10 Years

This weekend marked a rather important anniversary. It has been 10 years since my mother, Gail Marie Cornell Revell, left us and joined a long train of saints and ancestors. It does not seem right that ten years out, I should not mark the occasion, and remember what's brightest about her in my memory. So I will try, a little. But it's not easy; a blog entry seems kind of insubstantial.

My mom was the most buoyant, determined, active and healthy person I may ever know, (besides maybe Leah). Her underlying philosophy was (as it seemed to me) that you have to make your own happiness in this life. God gives us raw materials, but we have the responsibility to finish and refine them ourselves. She believed that we must not just wait for things, good and bad, to happen to us, but we must actively work to prevent undesirable things, and be equally active in going and GETTING desirable things in our lives.

My mom was ahead of her time in so many ways. She was working for social justice and for women's rights at a time when her church tradition was only beginning to involve itself in them. She was a feminist, of sorts, in a time and environment that did not particularly encourage a woman to speak her mind. She even liked Harry Potter books before I would lower myself to open one. She was a Christian with a deep and powerful faith, but she also had an open mind and a wise imagination, which is necessary to faith's continuance. She saw her God as being greater than politics, tradition, or social convention, and often took opposing viewpoints from that which was customary in her church tradition.



My mom was a warrior of words. She would talk to her friends and family for hours, and she could talk anything into existence. Just give her a firm place to stand and a working telephone, and she could move the earth. Whether it was a customer service number she'd dialed or a family member's, she'd bring it home on the telephone.

I wish I could tell her how much her work inspired me. Mom was ministering to urban kids and feeling out the Jesus People movement in college, and serving kids and their families as a pediatric nurse, later a pediatric nurse practitioner. She gave medical support and advice freely, and her research on breastfeeding was her master's thesis, which she wrote while working part time and parenting newborn me in 1982. Year after year, too, she worked to fundraise for Easter Seals. She did not merely hold down do a job or further a career; she served.

She had, I will acknowledge, several flaws. However, I do not choose to address them at this time, because it is too much work to remember them. I believe most of the flaws that I objected to most strongly had a great deal to do with her not being willing enough to humor or gratify my teenage whims, angst, and social anxiety. She didn't tend to care too much for nonsense.


Here I am, I think about 15 months old...

Ten years ago I was 19. I was unable to grasp what I was losing, or even accept that I was losing her until it was actually happening. I have become an adult without her, have married and am close to having my second child without her. And the only real philosophical conclusion I have come to is that this should not be.

Listening to The Fellowship of the Ring (kind of a fall tradition with me) lately, the song Bilbo sings before Frodo leaves him behind seemed like an apt meditation on mortality, on All Saints' Day, on leaving my mother behind. Someday we will all face a winter without a spring "that we shall ever see." Does our faith suffice to inform us that it will come, whether we see it or not? Mom's did.

...I sit beside the fire and think
of how the world will be
when winter comes without a spring
that I shall ever see.

For still there are so many things
that I have never seen:
in every wood in every spring
there is a different green.

I sit beside the fire and think
of people long ago,
and people who will see a world
that I shall never know.

But all the while I sit and think
of times there were before,
I listen for returning feet
and voices at the door.

-J.R.R. Tolkien