I’m beginning to answer my own silent question.
My wife’s mom passed away a long time ago, and she still wrestles with the memories. I knew I wasn’t smart enough to fully understand it until it happened to me. But the question always has been there: What is it like when your own mother dies?
I’m not the sort of person who shows emotions very easily. A lifelong trait forced on me by, I suppose, myself. I enjoy life and people and things in general. But I never made a big hoop-de-do about showing it. That’s one reason I never liked birthdays or anything that put me at center stage of the “How is he going to react now?” show.
I’ll deliver a class lecture, make a public speech, emcee an event, act in a play, even do a song-and-dance or a bit of standup comedy. But they all are prepared events, which is a lot different than spontaneously showing emotion.
We just passed May 17, which would have been my mother’s 94th birthday had she lived just another 15 weeks or so, and are coming up fast on her wedding anniversary and what I jokingly used to tell her was the best day of her life, my birthday. That cycle of “firsts” that everyone goes through for the first year of a loved one’s passing provides its own roller-coaster ride of physical ups and downs, emotional highs and lows, real and metaphorical laughs and tears. My brother, her only other child, and I talk about it from time to time.
To some degree I suppose that offers its own comfort. While I may have wanted her to last a few years longer, she wasn’t interested. Her last few years were a time of physical pain, emotional fatigue and a desire to, as she put it, “get this over with, already.”
I do miss her, of course. But I don’t think of her in the shape she was in when she wanted to call it quits. I think of the vibrant, tomboyish redhead who liked sports and dancing and liked to dress up and go out for drinks and dinner. She was maddeningly stubborn at times, fiercely loyal at others. She was a nurturing mother but could be part of “the other necktie” school of parenting (*) if you didn’t call her on it.
But now that I’m beginning to put a tiny bit of it in perspective, that’s what made her who she was. Everyone saw her in a different light. In her later years, that light was dimming and only the negatives were shining through. That’s all clearing away now — slowly, surely and to my great relief.
( * ) A young man receives a gift of two neckties from his mother, a woman known for being both generous and extremely controlling. To please her, he selects one of the ties and wears it to her house for Sunday dinner. As he walks in, she takes one look at him, crosses her arms and says, “So, you didn’t like other tie?
