For those of us who no longer have our mothers with us, Mother’s Day can be very complex.
May 12, 2024
Dear Mom,
I almost just wrote the words “happy mother’s day” to start this letter to you. Then it hit me that so many days since you died have been this holiday on repeat. In fact, because you got sick the day after Mother’s Day 2023, most of this year that is bookended today by Mother’s Day 2024 has been a kind of pilgrimage of holy days: I have walked these days in dedication to you—and in the wake of you.
I helped you into a wheelchair and pushed you into the Emergency Room. I beelined from parking lots to your room in that hospital and then the room in the nursing home that was your last home. Since you left us there, I have walked from your poppy-brightened Utah graveside to so many places with you still. You bounced across the varicose-blue Caribbean in a speed boat. You watched sunburnt leaves fall from New York City trees and then become bulging buds and alive again. You looked over my elderly dog’s shoulder while sniffing new-sprung daffodils in our favorite park. You brushed past me in an evergreen dining room in Woodstock on the day I turned 60.
Yes, I almost just wished you another happy Mother’s Day, but do you have days where you are? Do you have happy? Are there emotions there? Are there experiences like memories—like when those of us who still have neurons and electrical impulses in our gray matter burst into color-filled recollections of what is past? Can you even read these black letters on their white page? Or is it all a severed line?
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“Oh, Mom.”
So many times, I have sighed these words to myself across this year that actually reads to my gut like one intense, extended moment filled with questions and questing about you. “Oh, Momma,” has been a whispered sentiment that contains in two tiny words a world—my own internal sphere of grief, remembering, and still-making-sense of the senseless reality that you are gone. It has been a prayer by the godless—an existential plea to reach you wherever you are, whether veined deep in the switchbacked folds of my psyche or perched high outside the periphery of my mind’s eye or reincarnated and feathered within the wings of that black bird that flew past my window just now.
Occasionally, I get answers to my pleas.
Just this week, I came across an old birthday card—your own handwriting, an actual artifact!—and among your reliable, lovely birthday wishes for having a wonderful day and for knowing that you love me so much, this bright piece of you came smiling off the page at me in reference to the cash you had stashed inside the card:
“Don’t spend it all in one place! K?”
That was a Mom Joke from the past whose punchline suddenly became a little visit that we shared for a few seconds. I was pulled back into your living room and lived a tiny moment of laughing together over this one-liner. Your chuckle was in my ear. Even better, the mischievous glint that twinkled in your eye when you sat at your dining table and wrote that line years ago reached my sweaty face and entered through my pupils as I crouched over and sorted a dusty old box of correspondence discovered in the back of a dark closet. Words you had formed like an electric, yellow flower of thought, had planted on cardstock, and had seen with your eyes as you wrote them long ago, were welcomed into my being through my own eyes in the now, where they then instantaneously blossomed again in my mother-eager mind.
I’ll get answers like that. Or when I’m suddenly hearing on the radio that Rachmaninoff number you counted as your favorite, when I’m glimpsing an old woman waving out at boats from her balcony by a bay, and when I’m biting into a forkful of steaming spaghetti twirled around in sauce so like the tomatoes you hand-canned when I was a boy. These are all messages that flash to me—that keep you in my days that keep hearing me praying, “Oh, Mom.”
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As you knew when you were here, praying and religious things are not my thing. They were very much yours, and you personified your believing in your soft, wrinkled person. What I know instead of deities and doctrines is the sacredness of the open heart and the courageous mind. Because that sums up my spirituality, and since your religion was rooted in a hereafter, these words are a letter I’m sending out to wherever, ifever you are this Mother’s Day.
The first, simplest, and most pressing thing I want you to know is that I miss you.
I miss you so much and all of the time. I miss you in the traditional sense that we all have in mind when we say those three words: I am missing the times we used to spend together and am yearning to spend more time with you. But there is also a heartbroken expansion of the traditional definition that has been added to my internal dictionary of lived experience: You are now simply missing.
It took my brain months to detour its untold numbers of neural pathways that all led to you—to construct pathway-overpasses that merely overlooked rather than merged with all of the places where they could take me while you were alive. There are different ways in which we simply think about someone when they are dead. I would wake in the middle of the night in the months after your death, sitting up in bed and holding my head because this cranium of mine needed physical support in its task of reconciling where to put you now that there was no you.
Before those days, you were Mom and you were here—even if “here” was a hospital bed 2,197 miles away that you were beginning to never leave. Every foot between us could still be counted and crossed. However, I now know, “here” was also a very different place—somewhere within myself that germinated while I was in your womb, which planted in me while you and I were attached a reliance on you as a human being actually being. “Here” grew as I grew up. It wound around my ribs, my lungs, my esophagus. This energetic root is 60 years old. It tangles around and swaddles even the adult me. It doesn’t beat like a heart but reaches like a branch. After you were gone, I understood intellectually. I grieved normally. I processed emotions like the emotional person I am. But that branch kept reaching out for a you who was unreachable.
