When I was younger, Mother’s Day and my birthday always blurred together with their being a few days apart. For my Bat Mitzvah, our Rabbi instructed me to write my haftorah speech about how my mother had impacted my life at that early age, and to pay reverence to all mothers. In retrospect, it was fitting, as my mother played a key and pivotal role in my life, although back then, it was likely I didn’t comprehend the depth of our bond.
Our universal lot is that our mothers bring us into this world and are often the first to guide us on our journeys. They teach us to eat, to brush our teeth, to get dressed – so many of the basics that we come to take for granted as we evolve in our lives. They are typically the first to acclimate us to school, to remind us to do our homework, and to oversee our networks of friends, extracurricular events, and overall well-being. They are our champions, our disciplinarians, and often, everything in between. Somewhere along the way, our moms get displaced for friends or activities, but with time, our shifting priorities tend to bring us back to our origins.
Growing up, there was the typical I know it all and better than you rebellion but more often than not, my mom was my comrade and partner in crime. During my pre-sleepaway camp summers, we ran errands together, food shopped, went to the beach, and on rainy days, we visited the mall and shared over-sized slices of pizza oozing with cheese from Sbarro’s, in between shopping at all the trendy stores. My mom was always fashionable and loved her big and wild earrings, rings, and necklaces – the more colorful and glitzy, the better. She was a Brooklyn girl, originally from Bensonhurst and full of sass, but kind and loving, too. She wasn’t afraid to speak up when she felt wronged but was also sensitive and patient with the trials and tribulations of a pre-teen and later adolescent girl.
Then there was high school, during which times I was more focused on my friends and hanging out 24/7, but no matter how consumed I was with my buddies, I was never too removed from my family to make time for Saturday night dinners at Lapalina or the Golden Ox – as long as I finished dinner in time to make it out to hang out with my friends for a few hours. Our mother/daughter adventures to Puerto Rico started up when I was in high school; how I loved traveling with my mom, from our days spent at the beach at the Caribe Hilton, to our shopping outings in old San Juan, in which we never skipped a visit to Ralph Lauren and later the Coach store. For dinner, we dined at our regular haunts: The Chart House with its open shutters and warm breezes, and Lotus Flower across the bridge at Condado Plaza.
During my college years, my mom always orchestrated trips for her and my dad to visit me up in Oneonta, taking my college buddies and I out for laughter-filled dinners at Cathedral Farms and brunches at Perkins. Back in New York, there were dinner events with my brothers and our rotating significant others. So much of our time together was over meals; it wasn’t that any of us cared about food so much as we liked to sit around and talk. Wherever my life led me, my mom always made it priority to call daily, write, visit. She made things more fun with her upbeat “life is a beach” attitude.
When she and my dad visited me at sleepaway camp, college, or on the upper east side in Manhattan – their goal to make certain I was happy and safe, that I had a refrigerator full of food, and that I knew that they were there for me, whether that meant they were a phone call or a car ride away. I remember the Thursday nights that I worked full time while pursuing my final graduate degree. I would travel to Brooklyn College for my 6 – 10 pm writing workshops, and often after class, I would sleep over my parent’s house in Mill Basin and watch Seinfeld with my mom, laughing over nonsense before it was time for me to rise and shine super early the next morning and take the bus back to my life in Manhattan.
There were weddings, moves, European holidays, and somehow, my mom and I ended up in Florida – she and my dad in the Boca Raton area, and me in Key West. She often came down to visit me with my father, and once again, the dinner parties prevailed. Everyone who mattered to me in my life knew my mom and her fun and games. She was the first to offer complements on all things serious and all things fun – clothes, hair, makeup, jewelry, television shows – and the first to laugh and make jokes at the table. She sometimes complained about waiters and said the things that we all thought but didn’t dare to articulate. She said it like it was, even if it wasn’t politically correct, but it was hard to get annoyed with her, because her laughter would drown out any protests. Back then, I was what she considered conservative with my always reading and writing demeanor, although looking back, most would be conservative compared to her.
