"Wouldn't you be upset if you didn't see your mom for six hours?"

That question was put to me by a distraught Valerie when she was about 5 years old and had been taken to the beach by our neighbor Kevin Holland. For reasons lost to me now, they ended up being gone for quite a while longer than planned. It was dark when they got home, and even though Valerie knew Kevin and played with his son Mason all the time, she was upset and tearful.

The question is sweet in it's naivete and a window into a child's perception of time and space (I think my mother lived in Seabeck, Washington at the time) but today it really resonates in my heart. I've come to understand something lately, and that is the perception of our mother's presence. I didn't talk to my mother every day, or even every week. Several months would go by between visits. Neither my mom or I are phone chit-chatters. She didn't like her soap viewing time interrupted or calls at night after 7pm. She never learned to use e-mail. But somewhere, somehow inside of me there must have been a constant surrounding sense of her presence because now that it's gone, I feel the pain and emptiness that something very large and long that was there is not there anymore and really, I think I feel like Valerie did when it was late and dark and she was in unfamiliar surroundings and she couldn't reach out and touch me and she really didn't know where I was. I know I can't touch my mom anymore. I can't see her face again. It's dark and I don't really know where she is.

If there is a Heaven I know my mother is there. If there is a Heaven I would like to think I would go there too so I could see my mom again (and my dad, stepdad, grandparents (known to me and not known to me)well I guess everyone who has died before me that I've been curious about. But, I am still here on earth and I know religion is an abstraction I have struggled to come to terms with. I hope I see her again, but the pain is sharp now. Do other people feel as if their lost loved one should just be coming back home now after all the funeral distraction stuff is gone and silence is the only thing murmuring in my mind? I think I hear the creaking of the door! Is it my mom? I think I'll leave that question open for now.