Goodnight Mom

After the rain, after the florist, after the priest’s comforting words about someone he didn't really know…..  after the hugs and the tears, after the generations of photos posted on a white board, after the grandsons’ escort….  after the mud and the single roses laid on the coffin and car doors shutting with loud thumps….  after the three course luncheon at a familiar restaurant….  after all this, I find myself alone and stunned.  Numb, maybe.  Yes, numb.

The last 48 hours raced by like the 5:19 Metro North express to Tarrytown.  We got the news, convened, planned, selected, decided, procured, and finalized.  We gathered our children, watched them cry their eyes raw and knew there was nothing we could do to soothe them.  We called, emailed, cried, hugged, greeted, thanked, laughed and cried again.   Then it was over.  

I feel an inconsolable sadness missing my beautiful 93-year old mother already –  this feeling is unmistakable but unexpectedly powerful.  Sadness comes in many colors, and this one, though somewhat familiar, like the shades of grey in the black and white photos of mom as a young woman, triggers a hazy yellow brightness that makes me want to first squint, then shut my eyes against it.  I keep thinking  “what would I have done without mom when….” (fill in the blanks), and “what will I do without mom when…..” I’ve never had to do without her so I don’t have an answer.  Instead, I shut my eyes against the haze and try to sleep my mind quiet.

But tonight my mind won’t be quiet, and I can’t sleep.  I don’t know what comes next. I have become in one instant, the oldest generation of three.  I am mother, grandmother, aunt, sister, friend.  With mom gone, how do I call myself daughter?  When our mothers die, are we no longer someone’s daughter?

Of course, I know I am daughter to Laura Sinisi Breen, fun spirited woman, undaunted young widow, hard working mother, adoring grandmother and adored great-grandmother. Mom was cast-iron strong inside and out, and marshmallow soft-hearted through and through.  She is in my bones and in my blood.  But right now there is a space above me, and a silence hovering nearby.  The feeling of emptiness often can be intangible, but at this moment, I can see it and hear it with amazing clarity. 

I miss my mom more than I could ever know. My mother Laura Sinisi Breen was an extraordinary woman.  Right and wrong were black and white to her, she loved us passionately and parented us as her mother had taught her -- with all the rules and limits people only talk about and write about today.  She is the model of unconditional mother's love.  She was also generous beyond explanation, since she lived a very modest life.  They tell us to take what we remember about a loved one who has died and make it real in our lives today.  Keep her present in thoughts and words and her strength and love will go on through all of us.

Good thoughts for tomorrow, but not for tonight.  For tonight I will take Mom’s long standing advice when I was dealing with difficult days in my life—I’d ask her what should I do and she would say, “have a glass of milk and get some sleep.”   Goodnight Mamma.

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When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts.  A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child.  ~Sophia Loren

The Skier

The brass chandelier in the dining room downstairs sways and its six blown glass globes clatter as they rock in their bases.  Plaster dust falls onto the dark wood table with each pounding thud on the bedroom floor above.  

Upstairs, the carpet in his bedroom is strewn with damp towels, worn tee shirts, muddy sneakers and smelly socks, inside-out sweaters and a well-worn baseball cap.  Three of the four corners of his room are staged with sports equipment.  In one, a set of golf clubs, in another, a lacrosse stick topped with a helmet, shoulder pads and gloves, in the third, a baseball bat and two fishing rods.  His platform bed is pushed up into the fourth corner to support its wobbly frame, and make some room for play.  The bed, of course unmade, is littered with books and wrinkled homework papers.  

The top of his dresser holds a left-handed golf glove, a ripped nerf football, three drinking glasses caked with dried soda and juice, and an autographed photo of twin brother athletes from Syracuse University’s varsity lacrosse team.  And old shoe box on the dresser is filled with assorted coins, movie ticket stubs, chewed up pencils, and the sticks from eaten tootsie roll lollypops.

The walls are scattered with academic awards, his team portraits and framed photos of him holding up large fish and smiling proudly into the camera.  One wall sports black half-moon scuff marks, the scars of repeated battering with a basketball.

He stands in the center of his room, in a clearing just wide enough for his skis to lay parallel.  He is anchored to his skis by black molded boots which force his shins forward at an angle and cause his knees to bend.  He is crouched like a racer at the starting gate, bent over at the waist till his chest almost meets his knees, poles held horizontally under his armpits and eyes fixed on a snowy place in his memory, far beyond his bedroom walls.  He is wearing mirrored sun glasses.

He raises his arms, plants his poles upright in the carpet and moving only the lower half of his body, jumps into a parallel turn to the left.  His skis land in a dull crash on the carpet.  He repeats the turn to the right and then to the left again and again.  Plant, jump, turn, land.  Plant, jump, turn, land. The floor shakes, the walls rattle, the chandelier clatters, the dog barks.  His rhythm is unbroken.

My car pulls into the driveway and I step out.  He looks quickly toward the window.  Before I reach the front door of the house, he speedily and quietly unlatches his boots, jumps out of them, and stands the skies with boots still locked in the bindings up against a corner of his room.  He leaps onto his bed and opens a book.  As I climb the stairs, I notice the swinging chandelier, the dust on the table – again – and wonder.  “What are you reading?” I say as I greet my smiling son at the bedroom door.