My mom and siblings, 2016

On January 10th, my mother would’ve been 90. She’s been gone almost a year now, and I’ve struggled for days knowing that I couldn’t pick up the phone and wish her a happy birthday. And I’ve struggled for days wanting to write about her and failing to find the words. It’s like that for most of us who’ve lost those we’ve loved. Words simply fail in the wake of such love–or they flounder about, well-intentioned but wholly inadequate. Still, we try–as we feel we must–to give voice to our memories and our longing. And so, I begin.

My mother never forgot a birthday. Edited in uniquely personal ways, she marked her birthday cards to us with underlined text (or double-underlined text) and an army of exclamation points. She took Hallmark verse to a whole new level. Or–as my dad once remarked–she out-Hallmarked Hallmark. In her final years when she’d taken up adult coloring, she sent us cards she’d lovingly colored with the set of colored pencils that were always within arms’ reach of her recliner. It goes without saying that her greatest embellishments were the notes she penned to remind each of us that we were loved and valued. In a world of throw-aways, her birthday cards were keepers.

My mother was the kind of woman who made birthdays real events. When I requested that my 5th birthday party be blue–everything blue!–she came through with blue Kool-Aid, blue frosted cupcakes, blue napkins, and blue party favors. When the party ended, she sent six kindergartners home with royal blue lips, teeth, and fingertips. I like to think that we were the original prototypes for Smurfs–blue toothy grins and all!

I often find myself thinking: If I could just have just one more hour–even a half hour–what would I say to my mother? It’s a silly mind game that generally results in the realization that I couldn’t even begin to say the things I want to say in an hour. Still, I play it often, rehearsing all the things I’d tell her over a cup of tea. As I ponder, I’ve come to realize that these moments are ones in which I feel her presence most, moments during which our imagined conversation is nearly as good as the real thing. For in these moments, I can hear her voice, can see her seated in her maroon recliner with her cat on her lap, and can feel the peace that always radiated from sitting next to her. In my many imagined conversations, I always say this: You are sorely missed and loved. The rest of of what I have to say is pretty much chicken scratch in comparison.

On her 90th birthday, how would I have begun to measure the worth of a woman who’d poured herself fully into so many lives? As I noted at her memorial service last year, she was a cup-half-full kind of woman who continually emptied herself into her husband and children, relatives and neighbors, friends and visitors. Paradoxically, in spite of all this pouring out, she was never empty. Magically, the more she emptied herself into others, the more she was filled. Each year on her birthday, I would tell her that when I grew up, I wanted to be a cup-half-full kind of woman just like her.

My mother was a tree-climbing, cat-loving girl who grew up to attend college on a drum scholarship. In the 50s! She was a honey-haired coed pounding away on a snare drum in a music practice room when my father heard her. And then he saw her, barefooted and lost in a rhythm that drew him in–for life. She was the kind of woman who happily consented to a first date that took her into a hay field at dusk, a dime cup of coffee in hand. There, she crouched with my father behind a haystack where they could watch the sandhill cranes before they left for the river at night. She was the kind of woman who told my father that the Chicago apartment they could afford to rent while he was stationed there in the Army wasn’t so bad. It was bad, my father told me, so bad that my baby crib occupied a small room that had once been a coal room. So bad that my grandmother cried when she visited. So bad that my mother wouldn’t let me crawl on the floor, which was cold and dirty despite her repeated efforts to scrub. It was very bad, he said, but at the time, neither of them could see how bad it truly was because they were desperately in love–with each other and with me. In old black and white baby photos of this time, I’m diapered and wearing my dad’s garrison cap as my parents smile widely in the background. There’s no trace of the poverty that marked their lives here.

My father was a prolific letter-writer in the early years of their courtship and marriage. And my mother kept all of these letters: those from college basketball trips when he was on the road, those from his weeks of basic training, and those from his university office where he did the majority of his writing. When I think of what I would take if my house was on fire, I know that I would take those carefully bundled letters in my first grab. In these letters, I’ve come to know my father and mother in new and glorious ways. Above all, I’ve come to see my mother as my father saw her. Quite simply, he adored her. From the beginning, he recognized her seemingly endless capacity to give, as well as her commitment to encourage and affirm. Over the years, he wrote poems and letters in which he acknowledged what he’d known from their courtship: she was–and always would be–the beautiful foundation upon which he’d built his life. She was his greatest source of peace and joy. In a 1987 Mother’s Day letter, he wrote:

Maybe, just maybe, someone will recognize someday what an unusual marriage we have had. If not, we know, have known, and will continue to know how much we love each other, how we move in unison so often.

As I walk the path at the nature center each morning, I pass a small stone bench tucked a few feet off the path. In a family of practical cedar benches that flank the path, it’s an anomaly. It would look more at home in an English garden, centered in a field of violets under an aging willow. Its legs are ornate corbels that have sunk unevenly into the earth. Its top is large enough to hold two people, but only if they sit shoulder to shoulder, leg to leg. Each day as I pass the bench, I imagine that this is where my mother and father sit, watching the sun rise over the eastern ridge as it flames the dawn. I imagine that this is where they begin their day, their talk mingling with birdsong. I imagine that they will always be here, their presence grounding me as it always has and always will.

On the occasion of my mother’s 90th birthday, I imagine that I’d linger at the bench for a while and chat. And then, handing my mom a birthday bouquet and a poem I’d written her, I’d call over my shoulder as I walked down the path: When I grow up, I want to be just like you.