My dentist is still in the neighbourhood where I grew up, so three times a year I make the trek there for my regular check-ups. On my way to an appointment last week, I was waiting at a traffic light, looking up a hill where one of my mother’s “bridge ladies” lived. When we moved across Canada to our new home on the West Coast my Mum wasted no time in finding ways to become part of the community. She joined the Newcomers’ Club pronto and became part of a group of women who were all recent arrivals looking for friendship. They met every week to play bridge for the next 40+ years.
As I sat looking up that hill, I remembered how, as a young teenager, I used to feel dazzled when I’d look at the mountainside and see the very visible condominium where bridge lady Pam lived. “Up there” was where the rich people lived, and it seemed to me this was true since she looked so glamorous and elegant whenever I saw her. Thinking about this as I waited for the light to change, I felt a certain sweetness for myself and how in my naivete I created a fairy tale like filter for this tiny part of my world. My mind then shifted to the fine bone china teacups my mother brought out every time it was her turn to host. The red light changed to green and I turned left and headed down to the ocean, leaving the mountains behind me.
While I drove, I thought of how excruciatingly carefully I’d chosen six cups from her collection. I thought of the gift boxes I’d sourced from somewhere, just the right size because too big or small would not do. I thought about how I’d wrapped each cup and its saucer in crisp white tissue paper and reverently placed them in their boxes. I had tasteful labels made and tied equally tasteful ribbon around the sealed boxes. Somehow I carried out the delivery, making sure not to damage the contents or put a single blemish on the packaging. It surprised me that I had no memory of dropping off any of them, but I know I did. After my mother died, one by one I went to their homes and gave a teacup to each of the remaining ladies in her bridge group.
I noticed that feeling of sweetness I’d felt for myself had intensified after recalling these memories. Now many decades on from my youth and into the second decade since the delivery of the teacups, I could look back at this whole story with compassion for the innocent teenage newcomer who looked up the hill and felt a sense of awe, and for the grieving adult finding ways to temper a seemingly insurmountable loss. I could see clearly that I had carried out a ritual of farewell to my mother in an attempt to assimilate her absence into my new reality. At the time it seemed like nothing more than a nice thing to do.
Healing happens over the course of time and continues as long as it needs to, sometimes forever. With time comes the clarity of seeing the world constantly renewed as the fog of grief dissipates more and more. That’s how it is that these memories could now make me chuckle as I headed towards my dentist’s office. The bridge ladies were my mother’s contemporaries and would all have been in their 80’s or somewhere in their 90’s when they received the cups. Undoubtedly they were touched by the gesture, but there’s a high probability they did not want or need one rogue teacup. They would have all have died now and who knows where any of those precious tokens ended up. It doesn’t matter. What mattered was going through the ritual. That’s what allowed a little bit of healing to happen.
Lately I’ve been on a mission to clear things out of my living space that I do not use or, for that matter, even look at anymore. Into that category falls the Rubbermaid bin in my closet where my mother’s teacups and various other artifacts from her life have been stored. It hasn’t seen the light of day since I put it there. This made me chuckle even more, in a sweet, compassionate way absent of judgment and full of the peace of wisdom gathered over time. The gifting of teacups to a group of my mother’s gracious friends seemed terribly important at the time, but the real gift is the healing that came out of it and the understanding from lived experience that it’s the ritual that counts.
