As a teenager, my parents’ divorce and remarriages reconstructed all the extended family dynamics. Cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents on both sides of the family lost a family member. We went from always sharing Thanksgiving with one particular set of cousins to sharing the day divided between two homes, sometimes with new family friends at the table. Blended families create new webs of extended family connection. For some that’s good news. For others it messes with that warm, fuzzy, dependable sense of home and homecoming.

For me all this extra family and the new way we spent holiday and vacation time meant less time spent with cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents.

But in that loss I was given a gift.

In a series of years when our beloved elders died, Mom had a habit of asking me to travel with her to attend the funerals and to be there far enough in advance and after to be of service and share in the intimacy of remembering and collecting remembrances. Because of those women who said, “Come and help yourselves to whatever you’d like to remember me by,” I have sacred memories of two and three generations of women going through clothes, trinkets, and knick-knacks, telling stories punctuated by, “Here, you should have this,” or, “Would you like that?” No competition, jealousy, or greed, just love shared through remembering and gathering remembrances.

Lately I’ve wondered if these end-of-life rituals Mom and I shared have assisted my grieving the physical loss of her.

When I wear one of her butterfly pins or a piece of clothing that was hers, or admire some of her art work that I took to hang on my walls, I sometimes ask if I have a right to these things. But then I remember the spirit with which we gently chose some of Big Mama’s, Dear’s, and BeBe’s things and I know I handle her things and my choice of them with the same care and love of the person who once owned them that she and I expressed forty years ago.

I have had the very good fortune of remembering her more and more as she was when she was younger and vital: her laughter, her sense of humor, her sense of style, her care and concern for others, and I am so very grateful.

Mom and I shared the intimacy of the death and loss of the women in our family who came before us. It is one of the threads that binds us even now.

Death changes a relationship. It doesn’t end it.

I love you, Mom! And I am and ever will be grateful that you are mine.