A poem as prayer for Mother.

Blood is thicker than water.
It has of’t been said.

I’m off to see my mother
lying in the Intensive Care Unit
of a hospital where

I might have been born
except it wasn’t where
immigrants bore their children.

That was a place for the rich
the established.
the ‘landed gentry’.

Which we were, decidedly, not.

I am off on a quest
not seek an answer
to a question,
but to answer
the questions she has
with the truth of my life

I am off to tell my mother
what I need to say to her
before she dies.

To offer forgiveness
to bring true repentance
and amendment of ways.

To carry on the family legacy
of telling secrets
and ‘the truth’, as I know it,
buried deep in my heart.

I have freed myself of the need
to hear her response,
whatever it may be.

I have learned the lessons
this life has brought me.
She has learned the lessons
of her own life.

Buried deep in my heart
I know the truth.

Buried deep in my heart,
I hold the secret.

Blood is thicker than water.

And, blood is what binds us,
She to me and I to her.

Forever.

(With grateful thanksgiving to my Chief Pastor, Mark Beckwith, who provided a clarifying conversation while in his car, on his cell phone, on his way to Philadelphia.)

Sunday afternoon update: Mother went into septic shock in the middle of the night and was transferred to ICU. She was started on a new antibiotic and when my sister went in to see her at noon, Mother was sitting up in bed, eating a light lunch. A born fighter with stubbornness deeply imbedded in her DNA, she has rallied once again. I'm awaiting a call from one of my daughters who is out of the country to determine when it is I drive up to see her.

Thank you all for keeping this vigil of prayer with me. It is good to watch and wait with 'ye watchers and ye holy ones'. Alleluia! (Whatever is it that people do, in times like these, who don't have communities of prayer to support and sustain them?)