Tell No One

I will tell nothing to no one, except to say, watch Tell No One.

Dear Mom,

It has been 2 months since we lost you. Liz got married on Saturday night, and we were there (you rsvp'd yes, and ordered the sirloin), me and Kevin and Petey and Davey. Petey wore his hat, which you wouldn't have been happy with, but it was his fancy hat, which makes it better. When we got home from the wedding, to our house, to our house that you lived in and died in, I had this email waiting for me:

Are you THE Leigh Batnick...
…who was a sweet & lovely 5th grader at Lakeside Elementary in Merrick in 1989-90? I suspect it must be you, as your writing is as deep & graceful & magical now as it was then. I came upon your blog just now, and am so very sorry for your loss.

Of all things, I remember your mom’s signature on your report cards & absence notes. She had happy handwriting!
My deepest condolences to you & your family; my heart goes out to you.

With love,
Christine aka "Ms. Wicks"

Mom, you remember Ms. Wicks! She was my favorite teacher, her, and Dr. Isaacs (he understood me before I did). The thing is, I haven't exchanged a word with her in 21 years and she emailed me precisely at the moment that I was toasting Liz and Liz and I met in her classroom. In my toast, I quoted from the letter Liz wrote you on June 5th, and in that letter she spoke about Ms. Wicks.

Mom, I know you already know this. I haven't written back to Ms. Wicks yet, because I'm waiting to understand; I spend my days waiting to understand. Liz, who knows deep loss from the its eddy, wrote to me:

...Although I know you do not feel connected to your sadness, rest assure, you are at a kind of magical stage of subconscious connection. She is speaking through your heart, mind and pen (or rather, your laptop). Sadness will roll in with the tides of mundane memories, with holidays, with realizations about the lack of phone calls. Unfortunately, it will eventually come. But for now, know that the unexpected thing about loss is a strange super-powered infusion of love that you gain from the person that you lost. It is almost like a shield that they give us for our hearts. And that shield is made up of the energy created by the POWER of your connection to them. Some may call it denial or shock, but really, I think it is the protection given from our beloved, the one who knows that our fragile hearts can only take so much at a time... Lest they break in two. And that is the last thing that they would ever want to happen...

I spoke to Ray-Ray tonight, and she told me that Jane asked you before you died, as best friends can, "How will I know you are with us?" and you answered "You will know. There will be no doubt about it." When Jane opened the library the first morning she went back after you died (you loved little ladies and librarians who loved pink wine), 3 computers were on but the main computer, the host, was off. No one was there, the computers are turned off every night, religiously, and she knew. It was you. The mother-ship was dark, but still, she lit her 3 children.

Mom, you light your 3 children. I think about what I did not ask you; I did not know you were afraid of heights. Petey told me when you went on the ski gondolas out West, you hovered over desert and prairie, canyons and brush, and your hands tightly gripped the sides. I am afraid of heights, too, or of precipices, more specifically, and I couldn't breathe as we ascended the Eiffel Tower, so down quickly we went. I never knew you were afraid of anything, except what could hurt your children. You are fearless to me. You feared not death, you feared not life.

Mom, your heart has stopped, I heard your last breath, but your heart made mine, and now Liz tells me, that you cradle my broken heart. Please, come to me. Be with me in dreams. Michael dreamed of you, dead, but re-animated, and I am so jealous. In his dream, you told the three of us that Petey took good care of you, and when he told me about his dream I said, "You're right, he did" and Michael gasped, for I had said exactly the same thing in his dream. My girl, be with me in a dream. Tell me what I know (but the knowing is hard, and it's not the same as your voice telling me, kissing me, nuzzling your head into my neck - you are short!) you would say if you were here. Tell me that you love me, tell me that I am the daughter, the person, you hoped I would be.

Mom, I fear not the night or a great height. You are with me, you are in me, you are all around me. I love you, my girl, and I love my brothers and we talk to our uncles and I will be better about calling your friends (my friends) and seeing Poppy. You have taught me how to live, and I want to be my mother's daughter. There was no one better than you, my mother.

