Imagine that the best thing you can do for your child is to give him or her over to strangers who don’t even speak your language. These strangers will take your child to a faraway country for an unknown length of time. Imagine that your child may die if you don’t.

Maternal instinct in action is a heartbreaking thing.

I flew to the Dominican Republic with a small number of American volunteers from Healing the Children Mid-Atlantic, a charity that brings poor children to the United States for medical care. We were to pick up thirty-seven kids and bring them back to our country. Some of these children were amputees and some had clubbed feet. Others were burn victims or had hematoma birthmarks on their faces. Some of the children had spina bifida and one was born without eyes. And yet, with our help and the help of the volunteer doctors, surgeons, and nurses waiting for us back in the States, these children would be able to lead close to normal lives. We were doing a good thing for these children.

I was moved by the reactions of the mothers who chose to entrust their children to us for healing. The mothers understood. They all volunteered their children for this trip, knowing that American medical care would either save their children’s lives or make their children’s lives happier. The clinics at which they were treated in the Dominican Republic recommended Healing the Children and their doctors vouched for us. Our nurses were old friends of these local doctors by now, and they joked and laughed in simple English, touching each other with familiarity as the Dominican parents and children prepared for the voyage. Seeing this must have been reassuring.

Still...I couldn’t fathom how difficult it must be to give a child over to a complete stranger (who doesn’t speak your language) to be taken to a strange country for an undetermined length of time.

I smiled to the mothers as best I could and made their children laugh. A boy in a straw hat and I played peekaboo under a clinic table. The smaller children liked to see how many kids could fit in a single wheelchair.

My own mother, a nurse and organizer, was on this trip. She waved to a boy’s mother, pointed to me, and cradled her arms as though she were holding a baby. “That’s my baby.” The Dominican woman understood, and she looked pleased and relieved. They were, for a moment, two mothers who wanted what’s best for their children.

I didn’t let myself cry. I had work to do, making sure the children got to where they were supposed to be and taking pictures of the whole event.
One mother stays in my mind. She was young, only in her teens, and her sister was holding the baby when I first saw her. The baby had a birthmark on her face, growing slowly and starting to encroach over one eye. Laser surgery would stop the growth and remove the mark. I would learn on the three-hour flight back to New York that this baby had an extremely healthy set of lungs.

The mother was pretty. Her shoulders shook a little as she tried not to cry. One of our volunteers spoke a little Spanish and tried speaking with her. I took a quick photograph of her grief. When I developed my film, I decided the moment was too private, too sad to share.

She knew the best thing for her child was to send her off with strangers to be healed, but mothers by nature want to keep their children close to their bodies, to protect them. I greatly respected these women who entrusted their babies to us. We won’t let them down.

Just when life throws a curve, something comes along to smooth the way...

I was busy doing the “everlasting” chores around the house, when Jim, my husband, came ambling in the back door. He had been retired for nearly three years—a forced medical retirement that he hated. We were trying to exist on a meager retirement and disability settlement, and both of us had been pretty much down in the dumps lately.

“Look what I found when I was digging around those back flower beds at the kids’ house.”

My divorced son and single daughter lived next door to us in my mother’s house. Mom had been gone nearly two years and Jim had been piddling around trying to clean up around both houses.

I met him in the hall and he handed me a small button. I looked at the button and memories flooded my mind as I smiled.

“Recognize it?” he asked.

“I sure do, but I haven’t seen or thought about these buttons in over forty years. Where did you find it?”

“I was cleaning out the side yard up at the little house and dug it up. Pretty little button too. I thought maybe it was yours.”

I pushed him ahead of me into the kitchen and poured us some tea.

“Is it a tea-drinking story?”

“Milk drinking would probably be more like it. This button and its mates were on a blouse of mine I made for a home economics project in the ninth grade.”

“Ninth grade!” He sputtered. “That would have made you about fourteen, right?”

My mind flew back over the years as I turned the little pearly button over in my hand. My mother’s voice came back as clearly as if it had been yesterday.

“Dorothy, this is a piece of material I’ve had left over from something and we can’t afford another piece for your project right now.”

“But Mama,” I whined. “It’s really ugly.” I screwed up my face looking at the plain, gray cloth.

My mother sighed. “It’s not ugly. It’s perfectly good polished cotton and it just happens to be gray. It’s enough to make a blouse and it will go with anything, being this color.”

