One Year Gone: Remembering My Mom

One year ago today, my mother, after a long, arduous struggle, passed away at age 92 from complications of heart disease and Parkinson’s, leaving all of us who loved her desolate. It took a long while to adjust to the black hole in my life, including the realization that I would never again hear her soft, sweet voice.

Several weeks after her death, I came across a kelly-green sweatshirt of hers. IRISH GRANDMA, it read, with the names of the four grandchildren she loved so much on it. Of course, considering the personalization, that bit of clothing would not be worn by anyone else. Yet I immediately realized that it was equally true that nobody else could really take her place in our lives.

But this post is not about myself, or any of us who mourned her. There was nothing unusual in the fact that we grieved—anyone who lives long enough is destined to do so, sooner or later.

What was unusual was her. There was nobody like my mother.

You would think that, a year later, I could adequately convey her essence to those who never had the fortune to know her. But thoughts of her, as frequently as they still come to me, appear with the quickness of lightning, illuminating the darkness when it feels blackest to me, then just as rapidly passing.

I could tell you about her deep gentleness and kindness, her unexpected, sly humor, her love of Irish music and dancing. But it still feels hardly enough.

And then I think of this: There wasn’t a time I can remember when she didn't look after the needs of someone else: her beloved twin brother Pete, whom she looked after he suffered a stroke and a host of other medical issues; my father; myself and my brothers; anyone who came to the house and warmed to her hospitality. It was unending, this toil, and, I understand now, could only be maintained through a love and faith that somehow surpassed it.

And all of that sustained her at the end, too, when her movements were restricted by the interacting effects of her long-term medical conditions and all she could offer were an unerring sense of what troubled someone else, and a sympathetic ear she could lend in their time of need. “She’s in a better place,” people say, and I believe it; as the poet Algernon Swinburne writes, “even the weariest river/Winds somewhere safe to sea.”

If I had the chance somehow to talk to her again, however briefly, I would reassure this woman who, true to her nature, worried so much about each of us, that we are, in fact, doing okay now. The only thing is this: We still miss her.

One person expressed my feelings on this far better than anything I could ever write: Abraham Lincoln. He certainly said and wrote more famous words, but few as heartfelt as these, expressed years after the woman who raised and loved him was gone: "God bless my mother--all that I am, or ever hope to be, I owe to her."