Love Letter to My Mother
A long goodbye over the last three months gave us an opportunity to get to know you in a way that we never did before. Reading through diaries, letters, files, we discovered a mother who loved us more than we knew, dimensions of an internal life maybe different than we imagined, and details of relationships and experiences that were new to us. And in this last year of your life, and in the process of dying itself, there was a newness to you. You became more and more loving and grateful, teaching us incredible life lessons in your 84th and final year that will stay with us forever, about gratitude, love, and being in the present.
I am who I am because you were my mother. Not all of it was easy or perfect, but so many of the positive forces that shaped me were from you. Being raised by a single working mother gave me a model of strength and resilience. Your relationships with people of all backgrounds and races helped me build the same. I was weaned on No Nukes and ERA rallies, a love of reading and travelling, and was inspired by watching you volunteer to teach ex-offenders to read, posing as the white person seeking housing to discover discriminatory rental practices, working in an AIDS hospice, trying on EST and Rudolph Steiner, ecstasy, Rainbow Gatherings, and for the last couple of decades Tibetan Buddhism. Your path was not mine, but your openness to the richness of life, your ability to find your own way and be your own person, and your acceptance of others were all gifts that you shared with your children.
The memories flood in in the hours since your passing, aided by the remembrances and condolences of others. A cousin called you the “renegade cousin” among the group of you. Others reminded me that you were “ahead of your time,” a regular refrain we heard from our grandmother, your ex-mother-in-law. For her, it wasn’t necessarily a complement, but for us, it was and is. Raised in a secular Jewish family in New York in the 40s and 50s, you were an unusual free spirit, definitely not completely comfortable with the roles of wife and mother you assumed later, especially after moving to the suburbs. You stood out in staid Fort Lee in the 70s, throwing wild dance parties with your international friends from Columbia and assorted free-lovers, occasionally jumping into full-on mothering with a twist, as you did when you dressed me up as Amelia Earhart, in flying gear holding a fake newspaper you made about “my” flights. There were witches, princesses, ghosts, and one Amelia Earhart.
My friends remind me now of your warmth. Nieces and nephews talk about your unconditional acceptance of them. For some reason, a memory comes to me of how you covered for one friend when her mother called to ask if she had indeed been with us at our Upper West Side apartment. She hadn’t been. Your generosity in always allowing my friends to stay over with us in our home, coming in at all hours of the night, was pretty amazing, particularly now that I am the mother of a teenager myself. Two of my friends remember you as a matchmaker and have their husbands and children as a memorial of your life and impact.
Moving to China with me and my family was a remarkable moment in what unexpectedly turned out to be the last year of your life. My life was shaped by adventures with you: joining you and my father in travels with lifelong friends in South America when I was three, staying in hostels as we traveled through Europe together — just the two of us — when I was eleven, and again when you picked me up after I spent a month in France with a family friend and her daughters when I was 12 (you engineered that, too, giving me the gift of a second language.) So how fitting that you did one more grand international adventure at 83, even as you were battling dementia, joining my family and me full-time in a foreign land after living on your own since I left for college 35 years earlier.
A lifetime of memories — of walks together, of family gatherings with all three of your children, of Thanksgivings with us, your mother, sister, brother-in-law, and niece and nephew, of walking me down the “aisle” in a field in Vermont at my wedding, of singing, of storytelling with your two granddaughters, and so, so many other moments, big and small — cannot be captured in one love letter. My love for you, along with the memories, will be with me for the rest of my life.
As we send you on your way, released from a body that was fully worn out, you go with so much love and gratitude back at you from the people you graced with your love and presence.
Love you forever, Mom.
Laura
