For My Mother

My mother lost her battle with breast cancer. I was six years old when she was diagnosed and 11 when she died early in the morning of May 22, 1976. It was a Friday.

Now I am a grown woman with children of my own. I walk through life with my eyes open. I read the newspaper, heartbreaking fiction, and even more heartbreaking non-fiction. I have worked in child welfare for nearly two decades. I love family and friends deeply, leaving my heart and hood open for the sometimes accompanying wounds. I know more than one kind of sadness. I have witnessed great beauty and great injustice. 

Yet—and I am quite embarrassed to admit this—since my mother's death every single time the month of May rolls in it stops me in my tracks. After the birth of my children, and particularly since my daughter has become the age I was during my mother's illness, May is even more wrenchingly difficult. This year I am the age my mother was when cancer took over her days. While the flowers and trees are coming into fresh bloom, my heart overflows with a lifetime of missed moments. And I'm really angry to have not had a mother for all of those moments of my life for the past 38 years. 

I have adult friends who recently lost their mothers. By instinct I want to assure them that it will get easier. Others provide this assurance. I can't. Because in my own experience, living a motherless life has never gotten easier. Even as a grown woman. Even knowing that she she might not be alive now had she lived a full life. Thirty-eight years later, during the month of May, I just want to crawl deep under the covers and defy all the logic of my educated mind and my lifetime of perspective by feeling deeply deeply sorry for myself. 

Of course, my children know very little of this. I carry my grief quietly. My husband knows, braces himself, and does his utmost to walk beside me through it. 

And so I breathe. I try to be gentle with myself. I go on long hard runs in the springtime sunshine. I struggle to amass good May memories to carry me through the worst of it. And when our children climb into the bed, like our daughter just this morning, I nuzzle their sweet heads and hold them extra tightly.