Signs in the Paint

Sometimes grief grabs you by the heart and squeezes so hard that love comes out. 

Five years after moving into this house, I finally painted the master bedroom. Last weekend I was crawling along the floor foot after tedious foot, cutting in where the baseboard meets the wall, splitting the long straight lines of white into two colors - like a before and after - when I stopped for a second to consider the moment. 

And I thought, I wish my mom could see me in this good life. 

Tears pricked my eyes and heavy sadness fell on me like a thick blanket. Grief is like that sometimes, sudden and blinding. I wanted to cry. I wanted to lay down right there, brush in hand, and dissolve into sleep. Most of all, I desperately wanted to see my mom and have her see me, so far from where I was when she left. 

The windows of the room were open, an unusually warm spring breeze drifting in. My husband was mowing. The man I moved 1200 miles to join, near family I had just met, in a state I hadn't fathomed. We're coming up on 15 years this fall. 

I could hear my daughter chattering and laughing as she sliced the air on our old wooden swing set. One of two children who I prayed and fought for, who nearly killed me to bring into the world, who insist on sitting on my lap for morning snuggles even though they're getting too big. Children my mother never met, though one shares her name.  

I could hear the lawnmower in the yard and smell the sweet, wet fragrance of fresh-cut grass in the sunshine. The yard backs up to acres of woods teeming with green leaves and skittish animals, and has a view of a sparkling pond where ducks and geese sometimes cool their webbed feet. We have a neighborhood to feel connected to others and just enough nature to connect us to God. 

I was layering paint onto the walls of my home, a beautiful colonial I could have only imagined as a child, moving in and out of cramped, derelict houses and trailers. I was almost 23 years old and in an apartment before I lived in a place where the walls were anything but white. Painting a room was an extravagant splurge well beyond my family's means. 

The color I applied is called Comfort Gray, a shade like the soft underside of clouds just after the sun sets. The name implies consolation and relief, but also contentment and reassurance. Like me, it's moody and complex. In some corners it looks like a storm, and in others it's a calm, muted gray-green-blue. 

The sudden overflow of appreciation for all I have, followed by piercing sorrow that my mother can't see it, combined with a paint named Comfort, planted the thought that perhaps - somehow - she knows.  

Maybe my mother is somewhere working on her own project - probably repotting plants or hanging a hummingbird feeder - when she feels that same squeeze on her heart, the same ache to stretch across eternity and reach me. Maybe she sits down and closes her eyes, and she's able to see my family, my home, my happiness, and me in the middle of it all. 

In an inversion of my mourning, she feels love. And so do I.