October 12th, 2026
If you love something, keep its heart sealed in a jar forever and ever.
That’s the saying, no?
I’ve discovered that the root of my grief is simply attachment; to stop missing my mom, six years later, all I have to do is dig that attachment out with a spade, throw it away and forget all about it, right?
Not quite, but I found out today that finding a place in the soil can be helpful.
Zen Buddhism, for me, has been startlingly enlightening (pun totally intended) as I experience it at the intersection of science and magic. It does the thing I have always sought when it comes to spirituality: it has no arbitrary rules or requirements and everything you need is already inside you.
As long as we keep living, we’re going to keep suffering, in ways big and small; not only is this okay, but it’s unavoidable and largely solvable. I’ve known that the pain I feel in my grief is caused by my attachment to my mom. Knowledge alone, however, isn’t enough to fix my human condition.
I’ve kept my attachment sealed in a jar; for six years, I’ve been in various states of hurt while staring at a porcelain squirrel cookie jar sitting on the kitchen counter, holding a plastic bag filled with my mother’s ashes. It’s not a contradiction; grief, like life, can’t be reduced to dualism or be healed by the recognition of my hypocrisy. But it did sit with increasing weight on my mind and heart.
Through Zen and mindfulness, I’ve been able to work out so many of my issues (and I’m still working on many more). I’ve never felt more connected to myself, the universe and nature and, to my gratitude and surprise, my mom.
I made the realization that keeping her in a jar was actually making her less accessible to me.
Instead of digging up and discarding the roots of my problems, I have to accept them as part of my being; I’m a human and I do get attached but maybe I’m just attached to the wrong ideas. I don’t need an actual bag filled with her in my house, because I know that she is everywhere, all the time, and always with me.
This is metaphysical and spiritual, but it’s also literal: she gave up pieces of herself to make pieces of me, and I gave up pieces of myself to create pieces of my son. By the transitive property, he is me is she, all the love we carry transferred thoroughly down the line.
I’ve lived next to a lake for over two decades now and I don’t know how many walks I’ve taken through the woods around it. I have always felt the presence of my mom in nature, her love of the outdoors and especially animals embodied in me. Today, I took my jar with me and I freed her (and myself) from it.
She died six years ago this week, during the heaviest month of my life, and I have never felt lighter than this; she’s always been bigger than the jar. In Zen, we look at each other and the universe and find that we are all one being, undivided; now she’s literally part of the air and soil and water, a link in the ecosystem.
She was known for hugging everyone, even people she didn’t particularly like. I hope everyone who visits the lake and the woods can feel her presence there. As for me, I don’t miss her like I used to, because she’s more alive and free and close to me now than she has been in a long time. I feel like I can take back my goodbyes.
If you love something, let it be alive and free, and let it be close to you.
