COLUMN: Before and after the Mess

For three glorious seconds after I open my eyes, I am soft, malleable clay. I am blissfully tender. I am living in “The Before”.

I feel confident that my mom, Lori, is at home wearing her trademark plaid shirt, hunched over her computer finishing a story that was due the night before. She’s sipping coffee that’s gone cold, and later today she’s going to fill my messages with photos without context. A selfie with a llama. A squinty-eyed smile next to the mayor. An old picture she uncovered during a late-night scroll featuring a lost loved one wrapped in her arms.

For three seconds life feels simple. Everyone I love is within reach. I am fearless because I am clothed in the armour she made for me. If I fall, I know that her net stretches far and wide beneath my feet.

I begin making a list in my head of the groceries I need to buy, the dishes I need to wash, and the mess I need to tidy, because the responsibilities of an ordinary life are the worst of my sorrows.

Then, the fog of sleep clears. As I catch my breath and my heart hardens in my chest I know exactly where I am.

I’m in “The After.” And three seconds doesn’t feel like enough.

Only three seconds for me to understand the trembling message on my voicemail that Sunday afternoon: “Mom had a stroke. The doctors say she won’t recover.”

Only three hours for her to lose her beautiful voice, which she used to speak our names and utter words of love as she gripped our hands fiercely in hers.

Only three days for her to take her final breath, with her children and partner huddled closely by her side, filling the room with declarations of love and songs of praise.

It is no small agony for a daughter to lose her mother, and my mom understood that better than most. When my grandmother died, I watched the transformation from a distance as my mom’s tender clay heart was thrust into the sweltering kiln of grief. I worried for her, that she might crack or crumble, or disappear entirely in the fire.

But the flames settled with time, and when she emerged she was still my mom, but also something more. It was as though she was seeing the world through new eyes, stepping over obstacles none of us could see, and fluent in a language we’d never heard before.

In her longing, she found divine purpose. She channeled her heartache into her writing, with stories that gently guided us along our own grief-laden paths. When she spoke of her suffering, we heard echoes of our own, and in her words of hope we found healing. No matter how dark the path, we were never beyond the reach of the light.

Her stories were about the beauty in that sacred balance. Between struggle and success, her perspective from that holy middle ground brought us comfort and encouragement.

And now it is my turn to step out of the fires of love and loss. I am here, in “The After”, while my mom has gone farther still, to the “Sweet Hereafter”. And somehow, even without the comforts of before, I am moving forward.

As I step over boxes of her things and weave around the clutter in my house—and my heart—it is the spaces between the chaos and the calm where my feet now find their solid, sacred ground. She continues to show me that there’s beauty in the balance, and that a meaningful life is almost always a messy one.

I will miss her every day for the rest of my life, and that grief is a mess. But our stories are in the mess. There is hope in the mess.

And if there’s hope, I don’t mind it at all.

Holly Gilson is Lori Penner’s daughter. Penner, the author of the long-running Don’t Mind the Mess column, died June 25 at the age of 59.