Happy Mother’s Day

At age 67, it is finally time to admit that I was a Momma’s Boy. She has been gone for 11 years, but her loss feels so much longer.

Time is all around us. It reminds us; it surrounds us, haunts us, envelops us in cozy blankets of darkness and memories. Now when I look in the mirror, time laughs in my face.

You’re still here? Huh. Wonders never cease.

i’ve written before about my Mother's hands, “how they were very different than my Father’s. Her hands were more like mine. More like her mother, my Nana and her father, who died before I was born. Long, cold English fingers, descended from the Huguenots, runaways from France, elegant, aristocratic hands, fingers that seemed destined to play the piano.

Her hands were so soft, worn down and worn in from all the children, the laundry, the dishes, the endless cleaning that a house of seven children would bring.

I remember my hunger for her hands. How I wanted and craved the caress of my mother, wanting wanting always waiting and wanting more. Lying in bed with scarlet fever, chicken pox, or measles (both German and non-German) my head burning with fever, and the bed spinning, and the room coming in and out of focus, the kind gentle hands of my mother, so cooling, so soft wiped my brow, brushed my cheek, and held my hands.

How those same hands found me in Atlanta, when at age 49, I had a heart attack. There was my mother, before the dementia set in, by my bedside holding my hand, her little boy in bed.

Those same hands connected to the arms and body of my mother, whose mind was lost within her.

Still, she gifted me with her occasional laugh, what I take as recognition and a conspiratorial wink, making me think that just maybe she was still in there, not completely lost, but struggling to get to the surface of her congested mind.

These are the hands of time, the hands of my mother and father, hands gone, and hands lost. Johnny Thunders says, "You can't put your arms around a memory", but sometimes you can get a hand in there, grasping for fingers, pulling up these memories from the dark pool of time. "

This year, she is gone for 11 years. I know this to be true because I was always forgetting. So I asked my family, because the internet was no help.

When I tried to do a genealogical search, I did not find much of a trace. There was a military record, that noted she had married my Father. Once again, I forget the exact date, except it was Labour Day, which is funny given my Mother brought 7 children into the world. Children who went on to bring into the their own children, who have brought into the world their own children. You see how this works.

Begat, begat, begat. Forget, forget, forget.

Yet the strange thing about grief and loss is that within our memories, new life is born. As long as we remember, we are never really lost. My mother is gone, and while I feel the loss, I find her everyday.

I find her in the mirror when I look at this middle age face that she brought to this world. When I look at a picture of her, when I visit with other members of my family, I see her. She is smiling. She is laughing and singing. She is cooking something delicious.

I can imagine her wit and her sharpness, that was gone at the end. She is free of her trapped mind; she can be here again as we want to imagine her.

I reach out and her hands are so soft, and she is there for a moment.

A magic moment.

I will take it, these ghost moments. Because I have no choice.

I am a Momma’s boy. Still. Always. Forever.

I have no tattoos. My daughter’s first tattoo was Family of Liars. It was meant to be funny, not an indictment. I have never been inked, except for a small black dot they put on my chest before the radiation, to help position the molded face guard.

I kept this. Why? Had to say, but it stares back at me in the garage, when I park the car in front of it. It is a macabre reminder, not of mortality, but survival.

I am still here. Still remembering. Still parking.

Still laughing.