By Debbie Kelley | Denver Gazette
Unspoken words flowed from head to heart to paper Thursday, with messages that are being sent from Colorado Springs to communities across the nation, or from earth to heaven.
As Mother’s Day approaches, homeless people staying at the city’s largest emergency shelter and support campus wrote greeting cards with personal sentiments expressing thanksgiving, fond memories, forgiveness, regret, repentance and above all, their love to the women who gave them life.
“I most want to tell her that we miss her so much,” said Sherry Kirkendall, who for the second year will observe Mother’s Day without her mom, who also was homeless at the time of her death in February 2024.
“We were close,” she said, tearfully. “It’s been kind of tough. She was a rock, a foundation for me.”
The Mother’s Day card-signing event at Springs Rescue Mission was designed to help people working their way out of homelessness, addiction, unemployment and struggles with mental health to reconnect, heal scabbed wounds and perhaps reunite.
In the card she signed, Kirkendall told her mom things she couldn’t say when she was alive but has carried with her.
“She was sick. We didn’t know when she was going to go. We didn’t think it would happen when it did,” Kirkendall said. “I’ve been trying to process all the emotions.”
A client named Trish said she talks to her deceased mom all the time in her mind, and writing a Mother’s Day card felt like an extended conversation.
A steady trickle of people staying at the shelter and working their way through transitional housing and employment programs picked out a card from a table, filled it out and placed it in a decorative box. Envelopes with addresses were being stamped and mailed that day.