Before You Have to Lose Her

Cedar Valley News
May 8, 2026
Before You Have to Lose Her
By Dan Larson

Grace came in from the yard on Tuesday with dandelions in her fist.

She is fifteen. She walked past me at the kitchen table without a word, found a jelly jar in the cupboard, filled it at the sink, set the dandelions in it, and put the jar on the windowsill where her mother stands every morning. Then she went back outside.

Rebecca came in twenty minutes later from the church. She washed her hands, started water for the pasta, and saw the jar. She did not turn around. She put one hand flat on the counter beside it and stood there a few seconds. Then she opened the cupboard for the colander and started supper.

I watched from the table. I had a book open. I had been reading about a woman named Ann Reeves Jarvis.

Ann was born in 1832. She bore thirteen children. Four lived to adulthood. She was the wife of a Methodist minister in West Virginia. In 1858, while pregnant with her sixth child, she organized women’s groups in her county called Mothers’ Day Work Clubs. They taught families to boil drinking water. They reduced infant mortality in a county where more than half of her own children had not lived.

When the Civil War came, her clubs cared for soldiers from both sides. After the war she organized Mothers’ Friendship Day. Men from opposing sides wept and shook hands.

In 1876, Ann was teaching a Sunday school class. Her twelve-year-old daughter Anna was in the room. Ann closed the lesson with a prayer. I have read it five times this week. Here it is.

I hope and pray that someone, sometime, will found a memorial mothers’ day commemorating her for the matchless service she renders to humanity in every field of life. She is entitled to it.

Note the spelling. Mothers’. Plural. Note the language. The matchless service she renders to humanity in every field of life. Her own words.

Ann died in 1905. Anna founded Mother’s Day three years later in her honor. She trademarked the singular possessive and insisted the day was about your one mother. By the 1920s the florists and the candy companies had taken it over. Anna spent the rest of her life trying to stop them. She died in a sanitarium in 1948. The floral industry paid her bills.

What I had not seen before this week is the smaller thing inside the story. Anna loved her mother completely. In giving everything to her one mother, she made the day smaller than her mother had asked for.

Ann had asked for a day for mothers in every field of life. Anna built a day for the woman in your kitchen.

The narrower day is the one I have been honoring my whole life without thinking.

I have been a stake president long enough to know what Rebecca does. Tuesday she came home from a hospital visit. She had spent forty minutes with a man whose wife had died in February. She had brought him a casserole he did not ask for. She had not told me. I learned about it on Sunday because the man’s daughter caught me in the hallway and said your wife is the reason my father ate this week.

She is the woman Grace handed dandelions to. Grace does not see it yet. Grace sees her mother. The role. The constant. The air she breathes. Grace will hand Rebecca a card on Sunday and mean it with her whole heart, and Rebecca will receive it the way mothers do.

I have been Grace. I did not see my own mother for who she was until I had a household of my own. She is gone now. I see her now. I would give a great deal to have seen her sooner.

Sunday is two days away. I want to do something Ann was praying for in 1876. I want to say to my daughter, before she hands her mother the card, what the woman in front of her does. I want to name it. I want Grace to begin to see her mother now, not in twenty years, not after.

I hope and pray, the way Ann did, the same for you.

Walk down to the church on Sunday and tell me what you see.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. Tell us about the woman in your life who renders service to humanity in every field of life. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, Ann Reeves Jarvis, Anna Jarvis, the Mothers’ Day Work Clubs, the 1876 Sunday school prayer, and the history of Mother’s Day are real.

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