In honor of my mother, Trijntje Van Diepen
August 7, 1935 – Mar 3, 2023
It has been several weeks since the profound initiatory portal through which I have journeyed with Mom and her passing into Spirit.
I’m still integrating life without her. While I have pain because she’s no longer here in her physical body, her presence seems all the more real now, if that could be possible. I hadn’t expected that. Death had always felt so final to me. No more of the person that once was.
Now somehow I feel Mom’s presence in an even more intense way. I think about her every day. My journal is filled with writing, passages describing revelations I’ve had about my little Dutch born mother. One such discovery is how much she teaches me even now, in her death. I may be thinking, for example, about how disciplined my mother was towards my education. How she made me read to her every day before school from a young age. How she sat me at the table and helped me practice my letters. And drilled multiplication tables into me.
She valued books and learning as the focal point of my upbringing. She herself was a voracious reader. A few weeks before she passed she had given me a bag full of her favorite books. When I hold those books in my hands now I feel her energy radiating from within. It’s as if she is sharing her love of language with me from beyond the veil. The feeling of her presence is so strong it takes my breath away.
With my mother physically gone from my life, I am now liberated from who I thought she was to encompass more of the why of our soul union. I have a different and more expansive relationship with her. There are so many things I understand about her now that I didn’t before.
I have no desire to miss out on her meaning in my life.
Especially poignant and delicate is this Mother Daughter life and death dance as she, my mother, passes through the gates to the other side.
The process of living with, learning from and losing my mother is the deepest working of Love and Alchemy, a process I have been working on for some time. While I was in Hawaii last year I did my Mother Work, opening myself up to the Divine Feminine. Some of this work was gut wrenchingly hard because I allowed myself to look at the darkest parts of myself, parts that weren’t always understanding or kind in relation to my mother.
I made myself face these dark shadows, sitting in the quiet of the lanai of my little place with only birdsong and the wind for company. I saw myself for who I was and was not confused about what I knew to be true of me.
In my release I discovered my mother. My own work in relations to the Mother Daughter bond brought Light to her presence, light in the form of information, understanding, forgiveness and love on both our parts. She put her hand up for me, to take me as her child and all that involves in the raising of a person. It meant she had to tolerate my obstinance, my wreckless pushing ahead without thinking things through, my loud mouth, stubbornness and feisty temperament. She took me on as her child to raise no matter how hard that must have been at times.
When I could let myself love her as she was for who she was, a tremendous liberation filled my soul. Freedom. This was the taste of freedom. That’s when our time together became priceless to me. I wasn’t scared to let her go. I wanted her to be made whole when she crossed over as I knew she would be. Realizing this gave me tremendous peace in my heart.
In her final weeks of life, I was able to meet my mother where she was. One gloomy day in February, I climbed into bed with her, her weakening body so small against mine. I held her tight while we listened to Wayne Dyer’s I Am That I Am meditation. Together we would drift away into the subconscious mind where we could find peace, despite my mother knowing her end was near and I knowing that too. What courage she showed. How very brave and grace filled she was.
During one of these times, I shared a walking tour with her. It was in her native city where she was born – Delft in the Netherlands. As the narrator guided us on his tour on YouTube, through the historic streets of this thousand year old city, she delighted at what she saw. It was her home where she had been born and raised until her 18th year.
She lit up when she recognized the places of her youth. At one point the camera turned a street corner where my mother remembered walking so many years ago. She pointed excitedly at familiar sites like the market square where she would have bought fresh produce and flowers. She recounted the story of marrying my father when the camera panned the Old City Hall – Stadhuis Delft. She remembered the worn steps of the Apothek where she had been sent as a small child to do errands for her mother.
I could feel the love she had for that beautiful city. I ached with the knowledge that she would never visit it again. If any of you watched my TV series, Flexing at 49, you would have seen us there as the television crews followed us in that great city. It’s a time I will hold most dear in my heart.
This Sunday will be the first Mother’s Day without her. Already I can feel the tug at my heart that I feel a lot lately. She’s gone. The emptiness echoes throughout my days.
Mama I love you. I feel your presence around me as if it were a gentle yellow light. When I feel that light I know it’s you and I know I’m on the Sunny Side of the Street. Your favorite place to be. The place you said you went to when life became too hard.
Tosca
