I thought I was OK.
I was OK as we sat around the table at the funeral home, discussing the program, the flowers and appropriate prayers for my mother’s funeral.
I was even mostly OK while sitting in the front pew during Mom’s beautiful service, as my mother’s kind eyes gazed right at me from the enlarged portrait of her by the lectern.
Contributed / Swift family
I was fine afterward while people walked up to me to offer condolences and tell me stories about her that we’d never heard before (It’s how I learned that after we kids went to bed, my mother — the former teacher — sat at the kitchen table with one of our hired hands and tutored him so he could pass his high school classes).
I even didn’t mind much when my industrious sisters started cleaning out cabinets and closets the day after the service, although I secretly worried that Mom watched from above and frowned as we brazenly cleared out perfectly good gravy boats and egg poachers.
But grief is a slippery thing.
And it managed to sneak up on me on a Sunday evening so cold and gray that even the heavens were uneasy about a world without Margaret Swift.
Someone had told my sister that a great way to preserve the memory of a loved one was to save one of their voicemail messages. My sister happened to have one, which she played for us:
“Hello, this is Mom. (As if she needed to identify herself.) Say, can you pick up some ice cream? You can charge it at the store. OK. Thanks. Bye.”
We all laughed when we heard it. It was so Mom to think about ice cream for a birthday cake even when she was too sick to eat it herself.
And it was so Mom to offer to pay my sister back for the ice cream, when Verbena is a nursing home administrator and can easily afford shelling out $5 for a tub of Kemp’s.
But that simple message brought Mother so immediately into the room with us that I didn’t want her to leave. The sound of her voice instantaneously melted the igloo of reserve and self-protection I’d built around my heart to get through the funeral and all its trappings.
I was hit with a loneliness so deep and bottomless that I nearly doubled over. To never again hear her voice on the other line. To never again be able to call and ask advice or simply to vent. To never again have that home base, that safe harbor, that place of unconditional love.
The house is still here. My dad is still here. But the ingredient that made it home — Mom in her corner recliner while radiating strength and sheer German-Russian will and aliveness, even
when she most struggled to stay alive
— is gone.
I’ve felt that loss so many times in the last few weeks.
I keep wanting to call her. The reminders of her pop up everywhere: old birthday cards with handwritten notes, family photos, even in my own reflection in the mirror.
Recently, I had coffee with a friend who also lost her mother. Sarah nodded and smiled as I told her about my struggles. Why was this so hard? I asked. Why did I, at age 59, feel adrift — like a motherless child?
She used her index finger to trace an invisible sketch of a wheel on the table. The mother is the hub of the wheel, she explained. She is the center that connects everyone — the core which we all move around. When she isn’t there to hold everyone together, we feel like we no longer belong to each other.
Now, with Mother’s Day here, there are no flowers to send or phone calls to make.
But, as Sarah and my partner recently reminded me, I can still talk to her. Mothers watch over us, even when they aren’t here anymore.
Mothers never stop being the center of the family wheel. They still bind us together, through what they’ve taught us throughout life. They never stop being mothers. Not really. And deep down, we never really stop being our mother’s children.
So here’s to you, all you grownups who still miss your moms.
It’s OK.
Mother’s Day belongs to you too.
