Tomorrow marks ten years without my mom, and I will
admit, I am having some trouble wrapping my brain around it, in part because I
still think about her every day and often still believe she is very close to me and not light years away in the great beyond (wherever everyone goes, if everyone goes anywhere).
This dreaded “decade mark” of being half an orphan was something
I began to think about a couple months ago, for the first time ever as more of “that
time of year” than just an isolated, passing day. I started to re-feel the
pangs of everything – my old, uncertain 28-year-old life, that whole “final summer”
when I fought with her over our usual frustrations while harboring secret guilt
about it because I knew we didn’t have that much time left together. This weekend,
I will admit I unfortunately revisited the horrible feeling of sitting in my
apartment the weekend before she passed away, waiting for calls that kept delivering
increasingly worse news.
Sometime in June this year, I rethought of her last
visit in mid-July, 2004, when my dad and she drove to me from Chicago with a
carful of way-too-big, only-suburban-suitable furniture to help me better
organize my small city apartment. I struggled to balance my 12-hours-a-day-in-the-recording-studio
schedule (I was making an album that seemed very important back then) with
being able to spend enough time with my parents. The only things of substance
we did together were going out to dinner once at my favorite neighborhood
Italian place and watching a VHS copy of Some
Kind of Wonderful to celebrate putting my new, behemoth entertainment
center together. And when she was forced to leave two days early because she
took an unexpected turn for the worse, I remember her telling me in the lobby
of my building, while we were waiting for my dad to bring the car around, “You
know, I’ve really had a pretty good run. I’m OK with this, and you’re all going
to be OK.”
But was she right? This year especially, I’m not so sure.
Usually this August 4 date comes upon me by surprise, and
the day hits me because of a note from my aunt (her sister) or sometimes, just
because I am hand writing the date on a check. I’ve tried each year to do
something special in memoriam, but sometimes the living and non-stop life get
in the way, and that “something special” becomes five minutes of staring at a
wall or, even paltrier than that practice, a quick errand that I pretend is
something she would’ve been relieved I got done (like buying vitamins or
depositing a check I’ve been sitting on for a month at the bank).
The passage of this much time without her is also feeling
rather difficult to accept this year, because this is the year I became conscious
of a troubling fact: I have stopped
remembering what it is like to have a mother. I see other people my age with mothers, and I realize I cannot even comprehend what my life would be like now with mine ... and I feel like an outsider. I wonder daily, "Would she be proud of me?" And then I feel hopeless, as I legitimately can't answer that question. And as icing on that gloomy cake,
I am often not sure my memories of her are accurate, and the sadness of
misremembering hits me as I grab desperately for fading moments that are ever
slipping between my fingers: Did I just imagine her?
Of course, this is a ridiculous question, and not reality.
My mom and I talked literally (and in the real
and not newfangled sense of the word “literally”) every day. She called me sometimes
so many times per day that it got frustrating. If she knew I was out on the
weekends, she used to stay up until I was home, calling into the night between
my cell phone and house phone until I picked up, then pretending she hadn’t
just called a million times when I would finally answer. The last day we talked
was the evening of Friday, July 30. She called me from the hospital to find out
what I was going to watch on TV that night so we could watch it at the same
time. (Incidentally, it was Legally Blonde, which was airing for the first
time on network television.) We hung up after the conversation as if the
talking would pick up where it left off in the morning. Little did I know, she
would go to the ICU the next day, and I would only talk to her one more time (and
only through someone else).
The my-momisms I still use in my daily life, some of which
have become famous among my friends, also affirm she once existed. As one
example, she absolutely delighted in food (which should surprise absolutely no
one who knows this daughter of hers). She loved the wonders of food so much
that she would ask about the food you were eating while you were eating it,
even though she could easily take a bite:
“Is it crispy? Is it crunchy? Is it chewy? What does it taste like?”
Sometimes I still think this was her tactic to get you to offer her a taste
without her having to brazenly ask for it. (Of course, when you were actually sharing
an appetizer or anything with her, she would also repeatedly reject the last
piece of it, claiming she didn’t want it until she knew no one else really wanted it or was looking, and
then she’d eat it.)
While 28 is poised securely in adulthood, I must say with
bluntness that there are many rites of passage that happen (and there is quite
a lot of unpleasantness that also happens) after that age that would benefit
from the love (of both the unconditional and tough varieties) of a mother. I’m definitely not going to go into detail, but
suffice it to say, my road has not been easy. It’s common for all of us to
sugar-coat that motherless feeling by saying, “She’s in a better place” now or “Let’s
celebrate the memories we have,” but you know what? I’m going to be selfish and
say that it definitely would’ve been even easier for me had she just not
died. So this year, I decided to do what I try never to do: Share a little real, albeit brief possibly uncomfortably human insight
into how these last ten years have felt. (And believe me when I say, I am protecting everyone from the nittiest, grittiest details.)