“Ugh,” I said, and took the material. It was soft and it did have a sort of sheen to it.

“And besides, you can get a card of buttons to spruce it up,” she added, as she left the room.

I didn’t balk anymore. I knew she didn’t have the money for any more cloth. My father had died a year ago and we lived on a meager check. After the essentials, there was little left for even home ec projects.

I got my bike out of the shed (we didn’t own a car) and headed toward town with a whole quarter to spend for a card of buttons to match my cloth. Silver gray, I had dubbed the soft piece of material. I just knew my friends and even the teacher would just hoot at this gray mess.

I parked in front of the general store in town and went in.

“I need some buttons, Mrs. Florence, to help spruce up this piece of drab material.”

“Depends on what you might want to wear it with, Honey. You can use plain or fancy or whatever. What do you plan to wear your blouse with?”

Another customer came in and she left me to spin the button rack and select my choice. I looked at every button on the rack, and just as I was about to give up, a card flip-flopped into view. I instantly knew these were my buttons. They were pearly looking with tiny, wavey stripes covering them. The stripes were several shades of blue, a tiny red one, green, orange, and a teeny one of purple on a gray background—perfect for the polished, gray cotton material.

Mrs. Florence came up behind me. “Found some, did you?”

I held up the little card of buttons against the cloth.

“Perfect,” she said. “Now you can wear the blouse with just about anything.”

I paid for the buttons and rode home, happy to know my plain old blouse would be dressed up a bit. The next day in home ec class, my teacher praised my decision—something to match a lot of other things.

Over the time I wore that blouse, I matched it with a purple velvet skirt, a hand-me-down from a cousin, a red jumper (another home ec project), and several other skirts that stretched over numerous petticoats of the fifties.

My husband finished his tea, still smiling. “I can’t believe the button was in that dirt. How do you suppose it got there?”

“Who in the world knows,” I answered. “I don’t remember what happened to the blouse—maybe Mama threw it away or maybe a button fell off and got swept out.”

He laughed. “Now that’s a blast from the past.” He went back outside, still smiling. Although he was the one who was disabled, he seemed to be handling this situation better than I was.

I picked up the little button and twirled it between my fingers. It was still a pretty little thing and I remember pricked fingers trying to get them on the blouse. Suddenly, I thought of something. I went to my bookcase, pulled out an old yearbook, and turned to the ninth grade. Sure enough, there was a picture of a fifteen-year-old girl with a gray blouse and red jumper smiling at me. I had not thought about that picture in years. I could barely make out the little buttons, but I knew they were there.

Somehow that gray blouse was pretty much like my life back then, rather bleak and gray, no money to speak of, but the smiling girl in that picture did not seem to mind. She was young, rather pretty, and had her whole life ahead of her. At that point in time, it took very little to brighten up a gray life, just as the buttons spruced up that blouse. I put the yearbook back with tears in my eyes.

I had not been that carefree girl in almost forty years. I had seen both bad and good times, and things had looked rather “gray” lately. I looked out the window at my husband bent over some project he was working on and thought to myself. I guess he was one of the “buttons” that brightened up my life over thirty years ago, and my three “buttons” we had raised were a joy to me. Now we had three grandchildren who were also “buttons” of joy.

The little button suddenly seemed to burn my palm. It was trying to tell me something. Was that why Jim had found it? Why, after all these years, would this little button suddenly come to the surface of forty years of dirt?

What on earth had been the matter with me lately? I was usually a person of optimism with a sunny personality, the whole nine yards. I had let the gray cloth of life get to me. Life has a way of turning things into gray and bleak material at times, and everyone needs the bright “buttons of life” to bring back the good things.

Life is way too short to spend it in a gray mood. I remembered how little it took to make that blouse a lovely piece of clothing. I took the little button and put it in a special place in my jewelry box. Now every time I look at it, I remember to look for the “buttons.” After all, they are what makes the sometimes gray material of life wearable and bearable.

Jaimie, my three year old, is my miracle. She hasn’t had the easiest start to life—she struggles every day trying to cope in an environment continually causing her pain, but not being able to tell us why. She lives with sensory integration dysfunction (SID); Jaimie isn’t able to process sensory information properly. Most people have a natural ability to tune out unnecessary things so they can focus. Jaimie doesn’t have this filtering ability, so when her sensory organs receive information, she gets everything.

