You don’t wake up one day and stop being a mother. It’s forever and always.

Dear Mrs. Gasciogne,

In under an hour, you changed my life.

I am sitting on a cold metal bench, digital voice recorder in hand, and I’m yelling in my head for making a grown woman cry.

via weheartit.com

It’s the first week in October, but already the biting wind isn’t helping alleviate the sting in both our eyes as I listen, wanting desperately to help you. I watch the way you reach a hand up, brushing back a steady stream of tears, and I try to imagine what it must feel like to lose a child. I can’t.

Journalists interview a gamut of wildly different people. Eccentric people. Intellectuals. Creatives. Endearing people. Disheartened people. Oh, God. Did I just call myself a journalist?! But it’s true. I had a long list of choices to work with for this post.

And you’re the winner. You’re it.

You are the reason I fell in love with journalism. You are one of so many reasons I keep coming back to a world I never ever thought I would dare to enter.

I remember standing up, having to remind myself that yes, it was a production day. Yes, this was a time-sensitive piece. And yes, I still had yet to write it. I remember the way it felt to hear words spill from your mouth and believe them. Believe them because I couldn’t afford not to. Because I looked at you and knew that there was a certain unspoken code of conduct.

And that code was armed with a single word to bridge the gap between two strangers who knew each other for less than an hour in time on a blustery day last autumn — love.

L-O-V-E. That’s the million-dollar word.

“You’re going to change the world,” you told me.

And you hugged me the way only a mother can. The way only a mother knows how. You believed, and stated quite firmly, that my words would change things. That your son up in Heaven had told me to take this story assignment. That we were, in fact, meant to meet. And you were right.

I see now that you were right. I see now that a mother can lose her son and still wake up in the morning to share her love with the world. She can roll out of bed, taking each day in stride, and she can find comfort in the way love saves people. It really does. That maternal instinct doesn’t dissipate. It doesn’t waver.

You’re one of the hundreds of mothers I have met. And each time, I am struck by the supernatural ability mothers possess, exhausting themselves with love and devotion to their children.

So when I grow up, perhaps I will be a journalist. But I will definitely be a mother.

Love,
K

letter 27 – the friendliest person you only knew for one day

Hugging strangers and loving mothers.

I sat at a picnic table on a cold autumn day, talking with a mother who had lost her son, and I tried, with every ounce of my body, to understand why God does this to people. Why He takes away the Life Changers and leaves us with a slap in the face that says, “Wake up and change the world today since this person isn’t around to brighten the faces of strangers anymore. It’s your turn.”

And I decided that Billy Joel must’ve been onto something. That only the good die young.

What is it with mothers and hugging, anyway? And I don’t mean my mother. Although she likes a good hug now and then, I haven’t seen her in almost two months, so unless technology really is incredible, and we’re living in some post-Star Wars universe, I’m almost one hundred percent sure I haven’t hugged her since August.

No, I have reserved that for the mothers of the world I barely know. The mothers who are born with an innate sense of how to love just about anyone who comes into their lives and offers a smile or a kind face.

I’ve got myself sort of addicted to something. No need to brace yourself; it’s nothing illegal. I am not a proponent of the new “legal” pot or anything like that. I’m addicted to feature stories. I’m addicted to the feeling you get when a mother you barely know, a woman you met half an hour ago, gives you a hug and tells you you’re going to change the world.

I am in awe. How do you go on living, breathing, functioning – let alone smiling at perfect strangers and carrying on normal conversation – when you lose your husband or your son? How does the world even keep spinning? These women have shocked me, have proven to me that love knows no bounds. Strength comes in all shapes and sizes, and I believe these women have taken a larger than life dose.

And then there’s me, standing there in the cold air, trying not to cry while someone who doesn’t know me, doesn’t have any reason to take an interest in me, when I’m the one taking the interest, I’m the one writing the article, starts telling me good things about my future. I told her I wanted to write because I wanted to help people. And she basically said that that’s all it took, that if I wanted to help people, I would.

“There’s a reason you’re here today,” she said. She said her son brought me to this story, and that even though he’s gone, he’s already affected me. And I believed her. Because mothers are so blind in their love, in their ability to put faith into anyone they choose, not because they’re good liars, but because their job is to believe, with all their heart, in the words they say and the actions they take.

I should probably have saved this post until May, but it’s a little too far away and a little too close to my heart. All I know is that if someone else’s mom can do that for me, I hope that I can be that for someone else someday.