The Face in the Mirror

My mother died over 42 years ago, two thirds of my lifetime  ago.  It has been a long time since I had intense thoughts of and feelings about her. The touchstones of my existence, generally shared by a mother, I met alone. My youthful relationship with her was generally strained for reasons, never to be known fully and so I met those life transitions without much thought about her absence. I long ago was helped to realize that the reasons for her visible dissatisfaction and restrained rage was not due to my failings as a daughter, but to whatever inner torment she could not share even with her husband. And I have come to see her as the human being she was, married at a young 18, with a deep sadness neither spouse nor child could assuage.  She softened with illness. Perhaps, had she been given the time, age would also have softened her.

I am twelve years older than she was when she died. My trip to New York has brought her to my mind in a way that has never been the case before.

Maybe it is that I have softened with age. It surely is more than one person in the last month, from my Aunt Teri to my cousin Carol, to friends of Facebook, to readers of these pieces, have remarked on how much I look like her.

After all, it was said before, that I look like my mother. It is, perhaps, that I wasn't so eager for it to be the case. And now, having come to an understanding of the realities of life, and their vagaries, I now am embracing that possibility. What was the name of that old book, "My Mother, My Self"?  I read it when I was in my 20s. I don't think I grasped the relationship of me to her, or her to me. I think that when she died I was angry that her emotional distance could never be resolved. Door closed. Right?

Prompted by the observations of others that I look like her, that this face, my face, reflects some part of what she was, this time, I seem to be embracing it, even if part of that means I inherited a tendency toward weight.  When my mother was young, she had an 18 inch waist. Well, that's something I never had!!!!

My mother died long before the internet. There are so few remnants of her privately, and none, therefore, publicly.  I didn't even know there had been an obituary--my father handled it all that November. She died on the Monday of Thanksgiving week, the 25th. There could be no funeral or burial on the Thursday or Friday, the holiday weekend, so the one day wake was held on Tuesday and she was buried on Wednesday. I don't recall having a say in how things went down, nor did I think to ask why we couldn't wait a week. I remember only being stunned, not that she had died, that was a foregone conclusion for many months, but by the abruptness of her body's dispatch, and the forever shift of the world for my father, and me.  The only decision I recall making is what she would wear in the coffin, the outfit she had worn at the wedding of a friend of mine, just a month before.

Turns out there was a very short obit, another item I was given during my May trip, yellowed, glued to an envelope of my Aunt Rita's things. She too, would die, way too young in the 1980s.

So, what's the point?

Me June 10, 2016

Turns out, there is something of her still in this world.

The face in the mirror?  It is mine. It is hers.  It is ours. In me, she is still very much here.