The title of a book by Buckminster Fuller has been running through my head constantly regarding the recent passing of my Mother. His book is And It Came to Pass, but Not to Stay. The words haunt me. Everything is passing. This we know conceptually, but I have just experienced the first days of life without my Mother residing here in this incarnated realm. Her love, her presence has always been there.

She passed. Passed. The meaning eludes me just now. What does that mean, passed? I don’t want any answer just yet; I need to consider.

My Mother really, really, really loved her kids and grandkids. As my daughter Josi said at her Wake service, her love was fierce, protective.  Where does all of that love go when she passes? Where did Coco’s dynamic love go? When a relationship ends, where does the love that was held within it go? Do all of these merge with the cosmic love, or is there still a particularity to those loves outside of subjective memory? Cosmic love is good, but my Mother’s love was very particular.

In Mother’s last months all she wanted to talk about was her love. We’d tell her things in our lives and she was interested, but her attention would simply gravitate to expressing how much she loved us. And when we expressed ours in return she genuinely let it in. This was very satisfying. She knew she was loved, and we have always known that we were loved.

She commented to my other daughter Arlene in one of their last conversations that she might like to learn to play rugby. Mom was 89. Arlene told this story at the Wake too, appreciating her Grandmother’s fearlessness. The priceless stories went on and on, and will continue on and on.

I was home alone one night just after she passed and heard myself singing the song from the musical Oliver, “Where is Love?” I sang it over and over; such a sweet song I have always remembered the lyrics to. Singing it made me feel better. My heart is scanning, looking for the new evidences of my Mother’s love emerging from where she is now, and for new evidences of all of the loves in my life that came to Pass but not to Stay.

Those evidences will be my true North. I will direct myself by them.