Who Will Love Me Now?

John Adams once said that the key to the human condition was summed up in the question: “who will love me?” It’s a deep and profound question. I’ve had reason to think about it over the last twenty-four hours. To answer Adams’s question, we should consider the origin of the most profound kind of love that gives rise to all other forms of it.

It was mothers who brought love into the world. Indeed, it was mothers who both metaphorically and literally birthed the idea and experience of love. For Christians, Jews and Muslims, Eve’s love for Cain was no doubt the first love, making all other love possible. There is no love purer or more natural and powerful than a mother’s love for her child. It’s total and complete. All love begins with mothers.

With your permission, I’d like to say a few words about a particular kind of motherly love: a mother’s love for a son, which is, I believe, experienced differently than a mother’s love for a daughter. More particularly, I’d like to say something about a son’s love for his mother.

Have you ever noticed how dedicated boys and then men are to their mothers? It’s easy to make light of a grown man’s almost childlike devotion to his pampering mother and many Hollywood movies do so, but there is a reason for it, a reason deep in the male psyche. Sons must leave their father’s and their father’s home, but they must always return to their mothers. The eternal return is always to a mother because mothers are the life-giving source of all life, and that fount is filled by love. A son’s love for his mother is simple, pure, and uncomplicated. Jealousy, for instance, is no part of a son’s love for his mother despite what Freud says. A boy’s love for his mother represents a deep and profound expression of gratitude.

Of all human relationships, there is nothing quite like a boy’s love for his mother. Such love is almost always soft and tender, but it can become ferocious and even dangerous if threatened. Think of Telemachus’s devotion to his mother Penelope or Perseus’s devotion to Danaë. Such love resides deep in the soul. What son wouldn’t kill with extreme prejudice to protect his mother? At the deepest level, young men go to war to protect the motherland, which means mothers. A boy’s love for his mother is his first experience of love, and it lasts unabated throughout his whole life. It’s a natural and easy love. There is no insecurity or compromise in it. It’s never unrequited. Tragically, a boy without a mother’s love can become a monster. A mother’s love tames and civilizes boys.

It is not commonly or well enough understood the degree to which boys are emotionally fragile and vulnerable, but they are. From childhood, boys are naturally bold and adventurous, but all their little-boy bravado is a mile wide and a foot deep. Behind every boy warrior is a mother to kiss the scrapes and bruises, to bandage the cuts, and to provide shelter from the storm. Mothers understand and love their sons in a way that fathers don’t, can’t, and many times won’t. A mother’s love is unconditional and nurturing. Mothers love their sons just as they are.

I’ve had good reason to think about a mother’s love for a son and a son’s love for a mother in recent days. My beautiful mother, Joan Ruth Thompson, died yesterday. She was 91, and she died of stomach cancer. She had been ill for a couple of months, but her decline over the last few weeks was steep.

I drove up to Canada last weekend to be with her. She recognized me when I arrived, and we spoke briefly. She was in obvious distress, but I asked her if she would smile for me, and she did. In that moment, my darkened world lit up. That one smile was a remembrance of things past—a remembrance of a thousand smiles that always made my life happy. Soon thereafter, though, she began the long ascent to the world of peace and quiet. She mostly slept for the next three days, occasionally coming in and out of consciousness. On the morning of her passing, I got up at 3:00 and went into her room and held her hand for a couple of hours. The things a son says to his dying mother are private and sacred. I will share with you, though, two stories that I will always remember about my mother.

First, when I was a small boy, maybe four or five, I was quite sick in bed with a fever and a deep chest cold. My mother came into the darkened room, turned on the night lamp, and sat on the side of the bed. More than sixty years later, I still remember her rubbing Vicks VapoRub onto my chest and talking to me with tender loving care as only mothers can. I remember as though it were yesterday looking up at her in my half delirious state thinking to myself, “you’re the most beautiful girl in the whole world and I love you more than anything!” That was my first experience and understanding of what true love is. It’s a love that’s hard to replicate, and without it there is always an aching void.

The second story that I’d like to share with you was when I was a few years older. My parents believed in disciplining their three sons, which meant the occasional belt or paddle (known as the “board of education”) to the bottom, or, as was more likely with my mother, a wooden spoon to the hand. Two or three good whacks usually did the job. The physical sting always hurt, but it was the sight of my exasperated and angry mother that was the greatest source of pain because it seemed as though the real punishment was love withdrawn. Nothing can be worse for a child than unrequited love. But then there was the last day she ever hit me with a wooden spoon. She told me to put out my hand for the punishment. I did so without reluctance, and she gave that hand a good whack, and then and second and a third, but she quickly realized that I wasn’t crying out in pain or trying to pull my hand back. She hit harder a fourth and fifth time, and I could see both the shock and frustration in her face. And then, in an instant, her face changed from anger to joy and she burst out laughing in relief. She hugged me, and we both laughed knowing that the wooden-spoon ritual was a thing of the past and meaningless now. I loved her then, too, because in that moment, I realized that when she spanked me it hurt her a lot more than it hurt me.

In The Idiot, Dostoyevksy’s Prince Myshkin says that “beauty will save the world.” I’ve long wondered what Dostoyevsky meant by that enigmatic phrase. The comment is either a glittering vacuity and has no meaning, or it says something deep and profound about the human condition. On the long drive back to South Carolina yesterday, I spent fourteen hours thinking about my mother, my love for her, and her love for me. And then it hit me like a thunderbolt somewhere in the mountains of North Carolina. Surely that’s what Dostoyevsky meant. Love is beauty, and a mother’s love for her children is the most beautiful thing of all. Nothing transcends it. A mother’s love is entirely redemptive. It’s the source of all good, and yes, it will save the world because each of us is saved by it.

All honor to mothers and their love. It’s what makes life beautiful.

I loved my mother truly—madly—deeply, and I know she loved me just the same. That’s all that matters now. I am grateful beyond words that I knew her love, which in turn has allowed me to love others. That was her gift to me.

If grief is love with no place to go, I do feel paralyzed for the moment, but I know her love will soon release me from the pain so that I can love her again in that pure and simple way, just as I did when I was that little boy looking up into her beautiful eyes.

I love you, mom.