Years later, at 64 years old, my mom, seemingly healthy and vibrant, was diagnosed with cancer. It didn’t seem possible. I was with her and my father when she received the official diagnosis for Acute Myelogenous Leukemia at MD Anderson and when she agreed to submit to a 28-day Protective Environment, or PE, during which time she would receive strong chemotherapy until her neutrophil counts could rise back up to fight the disease. For 28 days, she lived without a shower or flushing toilet and spoke to my dad and I through an intercom while we looked in at her through a glass window. The nearly six years of highs and lows that followed that first month of living with cancer were extreme. But there were a lot of great and fun memories, and yes, we always managed to go out for dinners and to see movies on Sunday nights, too. The only difference now was that much of my mom’s comedy show included snippets about her doctors and PA’s both at MD Anderson and in Florida. She loved to say to her famed doctor at MD Anderson, “Have you found a cure for me yet?”
Throughout the duration of her cancer, my mom chose not to tell anyone outside of our immediate family about her diagnosis. Friends, cousins, distant relatives – no one knew about her struggles, the monthly chemo, and later, the daily platelet and blood transfusions. She didn’t want to have to report about her cancer; she didn’t want it to consume any more time than it already did. Although my mom knew that her end was lurking, she didn’t enjoy her days any less. She lived her life and kept going. It was enough for her to discuss her situation with her doctors, and the other cancer patients that she got to know throughout her tenure at MD Anderson and Boca Regional.
After she passed – a beautiful and sunny mid-May day two weeks after my birthday, and a week after Mother’s Day – I visited the cemetery that my mother was buried in weekly. Sometimes I ran there and sat by her grave in my sweaty run clothes, just as I had sat beside her at the hospital the many times I visited her in the middle of a run prior to work. I didn’t miss a week, ever. It became a weekly ritual for my father, too. It was more of an opportunity for me to shut all else off and to think about my mother in the flesh. Those first few years that she was gone were the toughest. The wound was raw, and I cried over the sheer fact that she was gone, and I was still here. I cried that she had left so soon, and that I had to go on living all the days to come without her friendship, her guidance, her listening ear. Time has a way of toughening us. It has the ability not so much to make us understand, but to enable us to accept: my mother is not coming back. She is in a new place, the next place, and although I am not privy to her life there yet, I can hope and wonder.
Moving to D.C. in July of 2017 was the first big change in my life that my mother was not a part of. How I wished prior to deciding to go that I could call on her to help me to decide the right path to pursue. How I wish she knew my cat, Koko, who brings me so much love and joy. The big and the little are now out of her scope. I can hope she is the all-knowing being that in our not knowing we have bestowed upon the deceased. But I don’t know. I don’t know if she is always with me; what I do know is that so much of who she was is in me and guides me.
The last time I visited her grave, a few weeks back in April, I told her about my life. The words flowed out of me and I found myself explaining how the last few years have unfolded for me. I told her that I finished my first novel, and that I thought she would enjoy it, and then I was telling her about my races, which have given me the time and space I often need to think and feel and just be. “I’ve finished the Keys 100 that heads to Key West, six times.” It made sense to me to tell her specifically about that race, as a few days before she died, prior to getting in my car and driving out to Key Largo, I had sat with her and my dad as she got chemo, debating if I should head south and run the Keys 50 miler, which I had signed up for months prior. She had insisted I leave the hospital and go.
Later, during the race, I felt overwhelmed with an unshakable feeling that her end was coming – and that she knew it, too. I went on to tell her about my career. How I am grateful that my dad is okay. The tears poured down my face as I spoke to my mother’s grave, and at some point, I noticed people not too far from me where I sat on the bench beside her grave in the cemetery. I didn’t mind if they overheard me. I was sharing the story of my life with the person who gave me life. It was the first time in a long time that losing her was deep and raw, and I needed to feel it, to be reminded that there was and is so much more than my daily rush, do, achieve. There is also loss, and love so deep that can’t be separated by death.
Mother’s Day is no longer the day it once was for me. Now I understand how it must have been for my mom, who had lost her own mom while I was still a young girl: it was a day that reminded her of the loss she lived with daily. Holidays, birthdays, life events remind me that death is real. People don’t come back from the grave. They are with us in some capacity, but they are also absent. This is the path of loss – we lose, we grieve, we go on, hoping that our paths will intersect at some later date.