Even Cherries for Sale Can Evoke Sorrow, and Sweetness

Sweet cherries are back in season. I saw a sale ad for them in the local newspaper back in my Connecticut hometown.

My mind flashed back to two years ago when I bought cherries almost every week at this time of year as spring heated up into summer, and I did the grocery shopping for Mom and me.

During cherry season the year before, I had bought a cherry pitter, a nifty kitchen gadget that deftly pops out the pit and leaves you with a perfectly pit-free orb of sweetness to savor. Mom thought it was the funniest thing, though we both loved the results.

Even an ad for cherries can be a trigger—or a reminder of sweet moments shared with a now-departed loved one. It’s still both for me, not yet two years since Mom’s death.

And her May 26 birthday is coming up fast on Wednesday. Another trigger, another reminder of shared sweetness, now gone.

I can mostly understand how someone with Mom’s health conditions, at 84 years old, could become ill enough to die. But I am still trying to understand—and to figure out for myself—what it means not to have Mom in the world, at least not visible to my seeing eyes. Sometimes it’s truly frightening to realize I am an orphan, as Dad left us 30 years before Mom did.

I came to see how much I depended, my entire life, on simply knowing Mom was there. Even when we lived hundreds of miles apart, as we did for many years, she was only a phone call away. That was more reassuring than I ever realized while she was alive.

Over the years I’ve thought a lot about what it means to “carry on” after a loved one is gone. I only have to look in the mirror to see a reflection of Mom’s face in my own; we were told regularly how much we looked alike. But I’m talking about the inside, in my heart and mind, my values, and how I treat others.

One of my regular little epiphanies revealed to me that I could keep Mom’s amazingly generous spirit alive in me by doing my best to share generously with others—as she did. I have never seen someone with so little in terms of material wealth share so very much as Mom did. No matter how tight things got for her at times, she always had enough to share—and share she did.

Mom taught me to be resilient by being resilient herself. Her educational techniques weren’t always the healthiest—shaming me as a little boy for being, well, a little boy who wasn’t at all prepared to be “the man of the house” at age 11 while Dad was incarcerated after a drunken-driving arrest.

But she modeled the very meaning of resilience by not letting herself be knocked down by the blows life inflicted on her. She swallowed her own pain and sorrow so she could keep moving forward, showing her children by doing so that sometimes being an adult means, first of all, needing to take care of vulnerable others who depend on you.

As I reflect on the sweet cherries for sale, and think about what her life would have been like if she had survived to now—likely undergoing treatment for lung cancer, highly vulnerable to COVID-19–I am calling strongly upon the resilience Mom taught me, that the tough times of my life reinforced, to focus on being grateful.

I’m grateful for all Mom taught me, all she modeled for me, about generosity and resilience. I’m grateful she was spared more suffering than she already experienced. And I’m grateful to see the sweet cherries once again for sale in the grocery store. They remind me of life’s cycles and seasons, and of life’s sweetest moments with someone I love and miss terribly.