The Longing That Doesn’t Go Away

My mother’s birthday is Thursday. I have both dreaded it and waited for it. I don’t know why. She would’ve been seventy-seven this year, so it’s not really a milestone. She has been gone almost eight years, so it’s not like it is my first year without her.

I can’t even say that it’s grief that catches me anymore. It’s a longing, not unlike the longing I have for my Dad, who passed away when I was twenty-two. Even now after twenty-four years, I catch myself yearning to tell him a joke and hear him laugh. He had a fantastic laugh, that was something like a cross between a giggle and kid who just got caught doing something naughty.

The yearning I have for my mother is different, though. Maybe it’s because I had her sixteen years longer than I had my Dad. Maybe it’s because I really got to know her as an adult and as a mother myself. We had longer to bond in ways I didn’t have with my father. I was barely an adult when he died, and had been away at school for the last four years of his life.

Maybe it’s also because over the last sixteen years I had her, we weathered so many losses together. In the years after my father died, we lost my grandmother, aunts, uncles, and even a cousin.

And then there was my brother. She constantly cared for him, enabled him, worried about him, supported him.

As we lost family, I still had her. I still had someone I could go to for advice on everything from financial matters to parenting. I still had a connection to my past.

Until I didn’t.

Nothing can prepare you for being pulled into a room away from everyone else in the waiting room and being told that the doctors are “having trouble restarting your mother’s heart” after open heart surgery.

We were somewhat prepared when Dad died. He had cancer. He had been fighting it for four months. The doctors had told Mom to call us all home because he probably wasn’t going to survive the week, and he didn’t. No matter how unexpected death still seems in an instance like that, there’s still a part of you that has mentally prepared and run through the scenarios, even if you’re still telling yourself it won’t happen.

There’s no preparing for sending your mother in to have life-saving surgery that everyone from Barbara Bush to Robin Williams to your own grandmother have had, and survived a long time afterward, only to have a nurse come in and tell you that basically the doctor is going to come in and tell you your mother didn’t survive this life-saving surgery and she is now dead.

I mean, is that supposed to soften the blow?

My only connection to my father, my grandparents, and my aunt was gone. My brother doesn’t count, because he hasn’t really been in my life since I was fifteen years old, and if I’m being brutally honest, he hasn’t been a part of my life (other than inflicting trauma on it) since I was around ten years old. My mother was it.

And she was gone. I was parentless. I was only thirty-eight.

This is the new normal.

I have learned to live with it, as one does. I have learned to rely on myself more, trusting my own decisions, and leaning on good friends when I really need to.

It’s true, you know, what they say about good friends becoming family. The cousins I grew up with that were practically like siblings dropped out of my life in a hasty retreat after she passed. But my friends formed a circle and held me tighter. THAT’S family.

I also reconnected with some cousins on Dad’s side and it has been a real light in my life. In the last eight years I’ve been able to hear stories about my Dad and aunts and uncles on that side, that I had never heard before. I finally got to know my Dad in a way I never had while he was living. These cousins have been a real gift that I will forever be grateful for.

Of course, The Husband Dude’s family have also stepped up and become family as well. I’ve been blessed with the best parents-in-law in the world. That was actually one of my mother’s wishes for me. She told me more than once that she hoped I would have a mother-in-law as wonderful as hers had been, and I do believe I did. This big Italian family has brought a whole new dimension to my life that I never could’ve imagined.

I am so fortunate.

But that doesn’t stop the longing from hitting me now and then.

My mother-in-law passed away two years ago. All of her kids and their spouses were there when she slipped away. It’s  a profound moment to send someone on their final journey, as much so as a birth. I did not get that with either of my parents.

When Dad passed, a friend had come to get me at the hospital to take me to dinner so that I could get out for a few minutes. He had been rallying and actually seemed like he was going to be ok for the time being. He died while we were eating. Only Mom and my Uncle Stanley were there.

Mom passed in an operating room, surrounded by doctors and nurses – strangers – while I sat in another room. I had spent the last two hours of her life reading a damned book. Can you imagine? A book.

I feel robbed. I didn’t get to hold their hands or watch them leave. I ate dinner and read a book.

THD and his siblings always get together to mark their mother’s birthday and death date. They bring dinner over to their Dad’s house, someone usually gives a toast to their mother, and then we eat and share memories of her.

That’s when the longing hits. The longing to mark Mom’s birthday. The longing to mark her death date. The longing to mark something. These milestones usually pass without much fanfare, other than the occasional Facebook post from me.

The reality is, I don’t have anyone that I can turn to and say, “Hey, do you remember the time we had just moved into the house in Santa Teresa and Dad built a fire on Christmas Eve, then the damper somehow shut and filled the house with smoke?”

“Do you remember the summer we learned how to swim and I was more scared of Mom being angry at me on the edge of the pool than the deep water?”

“Do you remember how the phone cord for the phone in Mom and Dad’s room used to stretch almost all the way down the hall, so we used to lay on the shag in the hallway and talk to our friends with our feet up on the wall?”

I don’t have any inside jokes with anyone that go back before 1999. If I threw out phrases, “He went skiing” or “El Loggo Biggo” to anyone who knows me now, they’d have no idea how hilarious it is. Even if I explained it, it still wouldn’t be that funny, because you had to be there.

I feel it anytime I’m sitting in a group, and they are sharing memories with each other. Remember this? Remember that? It’s a history I’m not a part of and I have no history to share with them.

I guess it’s a longing of a shared history with someone. With anyone.

Of course, I have shared history with THD, and his family, and our kids. But only about eighteen years worth. I literally have nobody to share the first twenty-eight years of my life with. No shared memories of childhood. All of those memories are locked away in my mind, and my heart. When I am gone, I fear that they will be gone too.

It will be as though none of us existed.

I told this to someone a while back and she told me that I should share these memories with Shane. That more importantly, I should write them down for him. Even though he can’t share those memories with me, because he wasn’t there, it’s still part of his history because it’s MY history. He’ll have those memories to keep after I’m gone.

I know she’s right, and I think I will write down some of those memories. Good or bad, he needs to know his mother and my grandkids need to know their grandmother.

I realize this post is darker than most of my offerings. I didn’t write it to depress anybody or bring anybody down. I guess all of this is a preface of my actual point in that I want to mark my mother’s birthday on Thursday, since I don’t often get to.

Mom’s last birthday was two months before she died. She turned sixty-nine and I took her out to dinner, as I often did. I remember telling her that next year she would be turning seventy and we should do something special. I don’t remember how she responded but I’m sure she probably waved me off because she never made a big deal of her own birthday and didn’t care if we celebrated or not. That’s just how she was.

We never got to mark that birthday.

One of my biggest regrets is the lack of a proper obituary when she died. We were having to worry about cost because her finances were a mess and she had always left strict instructions not to spend a lot of money on her funeral or other arrangements. I wrote and submitted a very basic obituary to the local paper and didn’t even send one to the paper back home. It didn’t even have a picture.

I have regretted that for eight years.

So for those of you who read this blog, I hope you’ll indulge me on Thursday when I mark her birthday with the proper obituary that she should have had and that would befit an accomplished woman like her.

In the meantime, if you’re lucky enough to have your parents or at least one parent, call them right now and tell them how you feel about them. If you’re lucky enough to have family that shares memories with you, call them right now and share a memory or two. Or five.

Give your kids a hug and share a funny memory with them too.

If you’re like me, with little or no family left, call a friend. Your friends will amaze you. At least the real ones, anyway.

Until Thursday, my friends.