Dear Mom,
10 years ago we celebrated what would be your last birthday. I can’t remember what we did. Maybe we made your chocolate chip pancakes – adding bananas inside to make them “healthy.” I don’t think anything could top you running your first half marathon at 55 to prove to everyone that, “you still had it.”
What would you have thought about turning 66? I close my eyes and imagine you as a salt and pepper gray complaining over the mountain of birthday cards in the mail. “I feel like a grandma,” you’d say, but I imagine you laughing it off. Your laugh sounds different in my head. I’m no longer sure if it sounds accurate.
The problem is that it’s all just imagining. I have no idea what you’d look like now, or sound like. And that’s what time does. It strengthens love but weakens memory. That person has become nostalgia frozen in time. You’d think a decade would help figure out who you were and who you still are. The past tense hurts the most. “She was so beautiful.” “She would’ve been so proud.” That’s the crux of everlasting grief – what will you continue on as?
One of the hardest struggles was deciding whether or not I still had a mom. When your spouse dies, you become a widow. When a relationship ends, you become an ex. When both your parents die, you become an orphan. But what happens when only one parent dies? What word captures that experience?
People will say, “your mom is always watching over you. She’ll always be your mom.” Yet most of these people will never understand how deafening the silence is when you scream into the universe and hope for a repsonse. Sometimes watching over you isn’t enough. It’s like reading old birthday cards wishing you could peel the “I love yous” off the paper and wrap them around yourself. Staring hard enough at an old photo that they might walk out of the frame and into your arms.
John Irving once wrote, “when someone you love dies, and you’re not expecting it, you don’t lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time.” But what if there are pieces we’re meant to carry for the rest of our lives? What if we’re meant to pick up the pieces of our shattered former life and make something new from them?
As much as our aching hearts yearn, there’s no bringing our loved ones back into existence. What we can do is redefine what their former existence means to us. We find new “is’s” and process the “was’s.” She is the reason why I am kind to strangers. She is my hero. She is the woman I hope my future daughter grows up to be. I try to focus less on the “was.” Not who you were, but who you are.
I don’t know how to explain why I think about you all the time. You feel like more to me than a “was.” A past tense. Because you are here. You are everywhere. You’re in my morning cup of green tea, the kind you used to drink. You play over the speaker at the grocery store when your favorite song comes on. You sit in the fabric of the sweater you gave me despite your smell being long gone. You shine in the faces of every kind mother who has hugged me, loved me, cried with me in your absence. I may never be ready to call you a “was.” Everything I am is because of you.
Today I’ll swap stories with my family and your friends. We’ll have a toast and celebrate what you have given us. Most importantly, whether it’s an “is” or “was,” we’ll think of you.
Happy Birthday Mom.
Leave a Reply