A mother’s love never passes away

It was four years this Tuesday that my mother died. I used to say “passed away,” because it didn’t have the harsher finality of “died.”

To me, it was more as if she had simply transitioned to another place where, my faith teaches, I would see her again.

It is an embarrassing admission, but the most important reason I stay in my church and in my pew is because of that promise.

Eternal life is nice, as long as I get to spend it with Lucy.

But last year, I had an epiphany and stopped saying “passed away.” I realized that it wasn’t accurate to say she had left us that way, because it came to mean “moved away, passed out of sight and presence and memory, faded.”

That is so clearly the opposite of what has happened since her death on Aug. 8, 2014.

In that irony of life when the importance of things become clearer when they seemingly disappear from the immediacy of the day, my mother became, and continues to become more central to my life.

It is a tired and trite truism that we start to look like our parents as we age, but I am often shocked at how much my mother’s features have become grafted onto my own.

The pudginess of my teen years and early adulthood has given way to the sharp angles of Lucy’s cheekbones and jawline, and the stern line that her mouth settled into when she was angry about something (usually something involving me) has become the default position for my lips.

I don’t have her beauty, which was movie-star obvious, but I see her expressions when I frown, furrow my brow, laugh and chew on my inner cheek. DNA is powerful stuff.

So my mother, four years after she breathed her last labored breath and finally escaped from a body that had stopped working, is more present in me than ever.

I dream about her, talk to her, ask her advice and even her forgiveness when I mess up something that actually took an effort to mess up.

I think that every daughter will say the same thing, if she had a profound connection to her mother.

It is the single most important relationship of her life, as rocky as life along the San Andreas Fault and as constant as the change of seasons.

Lucy Fusco Flowers has not “passed away,” because I am here and so, then, is she.

Beyond the television shows and the food that bring her back to me (I swear that every time I eat a really good lasagna she’s hovering above my shoulder, judging …) there are people who serve as the treasured repository of memory.

Of course there is my own family, who have their private and personal memories of Lucy, but who share with me an unbroken, titanium bond of experience.

But there are also people who remember her, who lived alongside of her for years and who have memories that predate my own.

There is a woman I will always know as “Sister Cassie,” even though the Immaculate Heart nuns know her as “Sister John Christi.”

I grew up hearing about “Cass” from my mom, her best and dearest friend at their small Italian Parish, Our Lady of Angels, and classmate at West Catholic.

My mom and Sister Cass rarely saw each other after the latter entered the convent a few years before I was even born, but they were tied together by a deep and loving bond.

Ironically, a woman who I love very much, my friend Gloria, was a novice with Sister Cass before she left.

Today, Gloria is the widow of a man who loved her very much and gave her a beautiful daughter, a daughter who will make Gloria a grandmother this summer.

Gloria was my friend and my mother’s friend but, irony of the world, we never knew that she was also a dear friend of Sister Cassie until after my mother’s death.

It is like a chain, closing back on itself, all of these loves and lives and connections.

Tuesday was four years that Lucy has just been hanging out in another room, one I will visit one day, too.

Until then, I have so much to remind me of her.