Liebestod

A Mother’s Love

Oh, be still my heart.

Some moments feel too big, too layered, too sacred to fully capture in words. And yet here I am, trying.

What 18-year-old young man - on the brink of entering the military - chooses to spend six hours at the opera with his mother on a Saturday? Six hours. With intermissions. And a Q&A.

Not just any opera. The Everest of operas’s: Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.

Yet my son, my Tristan, sat beside me patiently through the entire epic journey. He sat there quietly, understanding how deeply this moment mattered to me - choosing to experience the meaning of his namesake and the music behind it, not just for himself, but for me - his mom.

I don’t think I stopped crying from the first note to the last.

Because it wasn’t just the music.

Those first notes didn’t begin an opera so much as open something in me. Something ancient. Something cellular. Memories etched into my bones that I don’t consciously revisit anymore - but that have never left.

The monstrousness of raising him on my own. And I don’t use that word lightly.

The kind of monstrous no one sees from the outside - the quiet, relentless weight of being everything on your own. The nights of terror when I didn’t know how I would hold it all together. The grief of watching the life I was building dissolve. The shame that creeps in when you feel like you should be stronger, more capable, more certain than you are.

And the truth that is harder to say out loud:

Being a mother never came naturally to me. Not at first.

Stepping into motherhood at such a pivotal moment - right in the midst of the beginning of my chosen path, my career as a freelance cellist in New York City, my becoming - felt, at times, like ripping a piece of my soul out. Like being pulled away from something that defined me. There was grief in that. Real grief.

And yet, there was no question in my mind. I chose my children. Again and again.

The sacrifices no one applauds. The dreams I set down. The career path I stepped away from - not because I didn’t want them, but because I needed the support for him, and for his brother.

There were moments that felt like surrender. Like I was losing parts of myself.

And yet - they were acts of devotion. Love in its most raw and unglamorous form.

Sitting there beside him, as the music swelled and flowed, I could feel all of it rising. Every version of me that carried him through those years. Every moment I thought I might break but didn’t. Every quiet decision to stay. To keep going. To choose them again.

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And then - the ending.

When Lise Davidsen began the Liebestod…those first notes…it undid me completely. It still overwhelms me just thinking about it.

And perhaps that’s exactly what it was - my own Liebestod. The love and the letting go, inseparable. Because that is what a single mother’s devotion ultimately asks of you: to love so completely, so sacrificially, so without reservation - and then, when the time comes, to release what you loved most into a life that is no longer yours to protect.

Death and love. Bound together. As they always were.

But what truly overwhelms me isn’t only the music.

It’s the timing.

Eighteen years ago, I chose his name because of this opera.

And now - exactly one month before he leaves home to step into his own life - I happen, by “chance,” to see a post from an old friend: the Metropolitan Opera is performing Tristan und Isolde this season, broadcast live, one time only, in theatres around the world.

One moment. One window. And we were there. Together.

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I had already been moved by another uncanny synchronicity: the National Arts Centre Orchestra here in Ottawa is playing the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde next month, just two weeks before he leaves. That alone felt like something.

But then this.

To sit beside my son - my Tristan - and witness the full opera together. Eighteen years after naming him, after leaving my own life and musical career in New York City - to raise him

& his brother on my own. One month before he walks out into his own life beyond the safety of home. It’s hard to call that “coincidence”.

Because when you’ve lived what we’ve lived - when you’ve carried what I’ve carried - when you’ve loved with that kind of ferocity and cost - it feels like something deeper.

Like a thread that never broke.

Like a story that knew where it was going, even when I didn’t.

Time folded in on itself in that theatre.

There he was - 18 years old, strong, steady, becoming.

And there I was - every version of myself who raised him, all at once.

The fear.

The exhaustion.

The grief.

The love that never wavered.

In that music, in that moment, I could feel both the cost and the meaning of it all - at the same time. Not just the little boy I fought so hard to raise, but the young man he has become.

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And maybe that’s what undid me the most.

Not just the beauty of the music.

But the realization that every sacrifice, every moment of terror, every piece of myself I thought I had lost along the way -

was part of something.

Not a destination. Not an ending. But a thread in an arc so much larger than what we can often see from where we stand.

That there is meaning woven through the things we carry. That our experiences are not random - that they return to us in unexpected forms, in unexpected moments, as if to say: you were always being held by something larger than your fear.

And this afternoon - this music, this moment beside him - felt like a glimpse of that arc.

Not the end of the story.

A new chapter of what was always meant to be.

❤​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​