The gift of one more Mother's Day: Column

I woke up on Mother's Day in 2006 wishing that I could turn back the clock a year. It would be my first Mother's Day without my mom, and I wanted her back. I needed her back, so that I could tell her all the things I did not have the opportunity to say to her before she died.

The death of my mother, Jane Kling, was not a normal death — in fact, it was a total mystery. She disappeared from her home in San Diego one day in March, and 10 days later, her body was found beaten and bruised in a remote desert in Mexico. Authorities in two countries set out to find a killer, but no one was able to crack the case.

My odyssey mirrored, in many ways, the journey that Anna Jarvis took on her path in the early 1900s to help establish Mother's Day as a national holiday. According to historian Jone Johnson Lewis, Jarvis was motivated not only because it had been her mother's life's work, but also because she felt enormous guilt. Jarvis and her mom had quarreled before she died. I knew how Jarvis must have felt. At the time of my mother's death, we hadn't spoken in three months. I didn't know who Mom's friends were or how she spent her days. We had an ocean of unresolved differences between us.

I was a PTA mom living in a beautiful Southern California suburb. But when the authorities gave up on finding the person responsible for her death, I refused to let it go. I made phone calls, wrote emails, asked endless questions and finally hired famed FBI profiler Candice DeLong to help me keep the investigation alive.

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My four-year odyssey as an accidental detective mirrored the journey that Jarvis took to make Mother's Day a reality. She worked tirelessly — lobbying, campaigning and writing to political figures. In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed a joint resolution from Congress, and Mother's Day was established as an official holiday in the United States. On Jan. 15, 2010, I finally cracked my mother's case.

The investigation of a death is the essentially the investigation of a life. Everything about the way a person lived — her history, relationships, habits and secrets — must be uncovered and exposed. My search for a killer exposed many truths about my mother's life, about our relationship and about me as a person — none of them easy to stomach.

For some, the mother-daughter relationship is beautiful and affirming, but for others, like me, it is confusing, complicated and often painful. I was fortunate that the long investigation forced me to examine our relationship under a microscope. That lens allowed me to see clearly that what I was made of was a reflection of all the gifts my mother had bestowed upon me in her lifetime — a positive attitude, the desire to set and attain goals, resourcefulness and perseverance. Had I not peeled back all the twisted layers of her lifetime, I might have lived the rest of my own not knowing that although our relationship was not perfect by traditional standards, it was perfect in its imperfection.

I would also not have suffered the crushing blow that came from proving there was no killer to blame. My mother had taken her own life. She suffered from an undiagnosed mental illness, and the circumstances of her death fooled everyone into believing she had been the victim of a crime. We had all missed the truth right in front of us.

In the years that followed the establishment of Mother's Day, Jarvis became disenchanted with what she saw as the overcommercialization of the holiday. It had strayed far from her original vision. This Mother's Day, I propose that we pause during our hunt for the perfect flowers, and turn back the clock to the time when Jarvis' Mother's Day was celebrated as she had envisioned and conceived it: a day of reflection and personal thanksgiving to honor our mothers for all they give us in their lifetimes. Each mother, in her humanity and her limitations, does the best she is able to do.

Lauri Taylor is the author ofThe Accidental Truth , which will be released the week of Mother's Day.

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