As a parent, the two most painful things to experience with a SID child are: first, what bothers them can change from one day to the next, so you never feel like you’re doing anything right for them; and second, aversion to being touched. These two things have prevented Jaimie from being able to get close to anyone including her father Steve and me. Her sense of touch became so intense that I had to remove the tags from her clothes because they “hurt” her, a feather touch on her skin threw her into an inconsolable rage, and she developed a strict need for things to be “just so” or else she’d scream and cry until things were “just so.”

I longed to wrap my arms around Jaimie and to feel her tiny arms around me. But she’s never been able to allow herself to express her love for me in this way. Jaimie hugs by tilting her head toward me and saying, “Hug.” I’ve just come to accept this expression of Jaimie’s love as normal.

Jaimie received her SID diagnosis when she was two and a half and began therapy to help her learn to communicate and cope with her feelings. It hasn’t been an easy road. Jaimie had a real problem with anyone entering her sacred world of routine and organization, but I began to see positive changes in Jaimie’s personality as she slowly allowed people in. Yet, despite the positive aspects of her therapy, she still refused to be touched and would become very distressed even if we just talked about hugs. So I simply waited with my arms ready.

One evening, Steve made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. “Hon, why don’t you go out for a walk and let me hang out with Jaimie.”

Jaimie had been doing so well with her therapy, so I thought, “Let’s give it a shot!” This was the first time I went anywhere without Jaimie since she was born. But I was worried because Daddy didn’t always do things exactly the way she needed them to be done, nor did he have the patience for her strict routines—this caused Jaimie to explode in frustration. Still, she had to let herself try to trust him. What if, God forbid, something happened to me? All she’d have would be Steve.

I got ready to go, then told Jaimie I was going out for a little while. She was coloring at the kitchen table and didn’t seem to notice I’d said anything. I looked at Steve who nodded at me, then kissed me on the forehead.

At first, I felt a wave of guilt that tried to draw me back to the house. But after a few minutes, I felt exhilarated—so this is what it felt like to do my own thing. Considering I couldn’t even use the bathroom without leaving the door open, because Jaimie needed to know where I was all the time, that walk was like going to a party for me—the best twenty minutes of my life. As I approached the house, I heard what I thought were crow screeches exploding from our house. Then I realized it was Jaimie.

I flew up the front stairs, fumbled with my keys to open the door, then found Steve straddling Jaimie on the floor, holding her arms and legs so she wouldn’t hurt him (or herself) as she screamed, “No! I don’t like you. I want Mama.”

Steve heard my sneakers squeak across the linoleum and looked up at me like a doctor losing his patient—tortured. His tears fogged up his glasses, so I cupped his chin as I dropped to the floor. He enveloped my hand in his with a gentle squeeze and placed it on top of Jaimie’s chest, then left the room.

For over two hours, I tried every technique I had been taught to calm Jaimie—nothing worked. Finally, I had no choice but to put her in her bed so she could release the rest of her fit in privacy. I retreated to the solitude of my room, flopped on the bed like a rag doll, and allowed myself to do something I hadn’t for a long time—I cried. I didn’t stop the tears from coming like I usually did; I allowed them to flow freely.

I cried because I was angry at her for having SID, because I felt helpless and scared that I couldn’t help her, because I lost my temper with her when she wouldn’t stop crying, because I was frustrated that I didn’t understand what I was supposed to do, because I felt guilty that I wished she was “normal,” and I cried mostly for Jaimie, because she knew she was different but didn’t understand why. Why couldn’t she let us reach her? Why couldn’t I, her Mommy, help her?

Drained after my emotional release, I heard Jaimie downstairs with Steve. I splashed cold water on my face in a feeble attempt to reduce the redness in my eyes, then went to join my family. I entered the living room where Jaimie and Steve were watching a movie. “Can I join you guys?” I asked. When she heard my voice, Jaimie turned and ran to me. “Mama!”

I crouched down so she could touch my leg with her head, but instead she wrapped her tiny arms around me and hugged me—a real hug. I was in such shock it took me a few seconds to hug her back. I wrapped my arms around her tiny body and she whispered, “I love you, Mama.”

