A decade.

Every October it creeps up on me. It shouldn’t, but it does. It’s the month with the most birthdays of my favorite people. I’ve done the math. It’s the most.

It’s also the month my mom died. Too early and after too long, and not long enough.

But here we are, a few days into October, and here I am. Surprised and not surprised at all.

After she was gone we were palpably minus one in the house, but her body was still there. In my sister’s living/dining room, converted into a hospice room, she was there and she wasn’t. We had to wait for them to come get her. So we watched Glee. It was the Britney episode. We were late to watch it, because we were busy. And suddenly we weren’t.

We were busy doing awful things. Caring for our own babies while easing, we hoped, our mother’s pain. I look back in awe at the women we were ten years ago, and in awe of what we’ve done since.

We didn’t stop. She never stopped. She put one foot in front of the other. She made leaving a house, whether across town or the country, an adventure instead of sad. She worked her ass off, and did hard things, and found plenty of reasons to laugh while doing those hard things. She cleaned the houses of our friends’ families and never once allowed us feel shame about it. She ate books for breakfast. She was an incredible cook and hostess, and a terrible dancer (sorry, mom) but she played albums at full volume and called us to dance solos. She became a straight-A college student when I was in junior high. She became a teacher. She had always been a teacher, but she finally formalized the role in her 40s. She changed lives—her friends’ and her students’ and ours.

She was my mom, and she was always there until that October night 10 years ago.

Every day without a mom is one too many. Every day, I do my best to be half the mom she was.

And every October, it creeps up on me. The memory. The loss. That Glee episode.

I’m watching it on Netflix now.

I’m so sad she missed it. It’s really good. And I’m sure she’d be glad we found a reason to laugh that awful night ten years ago.

My mom was a storyteller. Some of her best stories were those involving ghosts and the supernatural.  She swore they were real–the ghosts and her stories.  I’ve been thinking a lot about ghosts lately, half-wishing she was one hovering lovingly nearby and half-wincing at what a terrifyingly unlovely thing that would be.  Still, I’d have her as a ghost in a heartbeat. Until then I have her stories. 

In the 80s my mom found herself on a solo trip to Stonehenge. The destination was befitting a woman who loved mythology, and history, and science, and especially loved them all rolled in to one mysterious circle of stones.  

She believed that science is crucial, that it’s what makes mankind better through explanation and invention. She loved history, the wretched and wonderful story of where we’ve been. And mythology because it’s an ingenious gap filler that provided answers to the questions that surrounded mankind in a time before science took hold. 

God, I miss her.

So there she was on a tour bus to Stonehenge. A stranger sat down next to her and the two introduced themselves as civilized folks do. The woman was from Honolulu. So was my mother.

They compared notes on places and restaurants, and played that game where you try to find a family or person you know in common. And they found one, sort of, as they listed neighborhoods and addresses at which each had lived. The conversation came to an abrupt end soon after they discovered an address they shared about a decade apart.

So, did you see…I mean, did you have trouble in that house?

My mom nodded. Not trouble, but something, she said. 

The woman stared out the window and they didn’t talk again.

The something, according to my mom, was a ghost. Not an aggressive, horror movie kind of poltergeist but something. 

My mom was a teenager in that house and the stories she told about that time were ones I asked her to repeat over and over again. How the lights would flicker as she saw odd human-form shadows. How the television would go on the fritz at odd times almost always accompanied by a strange chill in the air. How there was one night when she was not supposed to go out but her parents were gone at a party, so my mom took a chance and absconded. 

Her parents should have been out until early morning because they loved a good party.  So she wasn’t in a hurry that night as she walked down the sidewalk just a few houses away from home. Then suddenly she felt a touch on her back and turned. No one was there. So she started walking again and this time felt the touch more firmly, a hand between her shoulder blades now pushing. She started to run but the touch did not let up until she made it to the back door of the house. And just as she closed the door behind her, spooked and shaking, she heard her parents’ car pull up the driveway.  The ghost had saved her from the worst fate a teenager could face—being grounded.

Ghosts are myth. Sometimes created to scare or to enforce societal norms. Sometimes they’re simply entertaining fable. Sometimes they are figments of heartbroken imagination. 

Than again…who knows, maybe they’re real. Just as much of science was myth before it became real, maybe the same is true of ghosts or spirits or souls. I’m not sure what I believe about any of it—but her stories are my history and I believed her.  

