Emily Dickinson and a Jar of Spaghetti Sauce

From Favorite Poems of Emily Dickinson #XXII:

The bustle in a house
The morning after death
Is solemnest of industries
Enacted upon earth, -

The sweeping up the heart,
And putting love away
We shall not want to use again
Until eternity.

I will participate in a worship service this week of remembrance and memorial for lost ones called a Blue Light Christmas. The leader of this event invited me to say or do whatever I felt was most appropriate for the setting. As I thought about my contribution to this service, I remembered this poem by Emily Dickson that addresses death and loss so simply and purely. 

It made me think of a moment in time when I took part in the solemnest of industries.

As my mother was dying, I was the strong daughter. I helped my father make the decision to move her to the hospital for her last days, comforted him and my sister, shared hospital vigil, helped with arrangements for her viewing at the funeral, cleaned out her closets, and reluctantly traveled the 100 miles back home to my own family, leaving my father alone to grieve the loss of his wife of 37 years.

I did all of those things, with strength and a “get-her dun” spirit, all the way, putting on a good face and bulldozing my way through it for my father and sister.  

It was almost six months later when I opened the cupboard door and took down a jar of spaghetti sauce that my mother canned the summer before from tomatoes in her own garden…

that is the summer before when she had not yet received her fatal diagnosis. 

That is the summer before…when she was still loving her grandchildren, still worrying about me and my family, and my sister, and my father, and was still full of life.

As I held the jar in my hand and thought of her, grief absolutely overwhelmed me. Grief like I had never felt before. That jar of spaghetti sauce was the last jar of sauce my mother made…perhaps the last jar SHE held in her hand… and she gave to me in a loving gesture of nurturing my family. 

I could almost feel her DNA on that jar like an electric impulse going through me. I literally collapsed to my knees in overpowering sorrow for the loss of her loving and thoughtful gestures. I couldn’t control my sobbing that went on for several hours. 

Then it was over. I too, swept up my heart and put my love away until I see her again in eternity.

And  life went on.