The Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica

When Judith asked me to speak today on the subject of “broken hearts” and how we learn from the hard experiences of life, I thought immediately about my mother.

For many reasons, my mother and I had a love-hate relationship going for many years. After my dad died, she moved to Colorado and created a new life for herself. We visited or traveled together several times a year, having fun but there was always underlying tension.

When her best friend called me and said she was worried about my mom because she was acting strangely and seemed to be in a great deal of pain, I didn’t really know what to do. I wanted to ignore the whole thing. My mother could take care of it. But of course, she couldn’t. She was diagnosed with lymphoma and the small strokes it caused. Reluctant at first, but with the relentless urging of my therapist, I took charge.

For 2 years, I was my mother’s care manager, worrying about her as she used to worry about me. When the lymphoma returned and the doctor gave her only a few months to live, I made a few more difficult decisions. We moved her to California so I could visit every day, and I moved her to a nursing home. She recognized me, but couldn’t hold a normal conversation. She was overly restless and couldn’t sleep. I moved her to a little residential place where the nurse said that the medication was actually making her worse. Three days after we stopped her anxiety medications, I went to see her. She looked at me and said “Oh, Melanie, I feel like I’ve been in a daze.” I swallowed my fear and told her everything that had happened in the intervening months -- moving to California, giving away much of her stuff, selling her house, placing her cats in a new home. She looked at me and said “You did exactly what I would have wanted you to do.”

In that moment, she gave me such a gift. We had bridged the gap. I had found an inner strength and love I didn’t know I had. She helped to heal the broken heart that I knew would come when she died about 6 months later.

So I light the chalice this morning in honor of those of us who have the opportunity and take it to learn from our broken hearts.