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Day One: Monthly Letter
Dear Readers, It feels like much more than a month has passed since I last wrote to you. Although the calendar tells me otherwise, it's difficult for me to believe the way my life has changed in the last thirty days. My mother, truly one of the word''s best women, died on May 6th and nothing will ever be the same again. (Strange how I can type those words and still not believe them.) In 44 days, we went from diagnosis to goodbye and, to be honest with you, we're all still in shock.
May 13, 2000 - Saturday The memory is so sharp and clear that I had to run up here and capture it. Time: early evening, late June 1969. I am almost 19 years old. Place: Elmhurst, Queens (Roy and I were home on leave from Omaha) Players: My father and me Background Information: My mother and I had had a series of ugly fights during the three weeks Roy and I were home on leave. [He was in the Air Force.] I felt alienated from everything and everyone in New York City and couldn't wait to go back west where we belonged. I believed my mother was trying to cling to me and I was having none of it. Roy and I had spent the past week out at my aunt Mona's beach house in Rocky Point (north shore of Long Island) and had returned to Queens with great reluctance to say goodbye and drive back to Omaha. My mother had apologized to me on the phone while we were away but my heart remained turned against her. Daddy and I were sitting in the living room. I don't know where anyone else was. He repeated to me what he'd said on the phone a few days earlier.
"Be kinder to your mother," he said. "You'll never meet a more generous human being in your life."
I remember looking at him, thinking he had lost his mind. Generous? Albert Schweitzer kind of generous? What was he talking about? She was just a mother. My mother. Human, which meant possessed of many faults both great and small. She did the usual mother things - which usually involved making my life better -- but wasn't that what mothers were supposed to do? After all, I didn't ask to be born, right? He said it one more time. "Your mother is the most generous person you'll ever meet." Yeah, Daddy. Right. Whatever. You go on believing that. I, in my not-quite-nineteen-years-of-wisdom, know better. Cut to today, 31 years later. I see my mother walking toward the hotel elevator, back straight and tall, the cane present but unnecessary. She looks exhausted. She doesn't know I'm watching her, that I see her in this unguarded moment. She looks her age and my heart aches in a way I can't come close to explaining. She presses the up button. I approach. She turns, sees me, and her beautiful face suddenly lights up with such pure joy that the years fall away and I see her the way she looked when I was six and sixteen and twenty-six and I see all that she did and is doing for all of us and I suddenly think of Daddy's words from long ago and I get it. Really get it. You were right, Daddy. She is all of that and more to us. I'm going downstairs now to tell him.
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May 2001
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June 2001
There's so much I could tell you about my mother but right now the words simply won't come.
They will one day, I know, but right now the pain is still too new, too raw. I would, however,
like to share a journal entry I made Mother's Day weekend 2000 that will tell you how wonderful
she was and always will be.
