There will be phone calls tomorrow, but not to her. There will be flowers given, but not to Marie. There will be meals eaten, glasses raised, stories shared, family loved and enjoyed -- but she will not be joining us at table.

That is simply unacceptable.

Acceptance is the beginning of the healing process, they say. It is not so much that I cannot accept that someone who has been in my thoughts every day of my 63 years is no longer here, as that I am simply unable to get it through my head. She went downhill slowly, over some years, and was clearly fading. It was not difficult to get used to the idea that she was going to die soon. In fact, toward the end I was rooting for her to go while she still had a little quality of life left. I was not in a hurry to lose her, but I wanted her to go with dignity and some semblance of comfort.

Thanks to some wonderful people, not the least of whom were my sister and older brother, she had that opportunity and took it. Intellectually, I can handle that perfectly well. Deep down inside of me, though, it is impossible to believe that I will not be seeing her reach up to hug me when I next visit, and the look of pure joy at seeing me. Me!

You see, largely because of my mother, her ability to discern what was important from what was not, and her ability to forgive, I have been able to put my life back together after years of chaos. Her joy at seeing me despite the many problems that I caused her over the years -- and they were both many and notable -- made it possible for me eventually to begin to feel some joy myself. Her faith in me gave me faith in me. She raised me from infancy into young manhood, and then over the last two decades of our lives she showed my by example how to be an adult.

She knew that resentment is a poison that we drink ourselves, that makes us miserable while we wait for the other person to die. She knew that forgiveness is as much (if not more) for the forgiver than for the forgiven. She knew that if you are wise you forgive the ones you love, because it takes too long to stop loving.

She knew that I did not share her religious faith, and that troubled her. She never spoke of it directly, but one day she opined that she figured god knew if people were living a good life, and she trusted him to do the right thing.

Then she smiled.

I would like to believe in life after death again, in heavenly rewards and being reunited with loved ones and friends. It was comforting. But it is what it is.

No matter...

I do believe -- I know this: no one really dies until the last person has forgotten about them. So she is still with us -- and she will be for a long, long time.

Happy Mother's Day!