My birthday approaching; lilt missing; everything slumps.
No card will come from my mother this year.
I spent yesterday visiting with the dying, shadowing a hospice music therapist in conjunction with a spectacularly ill-timed consulting project. What was I thinking?
Today I feel traumatized, my thoughts turbulent and sad, a grey vortex of bereavement and regret commingled with aching, yawning, tangled pain. Back in it: the loss of her, and how hard her final years were, and what it was for her to be that broken wren with ravaged lungs who kept pushing that walker with her face turned so brightly to the world, and the cruel facts of all that she lost and suffered in her life. And the many ways I failed her.
The loss of her, but more, too: With my mother gone, all of what used to seem so large and expansive and certain—the historical framework of her life, and mine as her daughter—now seems tenuous. I feel cut adrift from the history that was hers, the stories of her childhood, the sense of a living connection to her large and vibrant family. The father whose shtetl-to-tenement Jewish immigrant story made all the more remarkable his rise to urbane mid-century orchestra leader. The mother whose German pioneer parents ran a large farm while raising eight children to be professional musicians. All this now seems increasingly vague, disconcertingly abstract.
I feel a slipping away of the connecting threads, of the certainty of enduring ties, of everyday engagement with what my mother experienced and knew. The ordinary verities of her life: What does any of it matter now? I feel compelled to declaim things she knew—the experiences and memories that were organic to my mother, that came to seem inseparable from her: Here is the street of snug 1920s houses where spirited Aunt Anna lived, where eccentric Uncle Ed once tipped over in a wing chair while listening to John Phillip Sousa music on the Victrola. Here is the garden center where Elsie, my grandmother, briefly worked after my grandfather’s death, pruning azaleas and potting geraniums in a green smock over her plaid Pendleton jacket. Here is the slipshod bungalow where Aunt Mame ended up after losing her home to unscrupulous bankers in 1935, here is a trendy boutique where once there was a corner drugstore, soda fountain and all, owned by the parents of my mother’s teenage pal Rose.
The entwining of my own experiences with my mother’s from the time my tiny heart beat just beneath her large one. All that I came to know through her stories, to see through her eyes. The wistful loneliness I feel when the waiter brings bread in a cafe, my mother’s voice in my head singing “le beurre!” as she never failed to do when passing the butter dish; then I’m recalling her much-told (if improbable) tale of how she failed high school French because, having also enrolled in Spanish, she’d mistakenly completed her French exam in, as she put it, “not parlez-vous-Francais, but Ess-span-yol!”
The many things I recall and know—and am—because I am my mother’s daughter. The weave of history, of memory; a shared tapestry, and now a bewildering inheritance. If I am inseparable from her, now what? No daughter of my own; what, then, of my mother’s legacy; what, then, of my own?
Most of all, this: With my mother gone, will the skein unravel? Will the threads hold?
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Every year on my birthday, my mother would make a big show of retelling—in a marveling tone, with gestural flourishes—the story of our first shared experience in the world. How it was a gloriously beautiful sunny October day, warm enough for her to don oversized pedal-pushers with her maternity blouse. How she knew in mid-afternoon, while enjoying coffeecake with my grandmother, that I was about to make my debut, and how my grandmother drove her to St. Barnabas hospital in her Plymouth, all the way exhorting my mother to “hold on, sis, I’m no midwife!” How I was an easy birth, out of her womb in a flash and nestled contentedly in her arms by 4:30, such a happy baby; how she cooed “my darling, darling daughter” in a ray of gold-glinted autumn sun beaming in the hospital window.
It’s because of my mother. I can’t help but think it. Thirty degrees in mid-October, the once-plucky geraniums now hanging their heads alongside a snow shovel better suited to December. The ash trees curling their leaves in shock or sorrow, color draining from the late-summer coneflowers and the weigela that only last week rebloomed on the front-yard hill.
Frost on the heirlooms; thyme frozen; the remaining harvest gone. I suffer the unseasonable chill, bemoan its insults and losses, but in truth I’m not surprised by it. My own roots heaving. This October altogether so much colder.
