“A mother’s love is the gentle whisper that guides us through life’s storms.”
The Child Who Doesn’t Remember
Mother’s Day falls on the 10th of May, and for many, it arrives with flowers, greetings, and warm embraces beneath familiar roofs. Yet there are some hearts to whom this day comes quietly, like a distant flute heard across a river at dusk. The following is a subliminal dedication to those invisible children of sorrow who search within the fading corridors of memory for the touch of a mother they can scarcely remember yet can never forget.
There are moments in life when memory behaves like the evening mist upon the warm fields—revealing shapes for an instant before concealing them once more beneath silence. Childhood, especially the earliest dawns of childhood, belongs to that sacred mist. We know we were loved there. We know some gentle hands once gathered us into warmth when the world was still unknown and frightening. Yet the details vanish. Faces blur. Voices dissolve into wind. Only the ache remains.
The mother lives longest not in the mind, but in the soul.
Some children can recount with certainty the lullabies sung beside their beds, the fragrance of jasmine oil in their mother’s hair, the patient tenderness of evenings when fever burned upon their brow. But there are others for whom motherhood survives only as a broken reflection trembling upon the waters of memory. They stand upon the shores of adulthood, trying desperately to gather fragments of a vanished moon.
How lonely it is to possess love only as intuition.
A child who loses his mother too early carries within him a peculiar silence. The world may believe him whole, for he laughs, studies, works, and walks among ordinary men. Yet within the hidden chambers of his being there remains a room forever unopened. In quiet hours, he hears footsteps there. Sometimes a scent, a melody, or the touch of dawn upon his window awakens a sudden grief whose origins he cannot explain. It is then he realizes that memory is not always an image. Sometimes memory is merely longing.
The deepest tragedies of human life are often those for which language is insufficient. To lose a mother before memory itself has matured is to inherit sorrow without narrative. One cannot fully mourn what one cannot fully remember. Yet the heart mourns, nevertheless.
Perhaps, once upon a forgotten morning, she carried him beneath the pale gold of sunrise while birds awakened among mango leaves. Perhaps when he cried in hunger, pain arose in her breast more fiercely than within his own tiny body. Perhaps she bent over him in sleepless nights, brushing away tears before they had even fallen. He does not know these things with certainty. He only feels them moving faintly beneath consciousness like ancient music heard through closed doors.
And this uncertainty deepens the grief.
For there is consolation in remembrance, but torment in its absence. The child searches endlessly within himself asking: “Why can I not remember her face clearly? Why does my soul recognize someone my mind cannot reach?” He clings to indistinct shadows because they are all he possesses. A blurred image becomes sacred when it is the final homeland of love.
Human beings spend much of their lives pursuing success, companionship, knowledge, and belonging, unaware that beneath all these desires there often lies a simpler yearning—the yearning to return to the first sanctuary they ever knew. The mother’s embrace is humanity’s earliest heaven. From it we are exiled by time itself.
And yet mothers possess a strange immortality.
Even when absent, they continue to shape the atmosphere of our existence. Their tenderness survives in the gentleness we show others. Their sacrifices remain hidden within the moral architecture of our lives. A mother gives herself so completely that the child often cannot distinguish where her love ends and his own life begins. She turns her own sleeplessness into peace, her own suffering into shelter.
That is why the sorrow of the motherless child feels almost sacred. It is not merely loneliness; it is the severance of something divine.
There are evenings when such a child, now grown into manhood, suddenly feels overwhelmed by inexplicable sadness while watching rain gather upon a windowpane or hearing distant church bells at twilight. The world around him continues indifferently, yet within him ancient wounds stir. Somewhere beyond conscious recollection, the infant still searches for the warmth that once protected him from the terrifying vastness of existence.
And perhaps this is why Mother’s Day carries two voices within it. One voice is celebration. The other is prayer.
For those blessed enough to still hear their mother’s footsteps in the next room, the day arrives wrapped in gratitude. But for others, it descends softly like incense over old ruins. They do not celebrate loudly. They remember quietly. They search the heavens with the helpless eyes of children.
Yet there is beauty even in this grief.
For love that survives the destruction of memory is perhaps the purest love of all. The child who cannot remember his mother’s words still carries the emotional imprint of her compassion within his spirit. Her tenderness becomes part of the invisible rhythm by which he understands mercy, kindness, and human sorrow. Though her face fades, her essence remains woven into his humanity.
Time is powerless before such love.
The river forgets the cloud from which it was born, yet continues carrying its waters toward the sea. So too does the child move through life carrying within him the unseen gifts of the mother he can scarcely remember. Her touch survives in his gentleness. Her tears survive in his compassion for suffering. Her vanished lullabies survive in the quiet melancholy with which he gazes upon the world.
And somewhere beyond the reach of mortal understanding, perhaps every mother continues watching over the child she once held against her heart. Perhaps love itself is a form of eternity granted only to mothers. For though memory decays and years scatter human lives like autumn leaves, the soul never entirely forgets the first person who taught it what tenderness meant.
Thus Mother’s Day becomes more than a date upon the calendar. It becomes a bridge between presence and absence, between remembrance and longing, between the visible world and the hidden chambers of the heart where childhood still waits in silence for one more touch, one more kiss upon the forehead, one more whispered assurance in the darkness.
And in that silence, even now, the child continues calling softly into eternity: Mother.
