The Day My Mother Died
Published in Mademoiselle, May 2001

          On a Saturday night in January ten years ago, when I was nineteen, my father, sister and I sat in a Chinese restaurant in New York City, trying to eat dinner like a normal family. I couldn't eat; my body felt like it was made of cement. "You've got to eat something!" my father yelled. I stared at my pepper steak and started to cry. My sister cried, too. Other families in the restaurant stared at us. When I closed my eyes, I prayed that I could go back in time, to the day before, or maybe to that morning. I prayed that someone would tell me this day had never happened.
          I'd flown home from college the previous Thursday because my mother, who had never been seriously sick, had a bad stomachache and was in the hospital. At first, the doctors thought it was an ulcer. We were shocked when they told us the final diagnosis-malignant melanoma that had metastasized to her liver.
          No one ever sat us down and told us exactly what was happening; none of us, including my mother, had any idea how serious her condition was. Perhaps the doctors didn't know themselves. But the following Saturday morning, my mom fell into a coma, and in the late afternoon, while my father, sister and I were in her room, my mother stopped breathing. I'd been watching hr mouth opening and closing, then suddenly it stopped. "Is she breathing?" I called out, panicking. "I don't think she's breathing!"
          There was no chance to say good-bye like there is in the movies, no tearful confidences. My sister screamed and moaned. I stood frozen at the bedside. Nurses hurried in, then an orderly arrived and told us to remove my mom's jewelry. I slid her two silver rings onto my fingers, held her hand, which was already cold, and kissed her forehead. That was the last time I saw my mother.
          Two days after the funeral, we cleaned out her office. The receptionist led us down the hall. Another woman was already seated at our mom's desk. She left quickly, and my sister and I emptied the drawers-we found notes to herself to buy milk and Entenmann's pound cake (her favorite), candy bars and wrapped presents she was never able to give. We took her nameplate off the door, and as we shuffled out, her coworkers stood in their doorways and watched us leave.
          A few weeks before, while I was home on a break from college, I'd met my mom at her office for lunch several times. We talked about our lives-not just like mother and daughter, but for the first time, like best friends. She recalled all the men she'd gone out with before she met my father: Moshe the Israeli; Harry the Californian, who took her cruising in his red convertible. She told me about her bohemian life in her twenties in new York City, when she took painting classes in the evenings and played guitar at cafes in the Village. I described my friends at college, my professors and how I wanted to wait until I was older to marry-to live an independent life first, just as she had. After one lunch, we bought Teuscher's champagne truffles, and sitting in the plaza at Rockefeller Center, eating those truffles, the world seemed charmed.
          The closeness I felt to my mom meant her death left an even larger hole. We used to talk on the phone every day, and when I went back to school four days after funeral (my dad insisted that we "return to our lives as they were before"), I'd pick up the phone intending to call her before realizing that I couldn't. Still, I kept calling the answering machine at home just to hear her voice.
          I was no longer the fun-loving college student I'd been before. Time seemed too short to be slacking off. I went from being an average student to getting all As. I became impatient with parties and frivolous relationships. I ignored many social pressures. At my politically active, liberal college, the norm for my independent-women peers was not to shave or wear makeup or fashionable clothes, but I'd always loved makeup and clothes. So I started dressing the way I liked. I wore a lot of my mom's clothes and jewelry, including a brown minidress from the sixties and a locket she used to wear with pictures of my sister and me inside.
          Everything seemed infused with death. My father suffered from heart disease, and orphanhood felt close. Yet conversations with my father were stilted. Whenever I'd called home before, my father and I would talk for a minute before he'd pass the phone to my mother. Now whenever we talked there were uncomfortable silences. "What did you and Mommy used to talk about?" he asked me. I didn't know what to say.
          Still, I was desperately grateful he was alive. Despite his "return to the way things were before" philosophy, a part of him knew that was impossible. When he took me to the airport for my flight back to school after the funeral, he didn't drop me off at the curb as he usually did, but waited with me for hours before my delayed flight took off. At the security checkpoint, he pleaded with the attendant to let him go to the gate with me, explaining that my mother had just died. The attendant wouldn't let him, but when my flight was delayed further, he paged me to let me know he wouldn't leave until my plane left the ground.
          I tried to keep my mom's voice in my head. When I dated a string of eclectic guys-a cowboy who took me gun-shooting, a fireman, and a New York City Ballet dancer-I could feel my mother's presence and see her winking at me and laughing.
          I'm grateful to have had such a loving mother, but it was difficult to go through certain events without her. At my graduation, during the Phi Beta Kappa induction ceremony, all the families-these huge Midwestern clans-were asked to get up and introduce themselves. My family, with just my father and sister, seemed so paltry in comparison. Afterward, my father broke down and said, "I wish Mommy were here to see this." It was one of the few times I ever saw him cry.
          When I see other women my age with their moms, shopping and laughing, I get a pang for what it would be like if she were alive. When I'm at weddings, I have a hard time imagining my own without her. When my sister and I have new boyfriends we ask, "Would Mom like him?" When we make career decisions, we ask, "What would she think?" We've tried to continue traditions she instilled in us, like sending each other notes and little gifts, like earrings and cookies, for no specific occasion. Before our mother died, my sister and I talked on the phone every few weeks; now we speak every day. And over time, my father and I grew closer. We started having our own long telephone conversations.
          Witnessing death changes who you are. My father died of a heart attack three years ago; I grieved his death and my mother's all over again. Sometimes I feel fearless about death, taking comfort from the hope that when I die I'll see my parents again. Other times, I panic if the slightest thing goes wrong-a cold or stomachache-terrified that it's cancer and I'll die suddenly, like my mother did.
          Going through my twenties without a mother has made me self-reliant; you have to learn how to mother yourself. It's made me trust my own advice and feelings, desires and decisions. There's no one to watch out for you in that way, no one to comfort you like your mother did.
          I dream of my mother frequently, and in my dreams she's alive and nothing has changed, but sometimes I forget the pitch of her voice, or exactly what she looked like, and it takes effort to remember. I kept her sweaters for a long time because they held her smell-baby powder, Jean Naté and a natural scent that was uniquely my mom-but eventually the smell disappeared.
          We're taught to think you can move on quickly, and in a year you'll be better. Many people don't know that you need to adjust to being a new person. I've learned that grief is work, the hardest kind of work there is. There is no guide; everybody has to figure it out for herself. I wish I'd been told that grief is a fluid, endless experience from which you never completely recover. No matter how many years pass, a part of me is still that girl in the Chinese restaurant, trying to force herself to eat on the January night she lost her mother.