Dear Mom,
It’s been over 7 years since you passed from this life, but I think of you, in some way large or small, every day. I know that time, as it mercifully scourges away the deep pain of loss, also sometimes dulls the sharp edges and brilliant colors of memory, but I can still see your face in my mind’s eye. I see you, in the bloom of just-married 1950’s youth with your Mona-Lisa smirk from the old photos on my living room wall. I remember you, when decades had given you weight and jowls and arthritic joints, and your legs would no longer carry you. Your words and thoughts sometimes turned dark and bitter then, but your pale blue eyes were still crystal-bright and snapping with fire. I think of how dementia came creeping up on us all in the last few years, stealing little bits of your cognition, your memories, scrambling names and dates and colors and events. I wish I could take back the exasperated sighs, the “Don’t you remember?” the helpless confusion I leveled at you – you when you were slipping and needed most of all a reassuring hand to hold – before we had a diagnosis that made it understandable – horrible, but understandable.
But I won’t drown in that guilt and sorrow – just as I didn’t want for you to dwell on mistakes made, hugs that might have been given, games that were never played. What I want for you to know most is that I love you, and that my children will know you, despite the fact that you died before they were born. I was seven weeks along with our first child when the fatal heart attack claimed you, and we hadn’t told anyone about the pregnancy yet. But when we made it to your bedside at the hospital, and I whispered those words, I think you knew. Even though you were intubated and couldn’t speak, I think you understood. And I want you to know all the wonderful, silly, sarcastic, anachronistic things I share with my babies, for you, so that even though they never got to meet you, some part of you can live in them.
I’ll tell them – when there’s a little rain while the sun shines, “the devil’s getting married.” If we have so much, too much of something, we’ve got “more than Carter’s got liver pills.” If I’m incredibly hungry, my “stomach thinks my throat’s been cut.” Your grandchildren are already “thick as thieves.” I’ll introduce them to the Thin Man movies. I’ll screen for our kids It’s a Wonderful Life and White Christmas and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and just for spunk remind them that everything Fred Astaire did, Ginger did, backwards, and in heels. I’ll show them this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zcIe09WdSM because it is everything anyone who aspires to dance ever should know. If someone is in particularly dire straits, I might say they have “one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel.” I’ll make sure they laugh at the absurd and themselves in equal measure, and that they are as deeply loyal to family and friends as you were.
Your granddaughter’s middle name is Rose, for you, like the roses in memento mori permanently inked on my back (even though you hated my tattoos). But perhaps the story that will stay with my children the most is the one that lived in my imagination, the one that I wrote in the baby-childhood diary I keep for E. When I was small, you told me that all the sweet babies’ souls wait patiently in Heaven, and when they are ready to be born they board a beautiful golden boat that carries them down to earth to be wedded to their tiny bodies so they might meet their new parents. As silly and fanciful as it sounds, it brings me great comfort to know that when you died, you were there in Heaven, standing by that golden boat, and it was your gentle hand that put E’s soul on the seat, and guided her down to us.
I love you and miss you Mom – now and always.