“Oh Jaimie,” I whispered back. “I love you too. So very much.” For the first time since she was born, I felt the joy other mothers feel when their child expresses their love.

Her hug lasted only for a few seconds, but even as she pushed away from me to finish watching her movie, I still felt the warmth of her arms around me. I knew it would be a long time before she’d hug again, but I wasn’t sad. Her hug was a sign of good things to come and it renewed my hope.

Thank you, Jaimie, for your precious gift. I will treasure it always.

My message to other mothers with SID children or other forms of autism is this: Don’t give up hope; they know we love them and, with patience and understanding, they’ll show us they love us too.

In life, there are many things to inspire and deeply affect us all. For those of us who choose to grow spiritually, there begins to be an awareness about life and what it really is all about. I, like so many others, was once caught up in the captivating current of materialism. But as life happened and I needed to call on my universal Divine more and more, I began to find myself conscious of a spiritual exchange of possibilities that increased my connection to the Divine and that continues to supply me with enormous growth and infinite supplies of love to this day. In contrast to this discovery, as I neared the end of my twenties, I experienced one of the hardest, yet most enlightening journey’s of my life which would lead me to also understand the possibilities of grace in death as well.

To lose a loved one is by far one of the hardest and most final experiences of living and the most unavoidable. In these times of war, disease, anger, and strife, it is easier to pretend that bad things won’t happen to us and that somehow everyone we love will go on to live forever. But as life will have it and as part of the journey of living, my world, which had been going rather smoothly, would offer me a test of compassion, patience, and faith as my mother’s universe handed her a task of healing. This task would challenge both of our spirits, but it would also ultimately help bring us towards a stronger bond and guide me to the understanding that we all must grow as creatures of humanity, and that to live on this earth means it is impossible not to be affected by the troubles of the world in a conscious state of being.

The experience of having to support someone in disease helped me to realize that we all must go through the core of our life lessons by ourselves, yet we are never alone. God’s never-ending divine presence, a regenerative substance of light and love, can not only be discovered in the silence of prayer, but also just as often come through the love that is shown by friends and strangers alike. One such moment impacted my life in such a way that I will never forget.

My mother and I were as close as a mother and child could be. My father died when I was around eight. The 60s were a turbulent time, and through many challenges, my mother was often faced with some hard decisions to make, but through it all she did it with the conviction of her will. Instead of concerning herself with the world’s expectations of her (a black, widowed, handicapped [she had survived polio at age two], single mother), she put her sights on changing the world’s view of people with handicaps, and raised me to be someone who learned to contribute to the world knowing that my strengths are gifts from the Divine.

Unfortunately, after a life well-lived, like too many others, soon after my mother retired, she was diagnosed with cancer. When she told me this, I knew without a doubt that my mother, with what I’d seen her accomplish in her lifetime, could lick this too. So we set out together with lots of faith and love in our hearts determined to win. I watched her persevere and fight the good fight for over six years until the medical profession decided that they had done all they could. Their decision destroyed the last vestiges of hope for my mother. Not long after, when she could no longer live with the circumstances of her illness, she let go of this life, and my world as I knew it was forever changed.

Being an only child of a single parent, there were a lot of things for me to do immediately after she died. There was the matter of funeral arrangements, canceling credit cards, deciding if I was going to keep the house, and calling all of our relatives, family friends, and my mother’s business associates to inform them of her passing. I had to do all of this when all I truly wanted to do was roll up in a little ball and cry.

As I finally got time to sit down and start making calls, I began first with my boss to let him know that I would need some additional time off. I helped him run a small agency and we had a small staff. With me gone, he would need to keep things running. I also called my life companion, my family, and then my best friends (none of whom lived nearby). They all took the news as anyone would, they gave their condolences, we shared a cry, and then I continued on making the rest of my calls.
As I sat in my mother’s big, empty house, overwhelmed by what lay at hand, little did I know what love was about to do. For after saying goodbye with those first calls to my friends and family, each hung up the phone and made arrangements to have their businesses watched, their shifts covered, their children taken care of, and they all (including my boss) arrived to help me before the next day was through.

I was overwhelmed with the love this gesture of support brought. I felt very vulnerable during this time and began to feel guilty that my friends had made these sacrifices to come and be with me in my time of need. The night before the funeral I told one of them how grateful I was for all of them being there and that she really hadn’t had to do this for me. She looked at me with the love of angels in her eyes and said, “Of course I did.”

