When A Mother's Love Loses Direction

When I write about a mother's love losing direction, I'm not talking about a mother's love for her children, I'm talking about her childrens' love for her. I just finished writing and publishing a post and then went on to visit my blogger friends, and I came to my friend Diana who wrote that she had just lost her Mom. Her mother had passed away in her sleep and Diana said she just felt sort of numb about the whole thing.

I remember that feeling well. I remember not really knowing how to feel, for I had never spent a moment on earth without my Mom here also. I could not wrap my mind around it. And I remember reading somewhere that losing your mother is losing so many 'firsts' as she was our first teacher, she was first to nourish us, first to comfort us, first to gaze on us, and she was the first face we gazed on. And once she's gone, so much of us goes with her.
Everything that our mother was here on earth, everything that our relationship with her entailed goes with her to Heaven.

And I still haven't found what to do with all the love. What do you do with all the love? We have different levels and different types of love for all the relationships in our life, you can't take the love you have for your spouse and direct it toward a friend, it's a different kind of love. And friendship loves are very different from the brotherly love we try to extend to even strangers. And you can't take the love you have for your mother and put it elsewhere, it's a love you have reserved for your mother alone, and she's gone. What do you do with all those feelings for her? What do you do with the love that's reserved for your mother alone?

I think that is the hardest part of losing anyone in life. You have all these feelings and all this love for each and every relationship in your life, and when you lose one of them there's nowhere to put that love anymore. It will always be directed at that void. Eventually you will stop looking for them when you hear the front door open, you will stop thinking that you might hear their voice on the other end of a phone ringing, you won't search for their face in the crowd, but you will always, always want to show them in some way that you love them and have them acknowledge that love and return it. No matter what anyone tells you, that is the hardest part of losing someone, for it is from this frustration that all other emotional problems arise when you lose a loved one.


Please pray for my friend Diana in this time of her great loss.

And for those of you who still have your Mom, that love you have for her, pour it out hundredfold.