got in a word edgewise when he was on a roll. One of my fondest memories was a Passover story involving the two Alice's, my mother and non drinking Methodist mother-in-law. They hardly touched a drop of liquor until they got together for the holiday. Then all hell would break loose, albeit slowly and slyly. They would put the bottle of the over-sweet kosher wine on the floor between them and quietly polish the bottle off, denying all the time that they were drinking. Their subterfuge of course fell apart as they got sillier and sillier, more inebriated and funnier. Needless to say, a fun time was had by all.

She was also like many of our parents, troubled or limited in many ways. We are all products of our upbringing and heritage and she like many of our parents was a depression era child, scarred by the privation of those times. Our parents all give what they can, based on how they were raised themselves. How many of us have said, I am never going to do repeat how my mother, or father for that matter, raised me, only to find that we do and say the same things. My wife and I had a foolproof way to not treat our kids the way our moms treated us. Every time we acted like "them" we would say ding as a reminder not to repeat their mistakes. Pretty soon it was like the bells of Saint Mary's, ding, ding, ding, ding. Oh well, perhaps in retrospect none of our mothers did such a bad job. After all it is on the job training for all of us, them and us.

We children put our parents through so much and never ever think about what they feel about how we treat them. Perhaps mom deserves more compassion than any of are willing or able to give. Perhaps that is the lesson we learn if and when we become parents. It is then, and only then I suspect, that what it is to be a parent become clear. It is then, when we learn to forgive ourselves for all the mistakes we make as parents, that we can finally forgive our mothers and fathers for all they didn't do, and finally thank them for all that they did right.

So I want to say, with you as my witness, thanks mom, you weren't so bad, in fact you were down right brilliant in your child rearing and that is why I am so damn smart myself.

In the end, I loved my complicated and erratic mother. She died with the wisdom with which she had lived her life, in spite of her dementia. When her end came, she knew it somehow. Her last clear, coherent words were, Mother I am dying. Her last whisper, if one listened close enough, was Mommie I am dying, and she breathed her last. Perhaps many of us here will call out for comfort, for the fount of all love, to return to the place of our birth. To return to our mothers. For all of us the great circle of existence will be finished, and we will be united in eternity.