It’s been five years since I last sat in this church. Sacre-Coeur: the literal sacred heart of Paris.  

The last time I passed through its hewn wooden doors, stretching toward the heavens, my mom had just died. It had only been a few days. Reeling from the loss and the emotional weight of the decision not to have a funeral, we kept a date with a nonrefundable trip to Paris. 

Finding myself at Sacre-Coeur shortly after, I said a prayer and lit a candle for her. I wondered if she was near me right then. I thought of lighting that candle as a remembrance: a way of leaving something of her behind though she was gone. Kind of like signing a guestbook. Except no one knew I’d done it but her and God. 

I was in Paris for the first time. And I was maybe the happiest and the saddest that I’d ever been. Witnessing her physical death a few days before had been colossally hard. I had caught a glimpse of her on that day that just didn’t translate into human terms. Even now, my human mind is still too small to give any shape to it. Being with a dying person makes human beings seem like very small containers that are packed so densely that we can only ever be aware of a fraction of what’s inside them. 

There was tremendous peace and privilege though, in seeing her life through to its very end. Reflecting on that helped me to get to a place where I no longer think of her as being taken from me. I more wonder why she was given to me at all. What were we supposed to learn from our time together? 

Sitting in that church pew last night, I realized that’s why I often write about her. Because the answer to that question never becomes clear enough when I speak the words. And because maybe I want to rephrase our lives together. To take it all in and give it back differently. So that everything is used and nothing is lost. Not like real life at all. 

I still don’t like to think too much about the last time I saw her alive. She was so barely alive. For a time, I worried I might only ever be able to remember her that way. Her feet already cold. Every breath sporadic and ragged. Instead, last night, I sat in the heart of Sacre-Coeur picturing her walking off into the horizon alone. And I thought about how the horizon isn’t the end of it all. It’s just the place where we lose sight of each other. 

But I also know that the finality of the death of one of the people who made you is an overwhelming and fluid and evolving revelation. And when it’s your mother — the woman who brought you through the veil of time itself — it’s entirely something else. 

They say that you come into the world alone and that you will leave it alone. But that’s not true. Your mother was there when you arrived. All your life you have known her — by touch and feel and the sound of her voice. Even with your eyes closed. So that when she’s gone, you’ll still recognize her — but now it’s forever by the shape of her absence. It makes you feel, on some days, that death has owned life all along.

In the five years since her death, I’ve tried to stop dwelling so much on the last time I saw my mother alive. I more often try to think of her when she was most alive. Walking up the driveway to greet me, fresh out of the flowerbed, a clump of weeds in one hand. Those summers when she ground up jar after jar of hotdog relish. Sitting with the kids and their storybooks when they were small. Making Christmas dinners. 

I realize now that love and the anticipation of her permanent absence from these kinds of future memories took me to some strange lands. We had watched her light dimming for so long. I eventually got lost in the doorway of an empty house. Memorizing the shadows I was waiting to mourn. Unknowingly mourning the whole time. 

But in that Paris church last night, where I had said a prayer of good-bye — five years and one month before — I sat remembering the house when it was home. 

Full of spirit. 

Full of beauty. And pain. And love. And the hard things. 

Electric with life. 

There are moments, even in a church with hundreds of people milling about, when a kind of clarity comes over you, and suddenly you can see through walls to another dimension that you’d forgotten. Or, that you’d chosen to ignore in order to continue living with the various illusions that make life, without someone you love, possible. 

And that’s when she comes to you. In a whisper. And you find yourself wondering if anyone else heard her right then when she said: “My absence is your classroom, you know.”