The Child Who Remembers
There are evenings when the sky itself appears to remember the dead. I have stood alone beneath distant blue hills, watching a solitary star awaken in the folds of twilight, and in that silent hour, it seemed to me that my mother was smiling somewhere beyond the reach of earthly sorrow. The old song says: “On the day when a star smiles above the blue mountain clouds, if you smile, I too shall smile.” Those words have become the final prayer of my life. For I lost my mother when I was twenty-five years old, and yet I have never truly lived a single day apart from her presence.
Death, I have learned, does not remove a mother from the life of her child. It merely changes the room in which she waits.
When I was young, I believed motherhood belonged only to the visible world—to warm hands placing food upon a table, to soft footsteps heard before dawn, to the quiet voice that entered my room when fever or nightmares held me captive. But after my mother departed, I understood what the Russian writer Maxim Gorky sought to express in his great novel Mother: that a mother’s love is not confined to domestic tenderness alone, but becomes an eternal moral force that survives suffering, exile, and even death itself.
Gorky’s mother walked through fear with trembling courage because love compelled her beyond herself. My own mother possessed no revolutionary banners, no speeches, no grand declarations. Yet her heroism existed in smaller things, which are perhaps greater. It existed in sleepless nights when she sat beside me in silence. It existed in the way she concealed her own grief so her children would not inherit its burden. It existed in her ability to transform ordinary days into sanctuaries of kindness. It existed in literature and music, both of which she taught me.
Only after her death did I realize how invisible sacrifices sustain human life.
I remember one monsoon evening from my youth. Rain had gathered upon the windows like tears from another world, and I returned home exhausted and defeated by failures I could not confess to anyone. My mother said nothing. She merely placed her hand upon my head for a brief moment. There are gestures so small that history never records them, yet they become scriptures within the human heart. Even now, decades later, I can still feel the quiet blessing of that touch moving through my loneliness like distant temple bells carried by the wind.
After she died, the house itself became altered. The walls remained, the furniture remained, even the familiar fragrance of old books and folded linen lingered faintly in the rooms. Yet something immeasurable had vanished. I then understood the sorrow contained within Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary, where Mary speaks not as an untouchable icon, but as a grieving mother carrying unbearable memory. Tóibín stripped sanctity of its golden distance and revealed the trembling humanity beneath it. In his telling, motherhood becomes the endurance of grief itself.
That is how I remember my own mother now—not as a saint sculpted in perfection, but as a profoundly human being whose love survived exhaustion, fear, and disappointment. The older I grow, the more sacred that humanity becomes to me.
There are moments when I hear her voice unexpectedly in the ordinary movements of life. In the rustling of trees at dusk. In the softness with which an old woman folds a child’s sweater upon a train. In the butterfly which flutters beside me and vanishes without a trace. In the patient eyes of mothers waiting beside hospital beds. Grief changes form with time. At first, it is a storm; later, it becomes climate.
The song says: “If one day I sleep within the embrace of the earth, and you stand alone in the wilderness, I shall speak to you from the other world and soothe your sorrow.” These words once sounded poetic to me. Now they feel true.
For the dead continue speaking, though not through language.
I hear my mother most clearly when I am kind to others. I hear her when I forgive someone I once wished to wound. I hear her when exhaustion tempts me toward bitterness, yet something within me still chooses gentleness. The dead survive within the moral instincts they planted in the living.
Perhaps that is why so many great writers return endlessly to the figure of the mother. Rabindranath Tagore himself understood that the mother is not merely a biological presence but the first revelation of the infinite to the child. In his stories, tenderness often arrives quietly, clothed in ordinary gestures, carrying within it the radiance of eternity. Likewise, Marcel Proust found entire lost worlds resurrected through memory, while Fyodor Dostoevsky repeatedly portrayed maternal suffering as the purest expression of spiritual endurance.
Even in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, motherhood transcends mortality itself. Love becomes haunting. Presence survives absence. A mother continues to guard her children, even from beyond the grave.
I think all children secretly believe this.
Sometimes, when night settles upon the distant hills, and the first star appears trembling above blue clouds, I imagine my mother watching me with the same quiet concern she carried throughout her earthly life. And I find myself smiling through tears, as though fulfilling an unspoken covenant between us: “If you smile, I too shall smile.”
There is a sorrow in surviving one’s mother that cannot be explained adequately to those who have not endured it. One becomes suddenly aware that no one else upon earth will ever love you again with that same primordial completeness. Friends may admire you. Lovers may desire you. Society may honour or condemn you. But a mother alone remembers the helpless child hidden beneath the armour of adulthood.
When she dies, part of that child becomes an orphan forever.
And yet, strangely, grief has made me grateful, for there are many who move through life never having known tenderness deeply enough to mourn it profoundly. My sorrow is immense because my love was immense. I carry pain because once I carried light.
Yet, In the silent twilight of my heart, I now weep with a sorrow too deep for words, for I had walked beside my mother’s boundless love as though it were the air itself, and only after her gentle hands faded into eternity did I awaken to the grievous truth that I had taken her sacred presence for granted.
Now, as years gather around me like fallen leaves in autumn gardens, I no longer ask death to return my mother to me. Instead, I ask only that I may continue hearing her invisible voice within the chambers of my conscience until my own final evening arrives.
And perhaps, when my body too returns to the earth’s embrace, and someone I love stands alone beneath the wilderness of stars, I shall speak gently from the unseen world as she once promised to speak to me, soothing their grief with the tenderness I first learned from her hands.
