Offerings

On love, loss, and the cost of devotion

If' you’d rather listen to this essay, an audio recording read by me, can be found here. ⬆️

My mother, 1928

As a practice, I remember the birthdays of those I’ve loved and lost rather than the deathdays, and I’m disinclined to punctuate the departures with sentiments like, “I miss her every day.” Rarely a day passes when I don’t think about my mother, given the many reminders in my life: clothing, jewelry, pictures, furniture, my image in the mirror. But it’s fullness I feel, not absence, when faced with such memories. It has been five years since she died, and time has not thinned her presence in the ways I once assumed it would.

After turning 93, she lived just over a month. Though she never put quite so fine a point on it, I’m sure when the time came, she was ready to go. She’d been comparatively well for most of her years, or at least more well than not. But after surviving a heart attack and a stroke in COVID-driven isolation, she returned home changed. The physical and cognitive limitations exhausted her, and living in that depleted state sapped her will to carry on.

When I visited for her birthday a few weeks before she died, she cried every day. Cried about the caregivers now offering round the clock support and about the fistful of pills she was meant to swallow with her breakfast. Cried when the words she sought wouldn’t come. Cried every morning, I would swear, when she discovered herself awake and still alive. As daybreak slipped between the heavy curtains in what had been my father’s room 12 years earlier, I’d hear the weeping coming over the baby monitor.

I’m crying most days now, too. Even if my reasons are different, the root of my sadness is still tied to being reminded, in so many ways, that love exacts a cost, and opting out isn’t actually an option. I’m doing what’s needed to maintain function. I’m damn lucky to be in a bright, beautiful relationship, to have family and friends who keep me from unraveling, to work with smart, sensitive colleagues. But my heart aches at the pain we people are capable of inflicting on each other and on this place we call home.

What brings me to tears, though, isn’t malevolence, it’s tenderness. Bearing witness to human and environmental destruction makes me angry. Self-sacrifice cracks me open with the merciful sound of someone setting down what they need to be sure someone else can keep going.

Ninety-four days ago, a group of Buddhist monks set out on foot from Fort Worth, Texas, bound for Washington, D.C. Pressing on through bitter cold and snow, they’ve passed through five states and are now entering Virginia. Alongside the promotion of compassion and non-violence, their aim is to ask that the Buddha’s birthday be recognized as a federal holiday. They travel with little more than their robes, their vows, and a rescue dog named Aloka.

Peace walks are not new, but this one is taking place in a different landscape than those in the past, amassing followers online and inspiring people to line the roads for miles to offer hats or flowers, to hold their hands in prayer, to shed tears. One of the monks, whose leg was amputated after he was struck by a vehicle, views the loss of his limb as an offering to the cause of peace.

All of this is unfolding as the country feels increasingly unrecognizable to me—violence justified by authority, a democracy splintering under pressure, and a resistance growing louder and more willing to risk itself.

Some have expressed a willingness to die for this cause, a fact I hold carefully, unsure how to both admire the devotion and grieve the necessity.

Mom’s piano, 2021

My mother’s life was as extraordinary as an ordinary life can be, composed of practiced gestures repeated until they became a kind of mastery, and her death, by most standards, was remarkable.

I’d had the pleasure of a video call just a few hours earlier, beaming myself into her family room two states away. It was my brother, his wife, and their then 17-year-old son who were by her side at the end.

As with most Sunday nights, they brought her over for dinner, this time plates of homemade lasagna, arugula salad, and crusty bread. For dessert, my brother offered her favorite flavor of ice cream. “I don’t believe I’ll have any tonight,” she said.

Minutes later, she was gone. Or at least her body was emptied of what we’d come to know as her.

Soon after, my young nephew would write of his profound experience:

While I sat in the dining room in disbelief, I remembered one of Tutu’s favorite things. [T]hough I’ve never taken a piano lesson…I moved to the next room and began to play the best that I knew how. A newfound talent fled into me at that moment. I plucked a made-up tune and let my downcast emotions speak through the notes on the piano.

To hear his parents tell it, what came out of his fingers that night, and persisted in the days to come, was an intensified ability to compose complex songs by ear. My mother spent the better part of her life at the piano, playing with skill, technical precision, and joy but never created original pieces.

January 26 was the birthday of a friend who died by suicide at the age of 38.

Renee Good would have turned 38 on April 2, Alex Pretti on November 9.

My mother would be 99 this December.

My nephew will be 23 in October.

I don’t want to presume what we’re meant to do for one another, or how much is too much to ask. I haven’t lived a life that has asked me for deep sacrifices. I only know that offerings beyond my comprehension are already being made and that I’m certain I can do more.

Peace is constructed from what we are willing to give, how we bear what is taken, and the refusal to bargain away our integrity at the table. If it’s built at all, the work is done by people who are ready to act and willing to go the distance without the comfort of certainty.

~Elizabeth

Thanks for reading. I’d love to learn more about how you remember the lives of people you love, or those you’ve lost. What anniversaries carry special meaning?

If this piece brought someone to mind, or if you’re wrestling with what it means to give more than you planned, bring it into the comments. This is a warm community, and it means so much to meet you there.

I’m also linking here to another piece about my mom, my inaugural Substack essay posted on 2/2/22. You might’ve noticed we called her “Tutu,” and that her birthday was December 22. The twenty-twos run deep in my family. But that’s another story.

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Afterward:

I’m including this section as a way to turn reflection into action, if you want. Each week, I’m sharing one small, concrete way to raise your voice, because sustained, visible engagement is one of the few levers we still have to influence the world around us.

Try this:

Make at least one call to an elected official about an issue you care about this week. If you’re in the U.S., use a tool like 5Calls to find your representative and a suggested script. Volume counts more than eloquence, one call can ripple into many, and it absolutely makes a difference!