My mother died five years ago. On that day I lost my best friend.

What I didn’t expect is to rekindle her after all this time. While she has left, her spirit remains.

On summer nights, as the sun goes down and I sit outside on the patio, I can still hear her laugh. It makes me smile. It reminds me of simpler times when the only entertainment was being surrounded by green leaves, grass and hearing the crickets at night as we talked about whatever came to our minds.

On mornings when I wake up to rain and had planned to go for a long walk, I think of how a few showers and grey skies did not stop my mother. She said, “That is why we have raincoats.”  So out we would go in our raincoats for a run. We came home wet and damp, but smiling. There is something exhilarating about feeling the raindrops on my skin on a morning run. It had a charm all its own, one should try it sometime.

It was her unstoppable nature that I thought I had lost. My mother had this uncanny ability to turn obstacles into something silly and fun.

Now that time has passed I am starting to understand that I’m ready to do those things that I once only enjoyed with her. She is not gone—her spirit is very much alive in me.

It fosters a spontaneity almost a childlike impulse to laugh and play.

On those nights

Silence fell

I heard your laughter

Your favorite chair sat bare

Worn and unbroken

From nights we talked

Till morning was there

Then walked in the rain

Cried with the moon

But that spark was always there

Throughout tear drops

And black bat wing nights

We shined bright

Alone and with you beyond compare

When you left I thought I had died

 I was lost

Until I found my strengths, the ones

You left me

So I decided to laugh in the rain 

Cry with the sun

In remembrance of what you showed me

Love, without a care.

~

Author: Jane CoCo Cowles

Image: Author’s Own

Editor: Sara Kärpänen