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he passed away a few days after Christmas 2017. My mother still speaks to me, though, her voice knifing through the din that often occupies my mind. A favorite saying, a line from a book. Or I catch the faint floral scent of Chanel No. 5, the perfume she wore on special occasions.
That’s when I feel her presence the most. Still pushing and prodding me into being the son she raised me to be.
Yesterday afternoon I was driving to a meeting when John Denver came on the radio. I was 9 when “Rocky Mountain High” cracked Casey Kasem’s Top 10, but I still know every word.
Is the song cheesy? Horribly. But to a young mother who grew up on the concrete streets of Brooklyn, who only glimpsed the Rockies through the scratched plastic window of an airplane, that song was an anthem.
“It reminds me of you,” she would explain, quoting Denver’s opening line. “‘He was born in the summer of his 27th year.’” That was about when I found a career putting my fingers to a keyboard, and those grade school years with my face buried in the books she bought me began to pay off. She’d sing the first verse through to the end.
“Left yesterday behind him, you might say he was born again.” We’d do a duet: “Might say he found a key for every door.”
Other days, she comes to me when I’m sad or stressed. If my mother had one trait that reliably drove me crazy when she was alive, it was her penchant for offering advice suitable for a couch pillow decorated with needlepoint.
Whine about a bad break? “Life’s not fair.” Mention contemplating a new purchase. “Ask yourself, do you really need that?” And her personal favorite, applicable to any and all situations that were less than ideal.
“This too shall pass.”
That one echoes in my thoughts every few days – in a traffic jam on the 101, on a Zoom meeting that feels endless, or when I’m on eternal hold with some customer service bot. It’s said in her voice, with a hint of a New York accent, the emphasis placed on the word “too,” like she was giving a dramatic reading.
My mom wasn’t wrong, though. Everything passes – even the people we love the most, as much as we wish they wouldn’t.
Your parents never stop being your parents, though. You look in the mirror and see the outline of her face in your own mug; the nose, the cheekbones, the inky darkness of your hair, now shot through with gray at the temples. Something noteworthy happens and you think to call home. Then the realization of her absence hits you, and you settle for a conversation in your head.
“It’s always darkest before the dawn” might get a mention. Or maybe she’d been thumbing through a Bruce Lee biography, a relic from my mother’s days taking kung fu lessons until her knuckles bled from punching the heavy bag.
Then she might offer up, “As you think, so shall you become.”
Again, she was not wrong. Today I am thinking of her: A shade shorter than four-foot-eleven, but every inch determined to give her sons the love and guidance she lacked as a child. I am thinking of the Mother’s Day card I might have sent, or flying to Florida to share a few slices of Antonio’s cheese pizza and the generic diet soda my parents favored to save a buck.
Once again, we are children, not adult orphans. Once again, we see ourselves through their eyes.
Once again, like the song says, we have found the key to every door.
