Dear Mom,

Hi Mom, Happy Mother’s Day!

Remember how the year I was born, 1956, my birthday was the day after Mother’s Day?

And then the year you died, 2001, my birthday was the day after Mother’s Day?

Wow. Way WAY too soon, but well played, Mom.

This year, 2023, Mother’s Day and my birthday fall on the same day. Today I will be as old as you ever got to be.

I think about how scared you were after the stroke you had on the night of my 45th birthday and my heart still breaks. I imagine how I would feel should a similar fate befall me. Perhaps I will make it to 68; perhaps I won’t. There’s no way of knowing, right?

I remember feeling how incredibly cheated you were and how cheated I felt. Had you lived, you would turn 90 years old this summer. Since your death, I have had many dreams of you and I have had many experiences that made me feel that somehow you were trying to reach me to tell me you were all right.

Do you remember the time the clock radio in my bedroom went off spontaneously at 4:00 in the afternoon and played a Chopin piece, your favorite?

I hadn’t set that alarm in years.

Simultaneously, a music box Cammie gave me after you died started playing “Hi Lily, Hi Lo,” that song you used to sing to us while you played the piano.

The pin was not pulled out.

How in the hell did you do that??

The day I drove my rental car to First Encounter Beach in Eastham, Massachusetts, where I was attending a professional conference, was also the day you would have turned 68 had you lived~~July 30th, 2001, just a little over two months after you died. The radio station the car was tuned to when I set out from Boston was playing lovely old-timey music and I didn’t change the channel. As I pulled up to the beach, the song “Que Sera, Sera,” sung by Doris Day, came on. I have never before or since heard that particular song played on the radio.

Of course you remember when you and me and Cammie and Jennie sang that song at a Mother-Daughter banquet so long ago and you knew I would too. That song was released exactly one week after my birth, for one more level of O.M.G! As I sat watching a spectacular sunset, listening to this song on what should have been your 68th birthday, tears streaming down my face, I just knew you were right there with me.

And the night after your funeral, I was fast asleep at a Motel 6 in Marion, Illinois. At exactly midnight, I felt a hand cup the left side of my face, warm and loving. I woke up, sat up, and called out, “Mom?” No one was there except my boyfriend, fast asleep beside me. But of course you were there. Were you comforting me? I know I was a hot mess.

During the conference, which was about spirituality and the counseling experience, I had a dream that you were dead but were coming back to life. When your beautiful eyes fluttered open and you tried to speak, I realized that your lips were sewn shut, so I took a pair of tiny nail scissors and carefully clipped the stitches so as not to hurt you. When the last stitch fell away, you looked at me and said, “Don’t lose your voice.” And then you died all over again. I wondered if you felt you had lost yours as well.

I know what you were trying to tell me. You were telling me that I had to leave my boyfriend, weren’t you? You were telling me in the best possible way without actually saying what I should do. You were still looking out for me. And within two months after that dream, I asked him to move out. Your death taught me that life was too short to stay in a relationship that held me back from feeling respected, happy and fulfilled.

22 years after you left us, I still feel your presence. I find myself telling myself to stand up straight, to floss my teeth, to suck in my gut, to use my voice. I hear your words cutting through the bullshit I sometimes tell myself and I hear you saying you always thought I was special. I think about how you didn’t want to die; weren’t ready to die and how your life was cut so cruelly short and I do my best to use my days as fully as possible, to not waste them or stay in bad situations. I won’t make the same choices you would make, but I will always honor the life that was taken from you by trying to live a life you would be proud of and do some things that you didn’t get the chance to do.

Sometimes I still cannot believe you’re gone. Other days I feel your loss like a knife in my ribs.

But I somehow know that you’re not far away. And today is the day, 67 years ago, when you first snuggled me in your arms and told me you loved me, even though I’d put you through 36 hours of labor and cracked your tailbone.

Mom, I’m sorry I still don’t go to church and I still drop too many F-bombs. But I’m also still voting Democrat and giving money to good causes. I do hospital corners when I make the bed. I bought a RAV 4 in your memory since that’s the car you said you wanted to get next. And when that one went kaput, I bought another RAV. Feel free to hang a ride anytime.

I can never thank you enough for putting up with me, for being interested in what happened at the dentist, for all the great food, for loving me without smothering me, for witnessing my many epic mistakes without shaming me and for disciplining me without breaking me. Thank you for nurturing my love of theatre and music and literature. Thank you for awakening my interest in politics and civic responsibility.

A few months before you died, I believe it was Easter Day, I called you and was boo-hooing about my awful boyfriend and you were gently encouraging me to think about leaving him. I said that I was afraid if I left, at the advanced age of 45,  I’d never have another love in my life. You very reassuringly told me about a friend of yours who found love in her 50’s and that she had “ten good years with the man until he got Alzheimer’s” and I laughed so hard I may have wet myself. Thank you. That busted me out of my funk.

I want you to know that while life hasn’t been easy, I’m okay. I hope you are too. If there’s anything in particular you’d like me to do, or you’d just like to check in, give me a sign and I’ll do my best. The alarm clock is on the dresser in the back bedroom; but you probably already know that. I’d even go to church if you really wanted me to; I can’t promise I’d stay awake during the sermon, but I promise not to throw spitballs from the balcony. Church isn’t the same without you being in the choir singing “Oh Holy Night.”

I love you, Mom, and I miss you every day. Say hi to Grandma and Grandpa and give Dad a noogie from me. I miss them too. I’m going to let you go for now, but don’t go far, okay?

See you in my dreams,

Love you,

G