{"id":94,"date":"2012-12-11T09:42:33","date_gmt":"2012-12-11T17:42:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nancymthurston.wordpress.com\/?p=94"},"modified":"2012-12-11T09:42:33","modified_gmt":"2012-12-11T17:42:33","slug":"winter-solstice-1986","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nancymthurston.com\/blog\/2012\/12\/11\/winter-solstice-1986\/","title":{"rendered":"Winter Solstice, 1986"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Sue<\/a>Twenty-six years ago, around midnight of December 21\/22, Mary Sue Tipps Mathys died. The woman who gave me the gift of life and mothered me so well, died at 60 years of age. This chapter from <\/i>Big Topics at Midnight tells about that holy night.\u00a0 <\/i><\/p>\n

Mom was a godsend. Despite her warning that she wasn\u2019t going to be one of those \u201cover-involved\u201d grandmothers\u2014since she had a full life of her own\u2014my parents\u2019 home became an oasis from the chaos of married student housing. Each month the four of us traveled ninety miles south for a visit. Mom carried infant Laura\u00a0around the house so Howard\u00a0and I could sit down to eat a meal. In the afternoons, Mom and four-year old Paul\u00a0went on \u201cGrand Adventures\u201d around town. They walked up and down Fisherman\u2019s Wharf, looking at the harbor seals and bags of sea shells for sale and went on regular visits to the Monterey\u00a0Bay Aquarium, stopping at the otter tank for the afternoon feeding.<\/p>\n

After Thanksgiving, Mom and Paul\u00a0decorated the first Christmas tree Laura\u00a0had ever seen. Mom\u2019s gruff exterior melted as she enjoyed the antics of her young grandchildren.<\/p>\n

That all came to a screeching halt around midnight of the winter solstice. The shrill phone woke me from a sound sleep.<\/p>\n

\u201cNancy, Mom\u2019s gone,\u201d Dad said.<\/p>\n

\u201cGone?\u201d I asked.\u00a0 \u201cWhat do you mean \u2018gone\u2019?\u201d<\/p>\n

Almost a month before Laura\u2019s first birthday, and three days before Christmas, my mother was dead. She was putting the last stitches on holiday decorations when her heart stopped beating.<\/p>\n

This woman who, thirty-two years earlier, had held me for nine months nestled under her heart, slipped out of her body on the darkest night of 1986. Paul\u00a0insisted on going to the funeral home to see her body. Standing at the edge of her coffin, he asked that I lift the lower half of the lid so he could make sure that she would leave this earth with the feet that had led the two of them on so many wonderful adventures.<\/p>\n

I held my full moon baby close to my broken heart as I ached for the loss of my own bright mamma during that dark season of grief.<\/p>\n

\"Mom's<\/a>
Mom’s drawing from the Christmas Card she mailed the week before she died.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Twenty-six years ago, around midnight of December 21\/22, Mary Sue Tipps Mathys died. The woman who gave me the gift of life and mothered me so well, died at 60 years of age. This chapter from Big Topics at Midnight tells about that holy night.\u00a0 Mom was a godsend. Despite her warning that she wasn\u2019t … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Winter Solstice, 1986”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-94","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gender","category-spirituality"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancymthurston.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancymthurston.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancymthurston.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancymthurston.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancymthurston.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nancymthurston.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancymthurston.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancymthurston.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancymthurston.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}