On Mother's Day ...

Every year, obviously, I think about my mom on Mother's Day. It's hard to believe it's been almost six years since I last spoke with her (she passed away on August 4, 2004), and sometimes I get concerned that I'm going to forget her voice and other nuances (both irritating/frustrating and positive). I miss her every day and am constantly frustrated not to have her input as I face major life events (even though her input was sometimes completely unsolicited and a little unwelcome).

I never thought I'd live out my 30s without a mom, but here I am, doing it, and somehow managing (though it's not the same). Below is a copy of the speech I read at her memorial service:

Everyone close to my mom has been talking about different ways they have felt her presence in the past couple weeks. Each time something extraordinary happens, whether a steady series of phone calls with no one at the other end, the jingling of the wind chimes on the back porch when the weather is completely still, or a spectacular meteor shower, she gets the credit for it. These signs have been great comforts to people who held her so close for so long, signals from some force greater than all of us to indicate that no one really just disappears when she ceases to be in corporeal form. I will admit it’s been really difficult for me to find her in those comet tails, or hear her favorite concerto in the scattered notes of the chimes, or even sense that she is anywhere at all. At first this made me feel incomplete in some way, as if I was the only one who was disconnected from her, from the world, maybe even from the spiritual powers greater than myself. Instead of having tiny bits of her that appeared everywhere, I found myself missing her in all the places she used to be. But, then I realized that my thinking was just not small enough, and, that, if the signs were too big, and if all of them were for everyone, they would not fit her style at all. In life, she was much more constant to me, and to so many others, so much steadier and quieter than a flash of light or a brief burst of sound. And, while it was often her method to be as vocal as possible about her opinions, the best parts of her were beautifully subtle. The only sign I received was several days after my mom’s death, the night of the day we committed her ashes to the columbarium. I had been sleeping in the same room all week, and, put down my suitcase briefly on the bed to get something out of it. When I lifted it again, there was a tiny sow bug on the bedspread. Sow bugs plagued the house I grew up in, but had rarely, if ever, been spotted in the new house my parents bought after my sister and I were far removed from the neighborhood. In fact, my mom caught me eating a sow bug (because my sister had dared me to, of course) in the backyard, near the sand box when I was about four years old. It was one of her favorite stories to tell as often as possible whenever the topic of bugs came up throughout our lives together, and, the fact that she would send one as a messenger to the guest room just as I was feeling emptiest couldn’t have been more fitting. And it was just enough to reconnect me and remind me of how sometimes frighteningly omniscient she always was. My mom had an involvement in my life that verged on the supernatural. And even when I went from seeing her every day to seeing her several times a year because of the distance between us, her physical presence was replaced by sometimes obscene amounts of phone calls to work, home and my mobile phone that increased in frequency when her psychic, motherly sense kicked in and convinced her I was doing something dangerous. Strangely enough, she was much better at knowing when I was trying to get myself into trouble when I was no longer geographically close than she ever was when I lived under the same roof, or in the same town, even though I think that was just because she had so many more worries floating through her mind that she had a better chance of eventually getting it right. I got away with much less trouble once I moved on and became an independent adult, and, there was even an unspoken 1 a.m. curfew when I moved to New York. If I didn’t pick up her phone call, she would call into the night, alternating phones until I did, without leaving a message. It was as if the cord had reappeared and strengthened and, unbeknownst to me, I was feeding her silent stories of exactly what I was doing at every moment. The reward for my willingness to go along with all these check-ins was all the calls from the mall or the car or the living room couch when my dad was out of town to tell me tidbits of gossip or to painstakingly describe a pair of pajamas she was thinking about impulse-buying me or to ask me what I was going to watch on television so she could watch the same thing and feel like in some way we weren’t as far away as we were. In attempting to prepare some words to say today, I found myself suddenly in a line from a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke. I’ve always had it in the back of my mind, but, it has never made so much sense to me until now: “Be in advance of all parting, as though it was behind you like the winter that is just going.” When my mom first found out she was sick, her first instinct was to live just as she always had, if not even more than before, and to continue to understate her importance in everyone’s life by not making the illness a spectacle, by not constantly anticipating saying good-bye. I think at first, when she was so suddenly absent, I felt that maybe because we didn’t daily acknowledge the giant monster she was facing, we weren’t prepared for her death , and worse, that she wasn’t prepared and had spent years trying to pretend that monster didn’t exist. But now I see that she was just following the theory behind that poem’s line, and her own style. She had put the future behind her, out of the way, so we could all live the best and most unlimited lives we could. My mom made sure the weight of the eventual farewell never got in the way of the present task of living, and that her life made more noise than her death. Because we were able to live the present that she wanted, now I feel that we can have no regrets about the past.