Standing among my mother’s things it came to me.
“Oh, that’s right…Mother’s Day.”
I heard it in her voice, the way she always put a sort of “here we go again” spin on it. She didn’t mind the opportunity to get together, but preferred it be kept low key.
“The last thing I want to do is fight a bunch of other people to get into a restaurant for brunch.” She emphasized the last word in such a way that it sounded like a slur.
Rocking in my mother’s chair I stared out the window listening to the familiar quiet of her house. When I’m not sitting in silence there, I’m having conversations with thin air, half expecting her to come around the corner and ask why there’s a mousetrap on the dining room table or “who put this lamp on the floor?”
As I feel the tears starting to well, I look to my parents’ wedding photo, still hanging over the piano. I remind myself that they are better off wherever they are — together, I hope. Whatever the case, I know they would want me to be happy.
Walking up the stairs, I’m acutely aware I’m in the midst of a ritual, the kind anyone processing grief might understand. I feel compelled to visit every room in the house, suppressing the urge to pull up the shades and open the windows, resisting what I know would be a futile effort to bring back something that feels like normal. Instead, I move like a ghost from dim room to dim room, immersing myself in memories.
Taking the cap off my mother’s perfume, I breathe in the scent I remember her wearing on special occasions and it suddenly dawns on me that when she was my age, I was 10.
“50 years old? How can that be?” She said last spring on the front porch. “If you’ll be 50, that makes me,” she paused, “90?! Good grief. I don’t feel like I’m 90 — most days anyway.”
Looking around my mother’s room I spot an old picture of us hanging over her desk.
“It’s the first Mother’s Day without you,” I whisper, immediately feeling a little stupid and overdramatic for pointing it out.
“Well, duh,” I can almost hear her tease me.
Standing among my mother’s things, I smile. So much of her life was here in this house. The things she left behind are left now for our consideration. We’re left to decide whether to preserve or purge everything from snow shovels to newspaper clippings — all things she valued in one way or another, things that were part of her life and her story.
“Better you than me,” she would say.
Heading back down the stairs and into the living room, I peek out the front window — hoping, I guess, she’ll be out there with a cup of coffee. She’s not, of course. She’s not in the kitchen either or in her rocking chair or looking out the back window with her hands on her hips accusing a neighborhood cat of being up to no good.
My mother is nowhere and yet, simultaneously, she is everywhere, everyday, all the time. I find it most noticeable when I hear her voice coming out of my own mouth.
“Okay, Pat,” my husband teases.
She loved him and I know she would appreciate “Charles,” as she affectionately called him (complete with a mock British accent) giving me the business. I have also come to realize she still has a lot to teach me.
Looking through my mother’s things that day, I found a yellowed newspaper clipping of the 1971 poem Comes the Dawn by Veronica Shorffstall.
It reads in part:
And you learn that you really can endure,
That you really are strong
And you really do have worth
And you learn and learn
…and you learn,
With every goodbye, you learn.
This essay originally appeared in my column in the May 15, 2025 edition of the Perry Herald in Perry, NY.
Beautiful, brought tears to my eyes. 🩷
This is so relatable! Every sentence!