No Soup for You!

There are moments that suspend you in time where the gravity of a situation, no matter how hard you’ve been trying to keep it at bay, will hit you with a thud. As you know my mom has a terminal illness and these past months have been a stretch for all of us just trying to adjust to the fact that she is on that slippery slope of decline. True to the nature of who I am, I’ve been managing things by mostly staying on the river of denial with both ores in the water just to keep myself together and be present for her while she comes to terms with a reality that is growing ever more difficult. One of the major struggles is how she keeps forgetting that she can no longer do so many things that once made their way into her life daily. One of the things I miss the most is her cooking which became most apparent in recent exchange.

 

The day had started in its typical way with me helping mom get dressed and then back into bed which at the time she was bed ridden. Mom talks a lot about things that didn’t happen and my part in our conversations are to agree with her and pretend that the unreal is real. On that particular day she had begun to tell me that she went to the store to get the ingredients to make my favorite soup. Extremely important side note, I am a soup Nazi! I could eat soup morning, noon and night and never grow tired of it and my all-time favorite soup had been one of the ones my mom would make. Even though she gave me the recipe long before she got sick; I’ve never been able to duplicate the taste of her soup. When mom told me she was going to make my soup I was simply going to acknowledge what she said and then distract her with asking questions about other things she’s interested in but when her words landed in my mind my heart stood at attention. So fast and loud did her words hit me that it created a traffic jam in my throat as I realized that I would never have her soup again. That was the snag that began to unravel me! That one realization brought the gravity of where my relationship was with my mom now and how it will never be the same.

 

It’s just soup but in that moment it became the bookmark of when I lost who my mom used to be. There will be no more sharing of my life with her like I once did. Mom cannot participate or even remember from each visit to the next what was said and her attention span has been cut to mere minutes before she starts to repeat herself. I’ll never walk into her home and smell my favorite soup on her stove and turn the corner to her kitchen to see her smiling, knowing, that she had made my day. She slipped away in the hands of a stroke when I wasn’t looking.

 

With losing so much of my mom over these months I’ve learned to value my conversations much more. It has become very important to me to follow through with actions from the heart when I feel prompted to encourage or support others. There is a silent deepening of the music called my life and with each new note I hear, the clearer my intentions of being a greater version of myself are. I've grown so much this year and soup is still my all-time favorite food but even more than that it has become a sacred reminder to be present when in the presence of others. If you're out to eat with me and I order soup, it's because I'm reminding myself of how special your company is to me and I'm wanting to stay in the moment. 

Mona McPherson