Happy National Lost Sock Memorial Day

At 16 years old, I told my mom that I never wanted to have children. With a disappointed look, she said, “Oh, I’m sure you’ll change your mind! You’d be such a good mother.” Fast forward 24 years when my over-achieving siblings had collectively gifted her with seven grandchildren, I asked her if I was off the hook. “There’s still time,” she said with a laugh.

I am trying to decide if I should leave the house this weekend, when I know I will likely be regaled with multiple greetings of “Happy Mother’s Day!” Most of the time I simply smile and say “Thank you.” Why bother to point out to well-intended if clueless people that I am not a mother, that my grandmother died 25 years ago and that my mother has been gone 20 years this month and that I’m in a really grouchy mood?

Every year, starting in late April, I start to feel depressed for no apparent reason. It creeps up, engulfing me, and I always think I should get some Prozac or go back to therapy. Then it hits me: on my 45th birthday, my mother had the massive stroke that would kill her three days later. She had invited me down to visit for the weekend of Mother’s Day and my birthday the adjacent Monday, just as it was the year I was born. I didn’t get there until noon Sunday, having attended a friend’s theatre performance Saturday evening. I’d bought her a camera for Mother’s Day, but it wasn’t the one she wanted. She wanted a point and click, but my stupid boyfriend at the time, a photographer, had bullied me into buying something more complicated. I still have the last picture she ever took, a candid of Dad looking completely nonplussed.

We made salmon on the grill for dinner. When I asked if she had any wine, she said there was a half-empty bottle of Chardonnay from Christmas out in the garage refrigerator, blithely unaware that it would now be undrinkable. So she sacrificed the last bit of red wine she kept in the fridge, an enormous bottle of Lambrusco. She said that she was drinking a glass a day because red wine was supposed to be good for her heart. I didn’t want to take her last glass, but she said, don’t be silly, drink it. Later that night, we sat in the living room and I asked her if she was game to watch the latest episode of “The Sopranos.” She was a sport, watched it with me and was absolutely horrified by the language and the violence.

On my birthday, I took her to a doctor’s appointment and afterward we drove by my grandparents’ empty home so I could take a walk through. We had just buried my grandpa the previous December; the house was emptied and waiting to be sold. Mom stayed in the car while I wandered through the home in which I had spent so many Thanksgivings, Easters and Christmases; I could still decorate it in my mind with their solid Ethan Allen furniture, the much-used pool table in the family room, my grandpa’s ham radio set, the blue bedroom I slept in when I stayed over, the pink bedroom where my grandma kept all her sewing paraphernalia, the organ in the front parlor, always sticky with grandchildren’s jammy fingerprints. Now it was nothing but walls, floors and a few appliances. Still, I whispered words of love to each room and to the grandparents I felt still lingered and closed the door for the final time.

Mom and I sat at the kitchen table to eat lunch and I noticed her eyes kept nodding shut. But she cut us a piece of cake from the night before and out of nowhere, started talking about how bad she felt that when she was a girl, she was “manipulative” to try to escape punishment. She told me how grandma used to make her cut the switch off the tree that she would be beaten with. I said she shouldn’t feel bad~~all children are manipulative in order to protect themselves; that I was very sorry to hear that grandma, the grandma I had cherished, had done that to her. She seemed comforted by my words, and I found myself wondering why my normally private mother was sharing such a painful and intimate memory with me. Later that afternoon, I said I’d take them out to dinner for my birthday before I headed back to Chicago and Dad suggested the China Buffet. He drove his electric wheelchair out to the van where I helped him up to the passenger seat and took the chair back into the house. After dinner, I went to the house to retrieve it while Mom hoisted Dad’s folded portable chair into the back of the van. We all retreated to the family room to chat for a few minutes before hugging our goodbyes.

I was no more than twenty minutes up Highway 57 when my cell phone rang; it was my boyfriend calling from Chicago. He told me my mother had had a stroke and I needed to turn around and go back. I told him that wasn’t possible~~I had just left a few minutes ago and she was fine. But he reiterated, slowly, as to a child, that I needed to drive back to Marion and to meet my father at the hospital. Numb with disbelief, I turned around at the next exit.

The next few days come to me in bits and pieces. My sisters and I taking turns sleeping on the vinyl chair and the cold hard floor in my mother’s ICU room. Watching “Cabaret” on the television. The nurse asking about her Sjogren’s syndrome and how Mom was able to spell it perfectly, even with her blocked brain. My taking this as a sign she was going to be all right. The concerned eyes of the neurologist when she told us “it was a big stroke.” The nurse telling me the dark brown in Mom’s urine bag was just due to her trying to pull out her catheter. The shadow of doubt at this explanation that I flicked away. Leaving Wednesday night to come back to Chicago for clean clothes, a cat check and a few days at work before coming back Friday night to help her transition to rehab. Kissing her, telling her I loved her, her telling me she loved me and to drive carefully.

That was the last moment I saw my mother alive.

