It was June 8th 2004 that last time I saw my mother and had said my goodbye to her at the hospital in Helsingborg in Sweden. Two days later, she passed away after my brother and his girlfriend had been there and her husband went down for a coffee at the hospital cafeteria. He called me in the evening on June 10th. It was one of those regular Swedish summer days where it finally had become warm enough to sit outside and I had had an ice-cream at the old kiosk at Triangeln in Malmö where I lived. I was sitting at the staircase thinking about her, when I suddenly had felt as if she elevated. I decided to walk home and sit down on my couch, anticipating The Call. Lights shut off, TV off, sitting down on my couch with the phone next to me. Less than 10 minutes later, her husband Christer called. And I called a couple of girlfriends and tried to reach my cousin. After that the following days became mostly a blur.
But it was the year before when I was going to go to NYC in April to do a week of research and have fun for my exam paper to my Swedish Master's degree, I had to start cutting her off. I was just going to be gone for a week, while my younger brother already had moved abroad entirely, then to Amersfoort in the Netherlands to work for Sun Microsystems as a network architect, later to Geneva in Switzerland for another company. We like to see it as that I inherited the intelligence for languages and he for technology and happy that none of us became too much. Unless creativity and an ear for music is what really defines us, dating back for decades. Either way, I never understood what my mother was so upset about, more than her own fear of dying of course, since it by then had started to become evident enough to me that she was not going to make it. Maybe she simply wished to go back to NYC herself, to sing on Broadway, the way I want to dance there.
Her body couldn't then, but her spirit can be with me now anyway.
My week in NYC in 2003 was both wonderful and devastating. Wonderful to do all the coaching interviews and be inspired while making lots of good fashion finds. Devastating to see what 9/11 had caused and how I felt myself overwhelmed with a fatigue and allergy I hadn't had before.
It will be lovely to go there again.
How could a mother be envious of her daughter? Constantly looking for younger men to be with, to compete, constantly looking for my approval of her looks and choices, as if she never stepped into being the adult. A pattern I of course see in some of my female friends and foes to have it resolved, while I unfortunately still have to wait to have my own family. Would I ever become envious of mine? Hard to imagine!
Again, compassion and forgiveness is the solution. She was curious about my becoming a Lifecoach and had never heard about how to be one, or have the attitude of one. It is my way of evolving from the teaching profession she had. And it is through feeling the grief, we also realize how much we loved someone.
When we acknowledge what's in our hearts, we can find love, faith and the path to joy.