"Listen dear mother
I miss you the most
and as I travel
from coast to coast
I feel your love
and I feel your ghost
listen dear mother
I miss you the most
Listen dear mother
I miss you the most"
"Please Tell My Brother" written by Jeff Tweedy, performed by Golden Smog
Sat back down at my desk after an all-afternoon-long meeting in another department and saw the red message light on my phone lit up. Dialed in to voice mail, punched in my password and the pound sign, prayed against the arrival of any bad news. Message from a number I didn't recognize.
Punched in my password and the pound sign, and then heard the operator I had one new message. Pressed one to hear the message. Recognized the voice in an instant. My mother.
I'm up in Manchester with your father, she said. I know you need a new pair of sneakers for walking, we saw a nice pair on sale, but we couldn't remember your size, do you wear a fourteen or a fifteen, if you get a chance, call me back, oh, that unfamiliar number must be her new cell, I think. Call me back if you get a chance.
I'd just made it through a long afternoon meeting over in the IT department, I felt a little out of it, and now quitting time and the weekend stood just fifteen minutes away. I hesitated for a second and then decided to call her back. She answered. Told her I'm a fourteen wide. OK, she said. We'll get the sneakers. Don't worry about paying me back, I know things are tight, she said. I thanked her and hung up.
A half hour or so later, on the drive home, it hit me: damn, I thought. It's my mother's birthday today, and she's buying me a present, and I didn't even think to wish her a happy birthday.
&&&
My mother came into the world on July 15th, 1943, smack dab in the middle of World War II, the fifth, youngest, and final child of parents who had emigrated here as young children from their birthplaces in the hill towns south of Naples. They lived right where I live now, and sometimes I think, oh, if these walls could talk, the stories they could tell. My mother's father died, just two rooms south of where I sit at this moment, in September of 1946, not much past her third birthday. Her brother lived here when he died in an accident in his early twenties, leaving behind a three year old boy and an eight-months pregnant wife. And I lived here when my wife died in her late thirties, leaving behind myself, an eight year old boy, a girl just nine days shy of her third birthday, and a boy not quite fifteen months old.
Growing up, my mother talked often of her father and her brother. Sometimes I'd accompany her and my Nana up to the cemetery and help them plant flowers at their gravesides, always in summer, always at dusk, always in the heat, as I remember it. The years would change, but they'd always plant the same thing. Red geraniums. I'd walk the fifty yards or so over to the water pump and fill a green watering bucket with water and then lug it back to the gravesides.
&&&
I suppose you can miss people you've never even met. Sometimes I missed my uncle and my grandfather; sometimes I'd wonder what my life would be like had my grandfather or my uncle survived. Whether it would be be better or worse I didn't know, but I knew it would be different.
&&&
Lying in bed a few nights, maybe a week and a half ago, Sheila asked me, so, how far back do you think our memories go? A colleague in her office had insisted earlier that day that we can't remember anything before the age of four (an opinion which matters in their workplace, in the work they do, by the way). Sheila had disagreed with her and now wanted my opinion.
I took an inventory of my earliest memories. Staring out the living room window in the apartment on East Saratoga Avenue in the middle of the night, looking at the flashing traffic light at the top of the hill. Laying on the couch in the same apartment on a warm summer afternoon, with a big scrape on my knee, and my father coming in from work and asking what had happened. Sitting in the dining room there on a Sunday afternoon with some relatives, my mother's side, for someone's birthday party. Sitting on the living room floor with a load in my pants, watching cartoons on the black and white television. Doing dishes with my father in the kitchen because my mother was in the hospital.
And the one memory that stands out above all: coming home from a parade on a summer Saturday afternoon, wandering out into the little backyard, and seeing my favorite teddy bear in pieces, obliterated, the next-door neighbor's dog had gotten to it and chewed it up. I remember sitting on the grass and crying, crying, crying. I remember my mother coming out and setting me on her lap while I cried.
Sheila laughed.
Maybe that's where you get your tragic view of life, she said.
I laughed back.
Maybe so.
But I know this: my mother insists this happened in the summer, the June or July after I turned three, and my birthday's in late May. Maybe she's wrong, I said, but I remember the day the teddy bear went down for the count. I swear I remember it. And I remember those other things, too. They're not figments of my imagination; they happened, and I remember them.
