In my particular case, though, this period from November 15 through to Thanksgiving, whenever it may fall, re-presents the day my father called me to say that my mother, who had been battling cancer for about fourteen months, was admitted into the hospital. Upon check in and assignment to her bed, she fell into a coma and died ten days later without having regained consciousness.
I wasn't a child, but I was fairly young--well, from the perspective of forty-five years later--I was quite young, a twenty year old college sophomore. She died the Monday of Thanksgiving week, and so, there seemed to be some haste about the planning of her disposition, with two days off for mortuary and cemetery employees on Thursday and Friday. I am not sure who pressed the haste, my father, or the funeral director. Either way, she died on Monday, the viewing was Tuesday and the Funeral and corresponding cortege to Gate of Heaven Cemetery was Wednesday. It happens that the days correspond this year as in 1974, Monday the 25th being the anniversary of her death, and Thursday the 28th being Thanksgiving.
There is a sort of haziness surrounding the time, the place, the people, and my own experience. I graduated from college. I went to law school. I moved across the country. I have resided in Los Angeles far longer than I did in New York, where my mother lived and died. Most of the friends I have made in my life never met my mother--there are a precious few otherwise. I am a woman in her mid-sixties. My mother never made it out of her forties. She had a marriage, and a child. I had neither. Have I missed her? That's a hard question to answer, and I worry that it makes me a cold person. She certainly was a presence during my formative years. Formidable. Commanding. Enigmatic. Secretive. Unyielding. Mercurial. Neither my father nor I understood her. I think part of the bond between my father and me, and one of the subjects of my years of therapy, was that she didn't seem to like either of us very much. She was also beautiful, and without a doubt, a perfect provider for her only child. All her efforts were devoted to my development, especially the educational. Though I had the customary baby boomer lapse as a teenager into young adulthood, she saw to my spiritual framework as well, insisting that I be raised Catholic. That gift gave me something sound and essential, especially when I was ready to come back to and explore my faith. The education and the spiritual foundations have both been saving graces.
Once diagnosed, though never told she was terminal, and still stunning to me, never told she actually had cancer, the presence became the softness I had craved when I was a child. She became open to my friends, and her own family, even a few she hadn't seen in a quarter of a century or more. In college, I dabbled in student radio at WFUV and she was probably my biggest fan aside from my dad. It would have been nice to have one of those Hallmark moments where the paradoxes of the past and the radical shifts of the present could have been discussed, where closure could have been achieved. My father never spoke of the softer woman in the 34 years he lived after her-- the one I had seen in the last fourteen months of her life. He recounted tale after tale of the stunning, but inflexible woman who married him just after World War Two, she a black Irish girl of 18 and he a world weary veteran several years older.
My father believed that she never really wanted to be married. I believed that she never really wanted a child. There was, there is, no way of knowing, of course. She never spoke of her inner life. What little I could ever discern of it was troubling--a kind of detached fantasy about being a hand model and a cast of friends, none of whom came with last names, who were movers and shakers in the fashion world. More disturbing, because of a lack of explanation, my father said that she actually would bring home cash from her putative modelling jobs.
One good thing about the passage of time, and growing into a senior's wisdom, is that my sense of my mother has softened. She was the product of her family life, the essence of which will always be a mystery. I suspect that she was the victim of some kind of of abuse in her own formative years such that she created a fantasy of what life ought to be, and however much husband or child tried to please her, they, and life itself always came up short. When she got sick, the walls came down. Whatever barriers that existed between her and me before that time, I am grateful for the fourteen months in which she allowed me to be her daughter, without expecting me to conform to some impossible standard I felt I could never meet.
I know quite a few ladies of her generation. I cannot imagine my mother at that stage of life. She will always be, to me, an innocent who died too young at age forty-eight. Her purgatory here done forty-five years ago, I pray that she is happy in heaven. I know she is.
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