My Cause to Celebrate a Life

When I named my business “Cause to Celebrate,” it was for many reasons, among them being the decision to start my business following the passing of my mother. I was inspired by our relationship and the many turns it took over many years, that found its way to a deep friendship and understanding. Being so much like my mother in many ways, my relationship with her often reflected my relationship with myself. The more grace I could offer myself in the course of life’s discovery, the more appreciation I had for her in my life. The more I appreciated about her, the more I could begin to appreciate about myself. In celebrating her life, I pushed myself to do things I know that she too would have loved the opportunity to do in her life. It’s like our friendship gave me the license and the freedom to be my true self in every way, and while It has been a difficult path, it’s a truly joyful experience ever since I started this business. There’s no better why to celebrate a life – hers and mine.

My mother was a woman of true conviction. She often refused to stay silent about things that bothered her. My mother wasn’t right about everything, and she didn’t always make things better when she spoke her mind. I argued with her a lot (a LOT) but I never questioned her intent. She believed in the healing power of truth and everything she spoke about came from a place of seeking what was right and just in this world. My mother also fearlessly protected her children, even when she disapproved of something. She would have thrown herself in front of a bus for any one of us at any time no matter what. That’s a very powerful force to have in your life, one that needs to be understood for what it gives you and also what it can take away from you if you’re not careful. When you have a relationship like that in your life, you run the risk of being careless with other relationships that don’t match up to that. You run the risk of isolation from other relationships that seem to pale in comparison, you run the risk of being controlled by the whims or the memory of your most loving parent. It can also fuel conflict when those who love you feel as though they have to compete with the power of that unconditional love.

So I think of my mother today as I mourn the loss of my niece to suicide. The first of many grandchildren, my mother loved her and adored her as we all did. My parents cared for her a great deal at our home while I was growing up. We were separated by only eight years, so in some ways she was like a younger sibling (who was also the first grandchild, so you can imagine the initial anxiety and jealousy that came with that at times). She was every bit like my mother in so many ways; lovely, strong-willed, smart, talented and very passionate. Like her grandmother before her, it was clear from any early age that she would go down swinging in any cage match to prove herself right (even if she wasn’t).

I can’t pretend to know what it was that eventually brought my niece down. I won’t share identifiable information about her, mostly because I didn’t know much about this spunky little girl in her adult life. It’s too long of a story for this post to share my perspective on how this came to be, but I can see how observable dynamics in her life (two separated families with their own issues, coupled with mental health struggles) didn’t help. And sadly, the absence of my deceased mother from her obituary speaks volumes about those living dynamics among her surviving relatives.

So perhaps in seeing my mother in myself and my niece, the right-fighter in me wants to speak truth to power. In this case, it’s the power of truth itself, the power to name and define others, the power to marginalize and erase, the power to heal and the power to forgive – and the ultimate power of love, in the presence of which we still must choose either conflict or reconciliation. In doing so, the speaking becomes more like a prayer, a prayer to accept truth and in doing so, seek to understand ourselves and others in our complicated glory. A prayer for life itself.