Tuck me in, and slowly tell each part of my body to rest, to exhale from my tiniest toe, to the tip of my head, like you did when I was small.

I love you, I love you, I love you and this is not good night, for maybe I will see you tonight.
Lulu Belle

Dear Mom,

On Sunday, we lay the stone on your grave. The cemetery has been there since 1917, there are small hills and oak trees, ocean air is near. Your grave has been there since June 19, 2011, and this Sunday, according to tradition, we, your family, will visit your grave for this first time since you died, in the shadow of the Strawberry Moon.

Mom, I will tell you the truth: I started writing your eulogy, in my head, a year before you died. I could never get very far, and I abandoned the effort.I abandoned the effort because I thought you cannot eulogize the living, and live you did, every day. I am your daughter, we are procrastinators, I knew the words would come when I needed them, and they did. But I was wrong, Mom. Eulogy has come to refer to a praise or speech for a person, usually dead, but the provenance is Greek, eulogia ‘praise’, and by that reckoning, we ought to eulogize those we love every morning we wake, together.

Mom, I am very scared of Sunday. Life is changing so fast, but the girlfriend is sleeping under my arm as I type, so that is the same, and I wear my eyeliner differently, so that is different, and I miss you through waking hours and dreams, so that is the same. I have stopped waiting to understand that you are dead. Sometimes, it even makes me laugh with the great unbelievability of it all. (I know dead people, and you are not dead.) But, all of us being together, your family, your friends, without you there, standing by a grave with your name on it, that is real. One of the hardest things to do, Mom, is to see your friends, because they are the ones you chose (we were given to you, and you to us, but I would have picked you if I could). Lisa surprised me at work, and I cried. It was like you walked in the door.


Mom, there is no deus ex machina, no disco ball above the stage. You will never walk in the door, you will never surprise me at work. I cannot call you to tell you the small thing that I want to tell you the most: Kevin doesn't give Teepee a bath in the right way! I tell everyone this story, but all I want is to tell you. I want to hear you laugh. Mom, there is no deus ex machina, and I am not ready for the small, closest thing to a god out of the machine. My life changes, you are not here, I cannot call you, but Mom, I live the life you gave me, the life you taught me, by example, how to live backlit in your beautiful, unfading light.


Yours, always,
Leigh Michelle

Eulogy for my mother.

The Strawberry Moon reached its peak at 4:16 on Wednesday June 15. On Thursday June 16th, I could not see the moon in the sky. As my mother lay dying in our den, a tree was felled from our neighbor's yard, to make way for a swimming pool. A man cradled by a rope scaled the tree, and cut it limb by limb, as a crew of others in green shirts stood in our yard to guide the falling parts away from harm, away from my mother who lay, one foot here, one foot there, her shallow breaths and pulsing neck monitored by my hungry eyes. A glass door and five men shielded her from the tree, but nothing can shield the masses who love my mother from what has fallen on us.

On Thursday night, I stretched myself on a deck chair and listened to my brother talk to his new friend with the beautiful name. I looked at the tree in our yard that now stands silhouetted by a ghost. It stands still, and will continue to, without the caress of another's leaves against its own. The tree that is gone remains with us in its absence. Its living form is no more, but what remains is the roots, reaching down, like fingers holding tight. Under the shadow of the tree remaining and the shadow of tree that once was, I whispered in my mother’s ear “Be a butterfly, fly like the butterflies we grew as children, from chrysalis to beings of the sky.” I told her to be free to go, so she can land on our shoulders.

My mother died on Friday, June 17th at around 1:02 pm. Our “giver of Nachas” as my brother Michael called her, as he covered her cheeks and nose and forehead in kisses, left the temporal world while my brothers waited together on the deck. Petey laid on the couch beside her bed, and I, I curled on the landing listening to her last breath.

