Love is Louder

For reasons unknown to anyone in my family, my mother always kept a jar of dimes in her closet. Not quarters, or nickels, or the hodgepodge of change that ends up in pockets at the end of the day, but exclusively dimes. We lost her in 2016 before any of us got to ask her about them.

After she passed, I spent about a month back in Burleson, Texas with my dad and siblings, but there came a time when I had to return to my life in New York. We got to Dallas Lovefield for my departing flight, and for the first time ever, I was in an airport, motherless, and honestly not knowing how to live in a world where my mom no longer awaited my call to let her know I had landed back home safely. 

I sat next to my dad in the chairs as close to the security gate as possible so I could soak up as much time with my sole remaining parent before I absolutely had to leave to board my flight. 

It was then that a man walking by, stopped in front of us and picked up something off of the ground.  He set it on the window sill next to us. My dad thought it was odd and got up to see what it was. It was a dime. We decided it was my mother’s way of seeing me off at the airport just like she used to.

On my 40th birthday, the year after we lost her, I was especially aching for my mom. She’d always be the first to call me and I wondered what special bits of wisdom or encouragement she’d have for me on this milestone year. Of course there was no call. In an effort to bring me happiness, my boyfriend got tickets for Animal Adventure Park upstate so I could meet the internet famous giraffe, April and her much anticipated new offspring Tajiri. As we were standing in line, I caught a glimmer of something on the concrete. It was a dime, my mother wishing me happy birthday. 

Since that first dime, my family members and I have found countless others. Sometimes on significant occasions, other times like a little random hello. Sometimes I’m so thankful for these small signs from my mother, other times I’m just angry that these little ten cent pieces are all the communication I now have with the woman I’d talk to almost daily for hours on end about nothing and everything. 

There will be those who won’t believe these are signs from my mom, sometimes I wonder if I’m a grieving daughter just reaching. I’m not a woo-woo, seance-y type of person, perhaps if I were told the same story I might just smile politely to make the aggrieved feel heard. But loved ones reaching out after they’ve passed on is apparently not that uncommon.

I ran across this story of daughters getting a very clear message by way of cardinals. My boyfriend’s mother, Martha, also had a similar experience. Her mother passed after a long battle with dementia in April. Martha really doesn't knit often, but decided to use the different odds and ends of yarn she had to make a blanket. Then she went into her mom's knitting bag to see what she might have. Amongst the skeins of yarn she found a square of the exact same flower pattern that she was also working on! Out of the thousands of patterns, she chose that very same one and had left it behind with her yarn. The only reason my boyfriend’s mom was even making that pattern was because her friend had owned a blanket in that style and had taught her the stitch. She knew immediately it was her mother’s way of checking in on her. 

In the days and weeks immediately following my mother’s death I googled and read everything I could on how to get through grief. One of the things that helped me were the words of Cheryl Strayed. In her Dear Sugar column she responded to a man who had lost his son thusly: “Small things such as this have saved me: how much I love my mother—even after all these years. How powerfully I carry her within me. My grief is tremendous but my love is bigger. So is yours. You are not grieving your son’s death because his death was ugly and unfair. You’re grieving it because you loved him truly. The beauty in that is greater than the bitterness of his death.”

So when I ran across some graffiti on First Avenue that said,“Love is Louder” it was those words that came to mind. This year has brought so much loss, for so many, pandemic related and otherwise. Now that I know what true grief feels like, to see others experience it hurts my heart in a way it didn’t before. If you’re feeling that ache, my wish for you is this: whether you hear from your loved one in dimes, birds, squares of yarn, or whatever else, I hope you know it’s the love being louder.