Last Thursday afternoon, I was recording my weekly podcast, my demented take on the news. I always close with a poem, because I feel they embody the power of the word, leaving silent spaces for us to fill in, a deeply, personal internal landscape, uniquely our own. This time, I read, To See My Mother by Sharon Olds. Then, I spoke briefly about my mother and her passing.

These past few days, I have been thinking about her, wanting to write about her one more time, like a debt that’s never, ever to be repaid. The older I have become, the more I appreciate what she did for my brother and I. The closer I get to her age, the more my perspective folds into hers.

In 1954, my father suddenly passed away, leaving my mother with two boys, a paid off mortgage and zero in the bank. Back then, there was simply no precedent for the role my mother unmercifully crashed into. She had worked as a bookkeeper years before, which is how she ended up meeting my Dad. What the hell are you going to do with two boys, 9 and 12 and no road map? This lady loved her boys so much, she overcame all the obstacles. She had to have been a warrior, doing whatever she needed to do for us. 

God, it had to be so tough raising two boys in the fifties. As my brother and I grew up, our independence became a badge all boys wanted to proudly wear. I was less afraid of her than I was about hurting her feelings, even as a kid. It did not take a rocket scientist to understand that she was all that stood between me and the orphanage, the distorted fears of a little boy, who couldn’t possibly fathom having no parents. Like many things that happen to us as kids, they get kind of frozen and live on, seeping into our skin, a mark that never fades.

I can only tell my story and my brother has his own. I think I tried her patience, the older I got. I couldn’t wait to move out of the house, which took a longer than I would have liked, because i went to a City college and the dorm was my bedroom at home. I started feeling my oats and not coming home was easier for me than it was for her. God, she could have been awful and she wasn’t. i can’t imagine how much she worried.

Getting married was very important to her. She was in heaven when I shared the news. Then, eventually, two grandsons came along and that was beyond words. She came from a time when your sons getting married and having children was all that mattered. If you were unhappy and the perfect union started to unravel, it was unimaginable to someone like her. The details of its demise were not relevant, figuring out a way to stay together was all important. Like the other challenges to her views of normalcy, she ultimately acquiesced to the inevitable, because she wanted her sons to be happy.

I can’t tell my story and leave out money, because that is one of those stories of my relationship with my mother that says more than I have words for, love being all I can conjure. I needed money to buy the house in the suburbs and she was there. I needed money for a short, terribly well dressed, divorce attorney and she was there. I ran out of money in Santa Fe, NM and she did it again. Approving or disapproving of my behavior did not matter at all to her, when it came to making sure I’d be OK. Those times when I had no choice, but to ask, I labored over each occasion for weeks and felt like shit each time. 

When my boys, her grandsons, were 15 and 12, I told her I was moving to Santa Fe, NM. Until that time, I periodically brought them to her, which felt like an annoying obligation to me, but heaven to her. I know they learned to appreciate her affection for them, because she was such a sweet soul. I think she learned over time that preventing me from doing what I wanted was futile. Her unsurprising disapproval was right up front and then love had its way. Today, as a grandfather, I have some idea what that feels like and the idea of hardly seeing them had to break her heart. She accepted my departure with a grace I couldn’t appreciate back then.

I lived in Santa Fe for around fifteen years. Every Friday afternoon, the phone would ring and it was my mother, wanting to know how I was, asking about my boys and sharing news of my brother. On my visits back to NYC, I would always bring the boys to see her. My sons were also really good about seeing her in my absence as they got older I know she loomed large in their lives and I never really shared how grateful I was that they honored her the way they did.

My distance and periodic visits became the norm over time. I honestly can’t remember when I told her i was moving to Kauai, but I can paint her reaction with the most predictable colors from the palette of our special language. It was one thing to adjust to your baby boy moving from NYC to Santa Fe, but giving him to the thousands of miles across the sea was something else entirely. Honestly, I can’t imagine how that must have broken her heart, but like she always did, her happiness came second to mine. 

I was in Los Angeles in early May, 2003, having dropped my red Toyota truck off at the dock. I had purchased a one way ticket to Kauai. I was spending the night in a sleazy hotel, somewhere in downtown LA. My phone rang and it was my brother, telling me our 92 year old  mother had a massive stroke and he was heading up from Chapel Hill, NC to the hospital. I was instantly overcome with a feeling of suffocation.I remember trying to jam the window open, but it didn’t budge, leaving me feeling like drowning in a coffin of rootless chaos. 

As a little boy, I was terrified of a life without my mother and all those years later, it stayed with me, buried under the distractions of time and every day. At that precise moment, I had no home, having given up my place in Santa Fe and feeling totally estranged from a new Kauai. It felt like being an astronaut, cut loose from his mooring, floating in the black silence of space.

On that same phone call, I told my brother I had to feel Kauai under my feet, before I could be with our mother.

I took care of the most mundane shit imaginable on Kauai and flew to NYC, within a few days. I met my brother and we went to the hospital immediately. Our mother was lying there, looking like a living corpse, a tube down her throat, her wrists wrapped and secured to the bed rails, because she kept trying to remove the fucken tube stuffed down her throat!. After being told about the consequences of a massive stroke and the complete absence of any noticeable improvement, we would have to make choices on her behalf. It felt like we had to do what she would have wanted, having left legal instructions for us to follow. She used to talk about her aging, her fierce independence and what it meant to her. Christ, even the idea of using a magnifying glass to read her books was crushing for her. She was a proud lady.

My brother and I decided to move her back to her home, in order to enter the world of hospice.  He and I grew close during that time, a connection needing no language, just the blood flowing between us. We would sit with her, together or separately. From the time I returned until her departure, she never regained consciousness or opened her eyes or said anything at all, but she spoke volumes to me and I will forever turn the pages, the story of a mother who loved her two sons more than there are words.

One time, sitting at her side, she raised her hand to her lips and I thought she wanted a bit more ice, because that was all there was for her at the time. No, she wanted me to kiss her on the cheek, that’s what she wanted. Once, holding her hand, she patted my palm in the most delicate way. Even then, she wanted me to know all she cared about was me. I remember asking her if this was what she wanted and she acknowledged.

I am extremely blessed to have had such a mother.The farther I have traveled, the closer we have become.

I will love you forever, Ida.