It was early morning when the phone rang. I could hear my husband answering, but could not imagine whom he was talking to or make out exactly what he was saying. He hung up and came to give me the news. “Your mom passed on,” he said.

This is how my journey to understand eternal life began. As a young mother with a two-year-old daughter, I did not know where to begin. In the midst of making the arrangements for my mother’s memorial service, I called my Christian Science teacher. When I told him of my mom’s passing, he spoke very lovingly, with great compassion, and shared that my mom undoubtedly learned so much through this experience. At first, I did not understand this at all, but another practitioner said later that of course my mom had “learned so much”—she had learned that there is no death! She had learned that whatever had seemed to take her life was powerless, because she was still going forward, progressing spiritually. She hadn’t come to an end!

This was a great comfort to me, but still I felt I needed to go deeper spiritually to really understand. My dear husband did so much to help. He would meet our daughter and me for dinner on Wednesday nights after he was finished with work and then take her to a park so that I could have a quiet hour or two in the Christian Science Reading Room before the evening testimony meeting at church. During that time, I read many articles on the topic of life in the bound volumes of the Christian Science periodicals and every citation on God as Life in the Bible and Mary Baker Eddy’s writings. Each week, as ideas about eternal life were unfolding to me, the grief was lifting.

My yearly Christian Science association meeting was just a few weeks after Mom’s passing. It was tremendously helpful. In addition to my gaining great inspiration from the day’s address, one of my dear friends, who had taken Christian Science Primary class instruction with me, said that she was going to give me an assignment. She said that I needed to find a passage from the Bible and another one from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy; each was to remind me of my mom. Then, whenever I felt grief trying to take over, I was to fill my thought with those two passages. This was quite an assignment! I searched and searched. At first, nothing seemed to quite fit, but, finally, I found these words in Science and Health: “A mother’s affection cannot be weaned from her child, because the mother-love includes purity and constancy, both of which are immortal. Therefore maternal affection lives on under whatever difficulties” (p. 60). This was so comforting, as it promised that even in the “difficulty” of what the world would call death, the Mother-love my mother expressed could never be stopped. 

The passage from the Bible that I finally chose was the one about the “virtuous woman” as described in Proverbs 31, especially verses 26 and 28, “In her tongue is the law of kindness” and “Her children arise up, and call her blessed.” 

Together, these words from the Bible and Science and Health lifted my thought so many times, and I am so grateful for this assignment, which definitely forwarded my spiritual growth. 

Another part of this release from grief came as my brother and I were dispersing my mother’s belongings. I had this nagging desire to find something of my mother’s that she had left just for me—perhaps a letter expressing her great love for me or some other memento that a mother would have given her daughter. I looked and looked, but nothing seemed to fulfill this desire. We closed up her apartment, and I thought I would just have to live with not ever having found this illusive thing I thought I needed. 

However, I knew that Mary Baker Eddy tells us in Science and Health, “Desire is prayer; and no loss can occur from trusting God with our desires, that they may be moulded and exalted before they take form in words and in deeds” (p. 1). I continued to study and pray to understand my mother’s oneness with Life. I had totally forgotten about my former desire to find something of my mother’s until one day sometime later when I was thumbing through her copy of Science and Health. Out fell an article from the Sentinel, which my mother had neatly folded and placed between its pages. The article was called, “The Traveler” (Becky Votaw, December 5, 1977, p. 2093). It was a children’s article in which the author talked of her healing of grief when her great-grandmother passed on. The writer said her mother had explained that “if someone I loved were taking a walk and suddenly turned the corner and I couldn’t see him, I wouldn’t be sad. I would know that he was going right on.” The young writer, at age nine, after doing research in the Bible and Science and Health, concluded that “my great-grandmother had traveled all over the world. Now I told my mother that to me this was just as if she had gone away on another trip.” In this simple, childlike way, I was comforted, and I knew I had found what my mother had “left” me—the gift of Christian Science.

There were many other steps of progress in this demonstration, but one that stands out happened a few years later. It was around Christmas, and my husband and I had just found out we were expecting our second child. For some unknown reason I began to worry that our family should put some sort of wreath on my mother’s gravestone. I was remembering years of going to the cemetery when I was young to decorate the grave of my father. I went with relatives who were members of another denomination.

In this simple, childlike way, I was comforted, and I knew I had found what my mother had "left" me.

All of a sudden, I was very concerned that I should have been doing this for my mother’s grave all along. However, it was ten degrees below zero, there was a great deal of snow on the ground, and I was expecting our second child. So the thought of finding an appropriate wreath, driving quite a distance to the cemetery, and trudging through the snow to mount it did not seem too realistic, not to mention the fact that I also had our other daughter to care for. When I shared this concern with my husband, he very lovingly said he would take care of it for me if I thought it was important, despite the weather conditions and the fact that he had a pressing deadline at work. I was so relieved, but then something even greater happened.

My husband said, “I will do this for you, but I don’t really think your mother knows anything about that grave.” 

Of course not, I thought! What a wonderful reminder that my mother had no connection with that mortal scene, but was going on, expressing Life, unimpressed and unaware of anything else. We did not decorate the grave that Christmas, and I did not feel the need to ever return to the cemetery. Our family had a joyous Christmas.

Another lesson came when our second child arrived. Of course, I was very, very happy that we were blessed with another daughter, but there was a little part of me that was sad, because this time, I would not be able to call my mom and tell her the happy news. This sadness completely dissolved, however, the moment the little baby appeared, because my first call was to the Christian Science practitioner who had been praying for us and supporting us during the pregnancy and birth. He expressed every ounce of God’s Mother-love that could be expressed, and there was just no room for any sadness. I felt right then that the healing of grief was complete.

Now, years later, there is absolutely no sadness when I think of my mother. Divine Love has healed all grief. Whenever I think of my mother, I think of all the wonderful qualities she is still expressing, and the abiding deep, deep gratitude I have to her for giving me the gift that can heal any difficulty, situation, or disease, and disprove even death—the gift of Christian Science.