Wednesday, November 3, 2021
Our son, Luke, posted the following on Facebook a few days ago.
"Made a sort of ofrenda to remember my mom on this Dia de los Muertos. Just a collage of photos and a thing I wrote a few weeks after she died this February. On a lavender background, of course. The grief goes on and on, but this sort of thing helps."
The text in the ofrenda:
“My mom had a particular flair for stating the obvious. “Just stuffin’ this turkey for dinner later,” she’d say, standing behind the counter, visibly shoving dressing deep into the bird’s cavity on Thanksgiving morning. I never thought much of it, until Kim started experiencing it too, and then it became hilarious and really quite wonderful. The day my mom invented lunch (“we just need something to tide us over between breakfast and dinner”) is a truly legendary anecdote in our marriage.
But sometimes you don’t want your mom to state the obvious. “I think she still wants to be your girlfriend,” is another one I’ll never forget. Mom said this when I was 16. I had been laid up with the flu for a week, and my first girlfriend, who had broken up with me a couple months before, kept coming to visit every day to deliver homework assignments and to see how I was doing. Then again, maybe “she still wants to be your girlfriend” wasn’t obvious at all; I remember being kind of annoyed by the visits, but mom seemed to find the whole situation adorable. Looking back, of course, I do too. My mom had found something meaningful, something obvious but worth saying, in a pattern of events I just saw as fairly uninteresting and definitely uncomfortable.
My mom’s gift for stating the obvious is just that: a gift. We don’t all see life in the same way, but there are a lot of things that we mutually agree don’t merit much thought or attention. Lunch, that mythical meal between breakfast and dinner, is one of them. But when mom was sorting out some food that day, with her daughter in law and her son and her youngest and most distant grandchildren all lounging around her house, it really was something worth mentioning. It was a new experience, a new day, a new meal, a shared life, a new memory, a joke we tell over and over. A miracle.
I think maybe that’s how she looked at life. As the memories have rained down the past few months during her advancing sickness and death, most of what comes to me is quotidian and frankly pretty dull. There really aren’t any Hollywood moments: I don’t remember how we felt or what she said when I graduated from college, or got married, or introduced her to my son or daughter for the first time. Instead, I remember going to the Super Fresh grocery store with her every weekend in the late eighties. Going to the mall and conning her into buying me a tape or CD, or the first time she let me go to the movies by myself while she shopped (that was 1989, and the movie was Say Anything). And I remember coming home from summer camp, or college, or grad school, or the wilderness of adult life, and finding her always there, always the same.
She was into oil painting when I was young, which if you don’t know is a painstaking process of mixing pigments on a palette board and then slowly working them onto canvas or a sheet of slate, back and forth. Think Bob Ross, but much slower: “Still lives” (I found that phrase infuriatingly dull as a kid) and landscapes and flowers. I admired her painting, but I never found it interesting. Perhaps I found it too obvious. Much later in my life, and hers, those roses she smeared so accurately onto slate suddenly exploded and blossomed--just like roses tend to do--into the intricate creations and recreations that they always were. A rose isn’t just a rose when it’s the tender work of your mother’s hands, wrists, eyes, heart, and mind. To paint a rose like that, you have to be willing to really look at it: no two roses, and no two lunches, are exactly the same.
One of the last things she said to me, from a hospital bed in her periwinkle sewing room, surrounded by walls hung with representations of roses, was “this cancer, it’s just terrible what it does, how fast it can do this.” And my initial thought, back to the old pattern, was “yeah, obviously”: that’s all plain to see and there’s no need to say it. But of course there is: she’d had to live and feel every moment, every cellular shift, of that belligerent sickness making its way through her being. She had to get up and stuff the turkey, and she needed to tell me that. This cancer was destroying her, and she needed me to hear that, too, because, obviously, it all meant everything.”
LEO
March 5, 2021
❤️
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