What I don't remember, within those memories, is what my mother looked like. I can feel her presence in those memories, I know she was there, she had to have been.
I just can't picture her. I don't have any memories in which I can actually picture what she looked like until I was in my early teens.
&&&
A couple of nights ago, around one in the morning, Sheila shook me awake.
Your son's crying in his bedroom, she said. He needs you.
I wiped my eyes open and got out of bed. I knew which son she referred to. I knew it was Bailey, the oldest. I walked from my room to his and opened his door. The light was on. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, weeping.
I sat down next to him and put my arm around him. Sheila stood by the door.
I miss mom, he sobbed. I miss mom.
There's a lot of things you see and hear that break your heart, but for my money, nothing in this world hurts worse than seeing your own flesh and blood, your own child, in misery.
I miss her, too, I said.
I love Sheila, too, he said.
She told him not to worry about making her feel bad; she told him she knew he missed his mother and that she wouldn't want him not to tell us, that he didn't have to worry about hurting her. I felt sick to my stomach for the both of them.
I was a bad son, he said.
No, you weren't, I said. I knew where he was going, and I waited for him to say it.
I told her I hated her, he choked.
He did tell her that once, in the summer before he died. I was at work, they got into an argument about something, he got mad, and in the heat of the moment he told her he hated her. He's never forgiven himself.
She knew you didn't mean it, I told him. You were just a little kid. Even grown-ups say things they regret, I said. Believe me, there's a few things I said to her over the years that I wish I could take back.
He cried in my arms for five minutes, for ten minutes. Neither of us said anything.
Let it out, I said after awhile. Let it out.
He calmed down eventually.
He laughed.
God, Dad, he said. You used to cry all the time. It seemed like you used to cry every day.
Well, I said, I'm a grown-up. It's harder to deal with things like this as a grown-up sometimes, but sometimes it's easier.
Is that why you got over it faster he asked.
Bailey, I said, you don't ever get over something like this. You just accept it sooner, I guess.
He went silent and we sat there on the edge of his bed for a long while.
No, I thought to myself, you don't ever get over it. My uncle died fifty years ago, and my mother said she still thinks about him every day. And I think about Bailey's mother every day, and I know I always will. I'm happy now, I've adapted to the new normal, I'm madly in love, I'm busy at work, I'm busy at home, I'm not paralyzed by the sadness anymore, I'm living. But still, sometimes, I'll hear a song, or hear someone say something, or the daylight will hit me just right, well, it could be anything, and for a second or two, I feel the loss so down deep that it takes me breath away.
&&&
I went for a long walk after I got home from work yesterday; I walk or bike most everyday now, trying to keep myself in the best condition I can, trying to stick around as long as I can for the people who love me.
While I was out on that walk, my mother came over and dropped off the sneakers she'd bought me. I tried them on. They fit fine. I threw my old ones, with their holes in the sides, falling apart really, into the garbage. I called her up and thanked her for them. I wished her a happy birthday. I should have thanked her for other things, I suppose: for cooking dinner for me on so many nights those first couple of years after Lauren died, for eating those meals with me when I couldn't bear the thought of eating alone. For sitting me on her lap the day that next-door neighbor's damned dog ate my teddy bear.
But I know what she'd say: she'd say she knows I appreciate it, all of it.
I said goodbye to her, told her to come over and get a little present we'd bought for her. She hasn't yet, but she will.
I said goodbye and hung up.
In our bedroom, I could see Evie and Riley in their pajamas, lying on our bed, snuggled up to Sheila. Evie might, in her later years, carry one or two vague memories of Lauren; Riley won't remember a thing. Sheila is their mother.
In the living room, I could see Bailey laying on the couch, watching the Yankee game.
It's a little more complicated for him. He has two mothers. One that's here, and one that's gone. He loves the one that's here and he misses the one that's gone and he always will. Whether he travels from coast to coast or stays here at home, he'll miss her the most, as the song says. But as I remember, without remember what she looked like, my mother holding me as I cried one long ago summer afternoon, he'll remember she loved him.