A series of firsts without my mom
Thursday would have been my mother’s 92nd birthday.
You might think that a language bountiful enough to include words for 150th anniversary (sesquicentennial), to jump or to be pushed out a window (defenestrate) and the thing before the thing before the final thing (antepenultimate) would include a word for so momentous an occasion as a first posthumous birthday, but there is, so far as I know, no such animal.
My mother died May 8, barely three days after coming home from what we had assured her would be her final sojourn in a hospital. From that point on, we – my sister, my nephew and I – promised that she would not have to travel for medical assistance; medical assistance would come to her. The word “hospice” was unavoidable, but, we explained, it was just a word for the shift in her care, not a directive, much less an invitation.
Perhaps she thought otherwise. She had always made up her own mind about things. She came home from the hospital Wednesday night, she began to fade in earnest on Thursday, Friday she was largely silent, Saturday evening she was gone. I think she was simply worn out, not only in body but in spirit.
Much is made on social media of Mother’s Day, in honor of the living, in memory of the dead, particularly in regard to that first stinging Mother’s Day without one’s mother. Mother’s Day this year was May 9, the day after her death: Well, at least we got that one out of the way right away, I thought. Two days later was my birthday, and another one ticked off the list. (I was born on Mother’s Day. “You were quite a present” was my mother’s annual comment on the subject.)
I’ve taken to thinking of these landmarks as the first-withouts.
June 12 is Anne Frank’s birthday. It had long been a habit of mine to to point out to those who consider the Holocaust ancient history that Anne Frank was born in 1929, barely five weeks before my mother.
Which would then lead me to point out that my mother was alive and well, playing computer solitaire, minding the family finances, making the occasional trip to the Theater District or Lincoln Center. This year, though, June 12 came and went and I had nothing much to say on the subject. Another first-without.
Somewhere in there was a noteworthy first-with: the first time after her death she visited me in a dream. We were FaceTime-ing, as I recall, and as we were wrapping up our call she asked me if I was coming to dinner that night. Of course I can’t make it tonight, I was thinking. You’re dead.
The next morning I recounted the dream to my husband, who said, Oh! Next time you absolutely must talk to her about her being dead! She might have a lot to tell you!
As time passes, I think less of my mom’s death (I’ve deleted from my phone the two photos I took, the one as she was dying, the one as she was in death, and filed them away where I can easily find them but won’t accidentally happen upon them), more of her absence, and even more, I’m relieved to note, of her life.
Her name was Diana, by the way. Perhaps you were wondering.
In her youth, she had lettered in swimming. She married my father and navigated an often nettlesome relationship with him till he died last year. She was a capable and dutiful cook. She read incessantly, so it pleased her that I work in publishing because, among other things, it enabled me to feed her voracious book habit. And when, nearly three years ago, she read the bound galley of the book I had written, she gave it the best review I could have hoped for: “It sounds exactly like you.”
There are only a few more noteworthy first-withouts to come: The High Holidays, and reciting, on Yom Kippur, kaddish, the God-hailing prayer for the dead that, we are regularly reminded, makes no mention of death, will be, to put it mildly, resonant. Thanksgiving, I predict, won’t carry much weight. In the past we ate and told family stories. This year we’ll eat and tell family stories; she just won’t be there. Eventually May 8 will come around again, that momentous first-without, and it will have been a year. Not only a year from the day of her death but also Mother’s Day, all in one succinct package. And perhaps a heavy door that has been ajar will, on that day, close somewhat firmly – though not, never, entirely.
In the meantime, as a wise friend noted, “Your mother would not want you to be in pain over her death, but your grief honors her.” And so I continue to grieve, as is my right and responsibility.
And this, I must point out, is its own first-without: the first bit of writing I’ve ever written that she will not have read.