In less than five days, my friends and family helped me honor my mother in life and in death. They kept me going even when I felt I could not put another foot in front of the other, not only from exhaustion but also because my heart was aching almost too much to carry on. They gave me laughter when my tears were running dry, they helped with plans, intercepted visitors, made sure I ate, and assured me it was okay to be such “a mess.” They rolled up their sleeves and helped me with the arduous task of packing boxes, sorting through a life well-lived and loved for over seventy-four years, and getting it in such order that when I did have time to sit and remember my mother, everything I cherished was there. Nothing had been accidentally given away or lost in all of the madness of having to let so many of those memories go.

They held my hand at the gravesite and my heart for months to come. They helped me stay the course when I faltered and would call for “no special reason” just to say “Hi.” Those words that were said to me that night when I felt most undeserving, I still cherish today. They represent a selfless act of love and the love we must all have for one another. Because of that gift to me, I find myself always looking for an opportunity to give back to others as often as I can. These acts of love and kindness opened my heart to something that until then I had always taken for granted. Love. And as I watched neighbors, relatives, and friends rally around me and support my weakened legs, my broken heart, and my saddened spirit with their love, laughter, and care, I learned how precious it is to be connected to the people of this world and to let love be the foundation for all my endeavors. For to experience love is to experience the greatest thing on earth in all its infinite glory.

On the night of the day my husband, Jim, died, I went through the motions of preparing myself for bed, certain I would not sleep a wink.

I approached the empty bed, and for some reason, was drawn to sleep on his side. To my surprise, I sensed his presence and a blanket of unmistakable calm came over me. I did sleep, and after that night, it was a comfort to go to bed; it seemed Jim was waiting there to comfort me. And why wouldn’t he be? He had been there for forty-six years.

This is not to say that I didn’t go through the typical emotions of grief. In a church support group, our facilitator often reminded us that we had to experience our grief before we could begin to heal. She suggested setting aside quiet time in a peaceful place so as to allow our feelings to flow freely.

I was doing just that one Sunday afternoon, taking in the healing expanse of the ocean through my living room window. As I gave in to some quiet tears, our little terrier Bella, who had been asleep at the other end of the house, bounded into the room, jumped in my lap, and began licking my face. I don’t know how she could have heard me, but I took it as a sign that Jim had sent her to cheer me up.

I began to notice other signs of his presence. I saw his likeness in the profile of my precious two-and-a-half-year-old grandson, Phoenix, and I felt him there too. Once, as I was reading my daughter an old love letter from Jim, my voice began to crack. Phoenix, busy with a toy on the far side of the room, suddenly called out, “I love you, Grandma!”

Now, nearly two years later, Phoenix is still showing me this special affection. When he stays overnight, he strokes my face while I read a bedtime story to him. If I close my eyes, I can almost feel the touch of my husband.

I believe that we need only to trust our intuition to take in these experiences. Sue of Santa Cruz says her house seemed so empty after her husband died. She was thankful that they had previously put two living room lights on a timer so she never had to come home to a dark house. On the night of his funeral service, she slept very soundly. In the morning, she discovered the living room lamps were still lit, but found nothing wrong with the timer. She says, “Then I got it. It had been overridden by my husband, who was remembering and honoring me by letting me know he was okay...a perfect gift from the beyond.”

Betty, a widow from Rhode Island, says that even after her husband died, she felt his presence when making household decisions, a chore they had shared as partners. “I needed to sell our house because of some impending law regarding older homes which would have adversely affected me if I remained. This had been an ongoing problem while my husband was alive and now it was mine alone. One night, I awakened from sleep and standing at the bottom of my bed was my husband, for only a second or so. When I blinked, he was gone. Shortly after this event, the house sold without a problem. After I saw him, I knew it would. The bonds of love do not break with death; they continue, but in a different dimension.”

Not long ago, my husband’s sister, Beth, called from Wisconsin to tell me that she had a comforting dream about him. She had been praying about a family crisis and Jim appeared in her dreams that night. He hugged her for such a long time she could still feel his warmth when she woke up.

Could it be that we not only remember our departed loved ones, but that they, too, remember us? Although I will always miss my husband’s physical presence, I now believe the spirit of those you love can stay with you forever.