My First Mother's Day as a Widower

This year as I think about the upcoming Sunday (07 May 2022) I do so with a heavy heart. It is the first time in more than 50 years that I have not had the mother of my children sitting at my side as we celebrate our mothers. 

Mother's Day is the perfect occasion for a husband to tell his wife just how wonderful she is as a mother. Unfortunately for me and others like me it is a time of remembering just how wonderful a mother she was. 

So, as I sit here anticipating my first Mother’s Day as a widower, I’m overwhelmed with emotions.  There really are no words to adequately express the feelings that are running through me. When the person with whom you created life with has died, this day is most certainly a complicated package of feelings.

I want to shout, yell and holler from the rooftops and say, “You see how great a mom Susan was.” Look how our children turned out . . . . that was her doing!  I want to remind them that it is hard work being a mom especially as a pastor’s wife. I want to take out a newspaper ad that tells everyone how even when Susan was exhausted she persevered and then she’d get up the next day an do it all over again. I want to tell her that I am proud of her and the work she does to ensure our gang of four (if you include me that would be gang of five), not only survived, but thrived. I’m so proud of the mothering she did. Her strength, resilience and humor is shows up in all our lives. I want to tell her one more time, “Sweetheart you are not like the Proverbs 31 woman you ARE that woman.” 

I want to do all those things and more to honor the woman who was the beat of my heart. But (don’t you just love that word “but”) as much as I want to honor her even though she is not here for the first time in more than fifty years, I am filled with crushing sadness and piercing loneliness.  I have life partner into whose eyes I can look and say something hokey like, “You really are the greatest mother that ever lived.” She seemed to love hearing it as much as I loved saying it to her. 

I remember shortly before Susan and I married we were talking about what we wanted to be in life. It was easy for me because God had already laid a claim on my life and called me to preach. We both already knew about me. When I asked her about what she wanted out of life she replied in her own self-effacing way, “All I have ever wanted to be is a wife and mother.”

On December 23, 1966 she became a wife as we pledged our mutual commitments to live together as husband and wife and then on June 25, 1969 she became a mother. Four times during our marriage she walked through the valley of the shadow of death to give birth to our children. 

For the rest of her life she lived her dream. I’d just like to be able to tell her one more time just how great a mom she was.