Where in the world is my mother?

I miss my mom. She died fifteen years ago and today would have been her birthday. I'm not quite sure exactly where she is right now. I'm not talking about the Grand Central Station in the sky, heaven, or whatever you believe happens to you after you die. I'm talking about her remains. She was cremated right after she passed away in 1991 and for the longest time she was kept in an urn, in her armoire, in our family home. That is until my sister decided to remodel the ancestral home last year. Since everything was going to be put in storage while the house was being revamped, my dad decided to take my mother on a little "road trip" to Spain for the summer. Yes, you read correctly, my father packed my mother's ashes up and shipped her off to Europe with him.


I was caught up in the "waiting for Makena's referral" vortex, my sister was caught up in tossing, organizing and selling forty years' worth of accumulation and before we knew it, dad had slipped out with the Samsonite and with mom in tow. By the time we came up for air, Dad was sipping Sangria on the Costa del Sol, my sister was up to her ears in plaster dust and I was -- come to think of it -- I never did come up for air, I was still in the vortex.

My mother's French cousins were called in for a "closure" intervention and quickly offered up the family mausoleum in this little village in the Pyrennees. It made sense, Mom could finally be laid to rest in a place that had meant a lot to her as a child and where she would be surrounded by her relatives.

OK, so we had about a five month window when this could have all gone down, reasonably calmly and in an organized fashion. I could have torn myself away, flown to France, hooked up with my dad and sister and checked out where mom would be laid to rest. But that would have been too simple, too planned. For months nothing happened and just when I get the "last call" to travel to China to formally adopt Makena, my dad realizes that his six months in Spain are up and that he has to come home. So he lights a fire under his posterior and contacts the cousins (via letter because a stamp is cheaper than a call and he didn't have their E-mail) and the cousins quickly whip up a mass, an interment and a luncheon (attended by the mayor of the village,) giving us two weeks' notice to attend.

Classic, I'm in Chongqing (we've had Makena about two days) when I get word that this is going down. I'm told via E-mail from my sister, that Dad is on his way to the Pyrennees with the urn and that she is scrambling to get airfare on zero notice, to be there in time. My husband and I debate the merits of booking me and Makena on a flight to Paris from Guangzhou and returning home after the burial, but then we realize that even if we moved heaven and earth to get me there, that I would not make it on time and that, furthermore, we would have had to re-adopt Makena in the States! Bottom line, I come to the conclusion that mom has been dead a long time and that she would forgive me for not being there.

So what does this really have to do with Chinese adoptions? Nothing. Except that six months have gone by since we've had Makena (and the ashes were relocated,) it's my mother's birthday, and I happen to read in one of the adoption forums that a Chinese girl, with the help of her Dutch parents, was able to track down her biological family in Chongqing, China. And I just lost it. It made me cry. I immediately thought about Makena and what something like that would mean to her...I started wondering about what kind of courage it took to undertake that kind of hunt -- the whole "if you love something, set it free" thing and I just cried some more and then my thoughts turned back to my mom and how I still missed her and how I wished that her grandchildren could have known her. And where the heck was she?

And then I just let it go because I realized that I know where she is. I've known it all along.

Happy birthday, mom.

Isabelle

PS The picture posted is the last photograph that was ever taken of my mom and me (about a month before she passed away.) It's damaged because it was lost at sea and then, by some miracle, was found when it washed up on the shore. Now, that's a LONG story!