Violets

Just about a year ago now, I received this note in response to a column I wrote for Mothers Day.  No words that I could add or bookending remarks that I could possibly add to it to make it any more meaningful than it is already.Here then the letter from Pattie Wesley of Woodbury Connecticut.“This is my first mother's day in almost 65 years without my mom.  She died in January, just shy of 88.“It is my first spring without her. She loved spring.“This is my fist violet and dandelion season without her.“As a young girl, I would run out on the morning of mother's day and pick violets and dandelions to fill the construction paper pocket I made for her.“She loved it.“When I first returned to this part of the world 26 years ago, I went out one day in my parents' yard, picked violets and brought them in to her. She burst into tears."’You always brought me the violets," she said.“This is the first spring since, that I have not been able to hand her the violets.“My mother was in the geriatric unit at Bridgeport Hospital for more than a month before she died. The nurses would tell me she kept asking, ‘Where is my mother?’ apparently not a good thing to hear from an old person.“Indeed, one day when I walked into her room, she was asking the nurse, ‘Where is my mother?’“The nurse said, ‘Jane, your mother is not with us.’“Looking straight at me, standing in the doorway, she said, 'She's right there.'“I do not think my mom thought I was her mother. “I think she lost the word daughter.“I think she knew, after years of holding me, that I was now holding her."And so she was. She held one parent and then she held the other as I learned just now when I wrote to Pattie to ask of I might share this tale:"I do want you to know that my dad, closer to 98 than 97, died in October of 2013, after my mom died in January. He was doing okay until we buried my mom in March on her birthday. Then he slipped down hill. His sweetheart was gone and he died, 24 hours after my brother and sister in law had said good bye and 30 minutes after I told him I loved him for the last time.“They were excellent human beings and the best parents. I miss them every day and I don't wish them back. Each, in his or her own way was ready to go. Their children are the luckiest people in the world.”As I said at the outset, no words that I could add…. No  bookending remarks except a word of thanks to you, Pattie, on behalf of us all.        

A Pack of Smokes at the Pearly Gates

Mothers Day was so easy once but it's all different now. Once you could just go outside and hunt around around 'til you found  a few apple blossoms, which you jammed into the crotch of a clothespin, swaddled  in soggy Kleenex and wrapped in tinfoil, just because tinfoil was so pretty. Then you just had to set it next to your mom's place at the breakfast table where she could enjoy looking at it while she took that bracing drag on the day's first cigarette. 

That’s how it was in my house anyway, long before the time when motherhood got all soaked in Clorox and sanitized. These days a mother is  supposed to be this purring and approving presence, building SELF ESTEEM in her young every minute.I knew my mother loved me - fiercely even - but she didn’t hand out compliments just to make me feel good about myself. When I got to the finals of the big annual Spelling Bee, then told her how I'd fallen down on the word ‘tongue’ she yelled, “You misspelled ‘TONGUE’?! Can you spell ‘LIP’?"I wasn’t hurt by the remark because I understood her, in the way that the second child often 'gets' the mother. Even as an 11-year-old I got it that her life had brought her heartache and that my being the best little speller in the city might somehow ease her pain.  I liked the way she was, strong and outspoken. I even liked it that she had a temper; and I didn’t mind that she smoked in a closed car. It was good knowing how human and  flawed she was; it made me feel better about my own shortcomings. Plus she never smothered me the way parents do nowadays.I miss her a lot. But I smile every time I look at this picture, taken that night in her 59th year when she came home after a week in the hospital with a  shattered pelvis and was still facing at least another couple of weeks in bed, which is how they did it in those days, never mind teh current method of trotting you around the corridors with your IV's from the surgery clanking along beside you.Her two sisters and her brother were there in the room as I was. Also my sister Nan, even sitting on the bed with Mom. I like that too, that she's sitting on the bed. The aunts and uncles were all drinking whiskey. So was our mother, as you can see, and she had that favored pack of cigs right handy too. Ah Cal Sheehy, born Caroline Theresa Sullivan! Here's to you, you cheerful soul who raised two cheerful daughters all alone. I hope they have Camels in heaven.

cool hands soft

It was a nice Mothers Day for me. My girls gave me plants and our first honorary son and his bride sent some gorgeous flowers and called - twice.  A certain young man from Brooklyn forgot to call but we’re not much on these things in our family so that’s fine  - and maybe this evens us out finally for that time I stole a photo of him from one if his friends’ Facebook pages and used it in the holiday card.

The truth is, it was  a long day for me and my back muscles were screaming bloody murder by 6pm, probably because I began the day by driving 3 ½ hours, then food-shopped, then picked up a boy so he could harvest some blossoms from our yard to give to his honorary mom. (And what an eye for beauty he has as the vaseful showed, the azalea and lilac, the rhododendron and bridal veil all so artfully arranged by him!) Then I roasted a couple of pork loins before the rest of them arrived with the side dishes and David produced a 1990 wine just on the edge of turning from awesome to dirt-like.

Of course I thought of my own mom as I do every day, since, except for a sharp yearning for the sound of her voice, she is not gone from me at all, even these 22 years after her death. But for some reason I thought more of David's mom who lies at last beside her young husband, cut down in the prime of his life. Ruth Payne was soft-spoken and self-effacing, tolerant, free-thinking, and humble. This is what she looked like her senior year at Tufts when she was futilely trying to tell one Ralph Marotta a marriage between them would never work.. And this below is the poem that since her death has made me think of her every time I read it. Emily Dickinson wrote it about her own mother who she too missed very much, even as we all miss the ones who gave us life, remembering as we do our baby days and their cool hand soft upon our brow:

She bore it till the simple veinsTraced azure on her hand --Til pleading, round her quiet eyesThe purple Crayons stand.

Till Daffodils had come and goneI cannot tell the sum,And then she ceased to bear it --And with the Saints sat down.

No more her patient figureAt twilight soft to meet --No more her timid bonnetUpon the village street --

But Crowns instead, and Courtiers --And in the midst so fair,Whose but her shy -- immortal faceOf whom we're whispering here?

but seriously: who could be mad at this guy?