TODAY is the second anniversary of my mother’s death. I remember her sadly and also with happiness for her full life. She was an energetic and talented woman, whom I discussed in posts here and here.

No one is more powerful than a mother. I could not believe anything else, given the influence of my own mother. No one is more powerful than a mother because the human soul is immortal while things of this world — works of art, scientific advances, buildings and politics — are not lasting.

Below is one of my mother’s favorite songs, the popular version of Somewhere over the Rainbow by the late Israel Kaʻanoʻi Kamakawiwoʻole, a Hawaiian singer who loved his own people intensely.

I was fortunate to go to Hawaii with my parents, husband and children in 2005.

One day while we were in Kauai, I was walking on the beach with my husband. It was a crowded little rocky beach with many people in the water with its famously unpredictable currents. I looked out into the ocean and saw a familiar figure about 70 feet from the shoreline. I would always recognize my mother’s crawl stroke. I said to my husband, “Is that my mother? She is struggling! She can’t get back in!”

My husband said, “I’m sure she’s fine.”

I said, “No she’s not fine. She’s struggling!”

No one else could possibly have recognized, not even the lifeguard, that she was having difficulty. I knew from having seen her swim many times that she didn’t have the strength to stroke the water that vigorously and for that long.

She was trapped in a rip tide but was so busy frantically stroking that she couldn’t wave for help. I ran to the lifeguard, breathless and shaking. “My mother is in the water and she can’t get back in!” He took far too long but he hopped on one those jet skis they used for rescues and rode up to her. A few minutes longer and I am sure she would have started to sink. She held on somehow and he dumped her right by the beach. She was completely spent.

I had been right. She couldn’t get out of the current.

Just the day before, an elderly man had drowned on a nearby beach. I will always remember the happy day I possibly saved my mother’s life. What could be more special for a child than to give something in return?

— Comments —

Edgar writes:

My mother was an English war bride, 18 years old. My father was a captain, Canadian Artillery stationed on the south coast of England. They married in ’44 and she came to Canada alone, 6 months pregnant, to stay with my father’s family in Quebec; I was born in January ’45.

We moved into our brand-new house at 425 Walnut in 1950. The street was unpaved, the milkman came with a horse and Riverside Drive was beside the river, not a 6 lane expressway as it is today.

She had a stroke 20 months ago which left her lucid but paralyzed right side. Her clarity of mind was perhaps a curse as well as a blessing.

From her room on the 5th floor of the residence 2 minutes away, through the treetops she could almost see her home where she cooked Christmas dinner for us every year for 67 years.

She was a classic old-style Englishwoman. Cheerful, gentle, polite; she always made the best of things. She did not have an easy time of it for the last year; she paid the price many times over and earned her place in heaven. She died on October 2nd.

She never complained and she understood why she was in the residence but she always wanted to go home.

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