Back in Chicago, I went for a run around 11:00 am. In 2001 I jogged with a clunky old portable CD player that skipped the CD every time I went fast, which wasn’t terribly often. I popped in “Les Miserables” because it was my mother’s favorite. I was praying to God while I jogged, a God with whom I was not in frequent contact, to please please watch over my mother, to comfort and heal her. Tears started pouring down my face and as I asked again for God to please be with my mother, the unsolicited thought “She is already with God,” turned around several times like a cat and then curled up and settled squarely in the middle of my mind.  It stopped me in my tracks but I sloughed it off as an overly dramatic fiction of my frightened mind. She was only 67. She was going to survive.

I worked in my Arlington Heights office until 9:00 that night. When I switched my phone back on after my last client left, the display told me I had seven new messages, and my stomach seized with dread. Each message~~from my father, my brother-in-law, a sister, and I can’t remember who else~~said the same thing: “Call home.” I called my father, who answered on the first ring and told me that my mother was dying. She had slipped into a coma at 11:30 that morning.

11:30 that morning. I slid down the bank of windows on the south end of my office and sat on the floor, my body shaking with waves of emotion and sobs choking off my breath. Somehow I had known the very moment she slipped into her coma. Is there a psychic string that connects a first-born to her mother so that she feels the tug when her mother leaves this world? I would not get there in time to say goodbye. I should never have left. I should have driven down as soon as my instincts told me she was gone. I should be there now to hold her hand and help her out of this world the way she helped me in. Why the hell did I turn my phone off? Why didn’t I pay attention to all the signs I’d been given? When I got home I began stuffing clothes into a suitcase and phoned the hospital. The ICU nurse said she would get one of my sisters. My sister Jennie answered and in a hollow voice told me, “She’s gone. Just now.” It was 10:42 p.m. She and my youngest sister Toni had been there with her at the end.

In the years to follow, I suffered brutal feelings of guilt for all the many ways I had failed my mother: I had not come down on Saturday night as she hoped I would, I had not bought her the camera she wanted, I had made her watch the filthy Sopranos, I had let her lift my Dad’s portable wheelchair up into the van, I had not been there for her when she breathed her last, I had turned off the ringer on my phone while I saw clients, and the worse offense of all: I had drunk her last glass of red wine. I tortured myself for years with the belief that had I not drunk that last glass of the fizzy Italian red, she would be alive today. My father wondered aloud if it had been the sodium-laden Chinese food that did it, which whacked me with remorse for inviting them to dinner. I was beset with a litany of “what-ifs” that drove me into a pit of despair. Not my own or anyone else’s logical explanation that not one glass of wine, nor hoist of the chair, nor sweet and sour pork nor even a combination of all three would have brought on a massive, lethal embolism.  Mom had high cholesterol, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes and atrial fibrillation, all of which were the prime suspects.

My mother once said she thought I would have the worst time of it when she died because I did not have children. She felt having children was one’s best defense against loss. I cannot measure the profundity of my siblings’ pain against my own, because I know how much they were all suffering, but I can attest to the fact that her death pitched me into a year of crazy grief. I went back to therapy, took medication, and cried myself into daily dehydration. I could feel the twisting and turning in my brain, trying to make sense of a senseless loss. I went through the motions of the year without tasting, smelling, hearing or caring. I had moments of wanting to die as well, although I had no strength, energy or intent to accelerate that process. As the shock wore off and the anger and grief paled, what was left was zombie-like guilt that I just couldn’t kill. I know now that I simply could not conceive that my mother would die. When I left the hospital, I had complete faith that she would be going to rehab on Saturday. When I went to visit that weekend, I fully expected that it would simply be one of many weekends spent together in the future.

So tomorrow is the 20th Mother’s Day I have spent without my own mother. My guilt has eased a bit (not completely), and while my grief remains, it is at a lower pitch. I know there are many others out there who suffer through Hallmark holidays like Mother’s Day~~those who have lost their own mothers, who have lost children, who have been estranged from their children or their mothers, whose mothers were or are painfully bad mothers, mothers who have children lost to drugs, alcohol, jail, or mental illness and vice versa. Mothers whose children have been alienated from them through no fault of their own. Adult children whose mothers are lost to dementia. Women who wanted children and couldn’t have them. Those who never knew their birth mother. And the list goes on. Many of us will walk into the grocery store and see the flowers and the card racks and the banners crowing “Happy Mother’s Day!” and will not feel happy about it at all. We will want to go back home, pull up the covers and wait for Monday to put us out of our misery. When thoughtless strangers cheerily wish us “Happy Mother’s Day” we might or might not tell them to fuck off.

I suggest that those of us who cannot bring ourselves to celebrate and would rather poke our eye out with a big stick rather than see legions of happy mothers and children eating Eggs Benedict together give ourselves permission to not only not celebrate, but not feel bad that we don’t. After all, we don’t all celebrate Tet or Kwanzaa, but we don’t feel hurt that others do. There are all kinds of other holidays we can commemorate! Today is also National Lost Sock Memorial Day (May 9th), Thursday is National Frog Jumping Day (May 13th), and my own personal favorite, National Dance Like a Chicken Day, coincidentally lands on my birthday (May 14th). We don’t have to take anything away from all the people for whom Mother’s Day is precious and enjoyable. We can always honor the memories of our lost loved ones in our own ways. We can even go back to bed and mainline Netflix and Cherry Garcia.

Or we can get a bottle of Lambrusco and Dance Like A Chicken. It’s our choice.