And like I said, I’d have her as a ghost in a heartbeat. 

Pali Lookout, Hawaii. Another mythical place she loved.

I put the last of her disposable razor heads on my pastel purple razor this morning.  I fished it out of a big plastic bag that once held a ridiculous amount of them, along with some hair combs.  I couldn’t believe it was the last one.  I also couldn’t believe that the supply had lasted so long. I remembered her teaching me how to shave my legs for the first time, and I lost it.  I’m lucky I didn’t injure myself trying to shave my legs through the sobbing.

Soon, maybe too soon, after my mom died my sister and I went through most of her stuff and decided what would be kept, what we’d give away or sell, and what we’d toss.  Much of that time is a haze for me now. Tomorrow, it will have been 5 years.

We kept a lot of things, of course.  Things we would give to our own children, including some clothes that are kept in dress-up boxes in our homes.  It’s really quite fun and not at all sad to see the kids play in her clothes.  There are also her reading glasses, but these we can’t take credit for.  In the weeks before she died, when she could no longer read, she pushed out the lenses on all of them–there were a lot of them–and gave them to us for the girls to wear. We also kept furniture and art that now hangs in our homes, along with jewelry, books, and (for me, for practical rather than sentimental reasons) those razors and combs.

Not long after she was gone, we held a garage sale during which we gave most of my mom’s home furnishings (custom curtains, pillows, etc.) to a single woman for next to nothing.  The woman showed up at my sister’s house in the middle of the sale and fell in love with the curtains.  They were beautiful, of course, ’cause my mom picked them. But I can’t for the life of me remember what they looked like, just that they were made of heavy gorgeous fabric and that this stranger was fawning over them.  

My sister and I had tried to keep any discussion of the origin of the things for sale to a minimum.  We thought it might be too macabre for people to know that the pillows they were holding were left behind when a woman died 50 feet away from where they were standing. Mostly though, we just didn’t want to talk about it.  Talk about her, at all, with these strangers.

The woman with the curtains was different somehow, so we told her.  She then told us how sad she was for us, but that she would take care of the things she was buying.  She told us that she’d recently left her husband after a “really awful time” and needed all new things for her new home.   

That was it.  It was all my sis and I needed to hear. She could have the whole lot. We helped her put our mom’s things in her car.   And later we talked about how fitting it was that a woman starting out on her own again, so bravely, would have our brave mom’s beautiful things surrounding her.

So today I used the last razor.  It’s clear that she liked to buy in bulk, and also clear that I don’t like to shave my legs as often as I probably should.  It’s not so clear how it can feel like her leaving us just happened yesterday. How I can feel like it was just the other night that I was talking to her about a work problem, or a kid issue, or a home decorating dilemma.  How a stupid disposable razor could reduce me to tears in the shower.

Really, though, it is clear.  The loss of someone you love never leaves you.  But more than the loss, it’s the love that doesn’t leave.  It’s not “there” in the art or furniture.  But it’s there in the empty eyeglass frames. It’s there in the faces behind those glasses, and it’s clear as the eyes smiling behind them.  She’s there.

[So, I wrote this a few weeks ago…but couldn’t push publish at the time.  Sometimes I feel like I write too much about the ache of missing my mom.  It’s not unique.  I’m not unique.  That kind of loss is something that we all will experience, or already have. Still, I figure that if the point of this whole exercise is to create a record of these moments and stories in a format that my kids are more likely to find someday than the tangible and scattered pieces of my own mother’s story that I find tucked away every now and again in old suitcases, journals and book jackets, then I should just put it out there.  This is for them.  The three people I want most to know her and me–even long after I am gone.

And I want them to know that my sister and I were lucky to have one of the great ones, and lucky to have her as long as we did.]

***

This morning he was screaming and banging the kitchen floor, like a life-size Joe Pesci in [insert the name of any mob movie here], because he wanted the salt shaker.

“Salt! Salt! I want dat salt!”

Arms flailing, feet stomping, red-faced and tear-streaked. I finally put some on his hand and he licked it.

“Yuck, dat’s disgusting. You not nice, mama.”

I kissed him anyway and he ran off to wreak mini-gangster havoc somewhere else, no longer interested in the shaker.

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