Beloved,
I have been carrying your star for years without quite admitting it. A little blue holy card tucked inside a book. A medal someone pressed into my hand at a funeral, which I never could bring myself to put away in a drawer.
I kept you at arm's length, Mother. I thought you were only the statue in the corner, plaster and painted blue, someone too gentle and too perfect to understand a life as unsteady as mine. I did not know how to come to you. I still come more as a visitor than as one who knows all the old prayers.
Then I read your story again, slowly. The angel at the door. Your trouble, your honest question: how can this be. You were not serene and certain. You were startled, and asking. And still you answered.
That answer has followed me ever since. Into the hospital waiting room. Into the sleepless night before a move across the country. Onto the dark water of every decision I was too afraid to make. People have called you Star of the Sea for centuries, and I understand now why sailors looked up for you. You do not always calm the waves. You stay lit above them.
So I am learning to light a candle on a steady table, to read your Magnificat in a quiet voice, to sit with whatever is uncertain and not run from it. White roses when I can find them. A plain white candle when I cannot.
And so I borrow your own words, the ones you spoke to an angel when you were frightened and brave at once. Here I am. Not certain. Not finished. Only willing, like you, to say yes to the crossing, and to trust that a light will hold above the water.