There were times Ruma felt closer to her mother in death than she had in life, an intimacy born simply of thinking of her so often, of missing her.
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth

Dear Mom,

Today, I’m sitting in your chair with your cat on my lap. Your absence is a palpable presence as we sit here in the home whose every wall and corner is filled with you. We think of you so often that our thoughts sit companionably beside us and open their arms in love. There is an intimacy born simply of thinking of you so often that your voice rings through our days, assuring us that we are not alone.

Still, like many who have lost their mothers, I’d trade this intimacy for the real thing. That is, I’d trade the intimacy born of simply thinking about and missing you for an afternoon with the real you. Particularly on this Mother’s Day when there are so many things I’d like to tell you.

I’d like to tell you–again–that I want to be like you when I grow up. Oh, I know that by all accounts, a 67-year-old woman should be grown up, but I like to think that I’m not done growing, that I still have time to become more like the woman you were. Each year, I would write this in your Mother’s Day card, this wish to grow into the grace and wisdom that are attributes of the quintessential mother. And each year as I wrote this, I meant it perhaps more sincerely than I’ve meant anything. I want to be the mother and woman who is sorely missed because she was an unfailing champion for those who needed a safe place to land, an advocate for those who believed they had no voice, and a lens through which others could see themselves as you did: loved and seen. You were all that–and so much more.

I’d like to tell you that your phone calls were lifelines. Through my own years of mothering and teaching, thirty minutes on the phone with you gave me the courage and conviction to face a new day, to meet it with your words in my ear, to suck the marrow from it with gratitude and joy. Four hundred miles away, I leaned into those conversations with hope. Now, I often find myself picking up the phone in expectation. And then I remember that you aren’t there to pick up your cordless phone with a familiar, “Hi, Shan.”

I’d like to tell you that I remember everything. That I remember too much. That, some days, the memories are too heavy to bear, while other days, they buoy my spirit as I sail into my day. I remember the power of your make-do-ness to transform a barely middle class life into a wonderland. I thought the lavender floor-length dress you made me for my junior prom was a confection in dotted swiss. I marveled at how you could stretch a dollar and a pound of hamburger. And when I said I wanted a blue birthday party during my kindergarten year, you broke out the bottle of food coloring and used it liberally, turning the cake, ice cream, and Kool-aid royal blue. (No one escaped without blue lips and finger tips!)

In his book, For One More Day, Mitch Albom writes:

But there’s a story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on your face. Sometimes the stories are simple, and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking. But behind all your stories is always your mother’s story, because hers is where yours begin.

Like Albom claims, behind all my stories are your stories. Recently after my granddaughter’s track meet, I was telling her the story of the district meet my junior year in high school. As I recounted the wind and sleet, the cold that cut through our cotton sweat suits and numbed our legs, I remembered that behind this story was another more remarkable story. This was the story of a mother who sat in the stands (one of a handful of spectators braving the weather), huddled under a Hefty garbage bag and sporting a plastic visor to keep the sleet from her eyes. This was your story, Mom. As I’ve told it over the years, people invariably chuckle at the image of a mom wrapped in plastic. But I want them to see what I see: a mother who showed up, again and again. Standing alone at the start of the 200 yard dash, I had only to look into the stands to see you smiling and waving and to know that–win or lose–you’d drive me home.

In her best-selling novel The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt describes the grief of a son whose mother is killed in a terrorist attack:

I missed her so much I wanted to die: a hard, physical longing, like a craving for air underwater. Lying awake, I tried to recall all my best memories of her—to freeze her in my mind so I wouldn’t forget her—but instead of birthdays and happy times I kept remembering things like how a few days before she was killed she’d stopped me halfway out the door to pick a thread off my school jacket. For some reason, it was one of the clearest memories I had of her: her knitted eyebrows, the precise gesture of her reaching out to me, everything. Several times too—drifting uneasily between dreaming and sleep—I sat up suddenly in bed at the sound of her voice speaking clearly in my head, remarks she might conceivably have made at some point but that I didn’t actually remember, things like Throw me an apple, would you? and I wonder if this buttons up the front or the back? and This sofa is in a terrible state of disreputableness.

I want to tell you that I understand this grief and how waves of ordinary things keep washing upon the shore of my consciousness. Small things that would never be scrapbooked or photographed come in with the tide of a moment. In the months before you died, I keep remembering how when I hugged you, you were a bird with hollow bones. I felt as though if I didn’t ground you in my arms, you’d simply float away. Years after my father’s death, I remember all the times you told me that you’d been talking to him, your hard, physical longing laden with sorrow and with beauty. And I remember once when I was frantic with worry about something (I’ve forgotten what), you assured me that everything would be o.k. and offered me this: Just don’t get your blood in a bubble. And I thought, who says this? You did. And now I do, too.

Most of all, I’d like to tell you that when I close my eyes today, I can see you and Dad driving into the countryside where the wild honeysuckle is in bloom, and the sky hangs clear and cornflower blue above you. I can see the road open before you, and redwing blackbirds strung brightly along utility lines that stretch into the distance. And you are young and in love. The glorious May afternoon pours in through your open windows, and you can think of nowhere else you’d rather be.

Today, I can think of nowhere else I’d rather be but in the home you made for all of us. So, I’ll sit here with the cat on my lap, and the silence generous enough for my sorrow and my joy. I can think of nowhere else I’d rather be but in this place where I learned what it means to love and be loved.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.

With all my love,

Shan