No one ever told me that losing one’s mother would be like this.
To be honest, I don’t think it is possible to fully convey the impact and lived experience of becoming motherless. But you knew that. You lost your mother when she was just 65 years old, and yet lived to be nearly 82 yourself. So you understood. But you didn’t tell me. Did you have the words? Did you try to prepare me? Or did you just not have time or energy or wherewithal among your four children and their learning needs, consuming demands, and unending messes to grieve your own mother?
What I know is that, for me, your death was a kind of birth.
July 29, 2023 was the day I had always dreaded. Too much of my life had been spent wondering and worrying about when and how you would die. Most of that was done in the back of my mind—a different dark box where fears are stuffed instead of birthday cards. I don’t mean to be macabre, but I wish The Universe had given me a card on your deathday. I wish I could have slid my thumb (the one on the hand that had just held yours in your last moments) under the edge of a simple white envelope and tore open the following message:
Our dear Jeff,
This terrible day holds for you the birth of your life as a motherless child. For the rest of your life, life will be different. This one death on this single day has changed you. Hereafter, there will be nothing and no one like your Mom. You knew that intellectually before this moment, but all moments going forward from now will drive the reality of this revelation deeper into your being.
Be patient and loving with yourself. And with others, especially those whom you love. And most especially those others whom your mother also loved.
You will be discovering the unique ways in which your mother’s death—and only her death—leave you at a loss. From the times of your infancy, you instinctually looked for your mother, and you found her. Until right now, your body and mind grew around an invisible notion of your mother that was embodied by her.
Now that she has left this life, born in you is a mother-shaped absence. There are no words in English that describe this. It has not been named. It is a universal loss that can only be defined through the experience of living this one death.
Know that that starts now.
With love and wisdom,
The Universe
I’m not as sage as the cosmos, of course. I can’t write above the degree of awareness or understanding that such a message would contain. That’s why I’m writing this letter to you: To describe my orbit around your death instead of you.
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Here is what I know today: I now celebrate Motherless Day.
As with many holidays, I am a begrudging participant. I don’t want to be at this table. I’m aimless in a one-person parade. There are no greeting cards or cakes or personal time off. Billions of human beings have mourned the losses of their mothers, and yet humanity has not put this death experience on the map of navigating life. We cherish Mother Earth. We mythologize Mother Nature. We revere mother goddesses named Mary, Parvati, Gaia, and more. But these are all eternal. As with Mother’s Day, we default to the living. After all, it is so confounding to understand, let alone to express clearly or to celebrate, the dead mother.
And that is the paradox: To mother is to give life. I was once part of your body. The fingers that are typing these thoughts first moved inside your womb. I paddled about in amniotic fluid that you made to keep me alive while I was attached umbilically to an unfathomable new organ called placenta that you had manifested just for the two of us to share in this act of creating and being created. My brain, from its earliest moments of functioning, was dependent on yours to keep the miracle of fetal me forming. My first thoughts were necessarily powered by you, and once I was born, it was to you whom I was still attached. Naked and bloody, I endured the lifeline connecting us being cut. And while we were separated and grew ever-so-slightly more separate from that moment, I know there is still a “creator bond” with you today.
We all are biologically programmed to look to our own mother for life. Life then has its ways of both reinforcing, reforming, and even rejecting our connections to “mom.” I know that the first time you could have been pregnant but learned you were not, you cried out of deep sadness, such was your longing to mother. I know you risked your life to pull an unconscious boy from a desert lake in Wyoming, giving 10-year-old me a second life. I know that you unmoored me here and there by not being the mom I thought I you were, that I disconcerted you for a time by being the gay son instead of the Mormon bishop, and that we beamed into each other’s eyes during your last week a love burnished by it all. It is vastly complex and flawed. We are only human, even mothers. But there is something so fundamental about our primal bonds to these beings who mother us—who stay central to our lives and also uncenter us—that make their deaths so very inexplicable. Maybe others expect this or have the pragmatism of a calculator in solving for it once it happens: “2 – 1 = 1 me after Mom dies,” in other words.
That’s not my math, however. This past year of having you get very ill, pass away, and then be missing from my life has been an ongoing calculus that has, very oddly, figured Mother’s Day into its sum. I have a solution now: I have stepped from “mothered days” to “motherless days,” and there is a peace and a wisdom in that for me. More than anything, it just helps me to know that I am now living a string of unofficial, completely spontaneous holidays. They are all for you. I can give up Mother’s Day today because many or most of my own remaining days will still celebrate you and remember you. There will be untold mementos and memories. There will be smiles and head-holding. My heart will be full of you at times and my mind will be searching for explanations at others. But you will be around, and I know you will still hear and answer when I pray (yes, pray), “Oh, Mom.”