My brothers and I will mourn our mother for the rest of our days. We mourn the loss of the old woman she would be. We mourn all that she will not be here to share with us. I was lucky enough to have the clouds part on April 3rd for my wedding; she had been so sick in the months leading up to it, and yet on that day she glowed with love. I was resolute that our wedding would be big and full, a festival of love, peopled by friends and family, the community that we have built. I wanted her to see the people who would care for us when she was gone. It is not luck that my mother was surrounded with love from all over the country in her last months. She lived to give love, and everyone who knew her felt themselves to be the center of her universe, for she gave of herself completely, and with the utmost honesty.

I stand here, my mother’s first born, the only daughter of an only daughter. The words I say are for her and for my brothers, her boys, my best friends. My mother gave me the greatest gifts I have been given – the gift of her love, her moral guidance through the world, the love of books and animals and family and friends. My mother gave me my brothers and nurtured us three as individuals, as unique beings. What went for one, did not go for all, with one exception: her love. Beyond that, I am her mad, bad bibliophile, Adam her gentle soul and Michael her chef and her warm and loving boy. My mother will never know her our children, as her namesake, my maternal great-grandmother Blanche never knew her. But our children will know our mother, for we would not be Leigh Michelle, Adam Ross and Michael Henry without her. I will tell them to be goers and doers, I will teach them to do unto others, I will teach them that relationships require hard work that pays in piles richer than gold and pearls, diamonds and rubies. We will tell them stories of my mother the boxer, of her ‘fro she named Moishe, her love of flying low, particularly on the back of Petey’s jet ski, of her Sternberging little Paul Sternberg in the third grade, bloodying his nose for a forgotten wrong. We will tell them how she gave freely to those who were good, and sought to understand with compassion and forgiveness those who were not. Our children will know my mother, for she will be a butterfly on all of our shoulders, for the rest of our days.

Gimlet-eyed.

Léon Bakst + LuShae jewelry

When I was a child, in country here, and she was a child, in country there, we flipped through Sunday's catalogs, and obliged ourselves to pick one thing, no more, and no less, from each page, no matter how wanton or waning our desires for a collection fell. I'm taller now, and my silver hairs thrive, and Sunday is no longer black & white cookie day, but the thrill of the catalog game remains, updated for my third decade to include a Bakst evocation alongside each chosen jewel.

I'm sure I've told you before, but its worth repeating: I hate breaking rules. Rules dictate that I must tell you that in exchange for this post, LuShae Jewelry is sending me a piece of my choosing. They asked so nicely, and I was so thrilled to receive an email that had been spell-checked that I just couldn't say no. What will I choose? Though I'm rather a snide little snob re: CZs, I like the Baba Beaton moment of the Once Upon a Star earrings, and the flower buds satisfy that desire to sprinkle tiny diamonds across my ears like the elf I'd like to be.

Last night was the Strawberry Moon. Tonight, I cannot see the moon in the sky. Tonight, as my mother lay dying in our den, a tree was felled from our neighbor's yard, to make way for a swimming pool. A man cradled by a rope scaled the tree, and cut it limb by limb, as a crew of others in green shirts stood in our yard to guide the falling parts away from harm, away from my mother who lies, one foot here, one foot there, her shallow breaths and pulsing neck monitored by my hungry eyes. A glass door and five men shielded her from the tree, but there is no one to shield the masses who love my mother from what is falling on us.

I stretched myself on a deck chair tonight and listened to my brother who spoke to his new friend with the beautiful name. I looked at the spot where the tree was, and the tree in our yard that stands silhouetted by a ghost. It stands still, and will continue to, without the caress of another's leaves against its own. My mother will not know our new friends, she will not know the children who will be named for her. My mother will never read this. I whisper in her ear to be a butterfly, to fly into the sky like the butterflies we grew as children, from chrysalis to beings of the sky. I tell her to be free to go, so she can land on our shoulders.

I seek to know who I am without my mother in this world. I seek to know where my words go, the words that used to go to her. I seek to know what becomes of a daughter of a dead mother, who feels hopeless, alone, unmoored, unloved, uncared for. I do for her, but that is not always enough. What of me, who am I, where is my family, who do I belong to?

The streets are empty, the children have gone home. I have no home. There is my apartment, there is our house that she died in, but where is my home in this world? When she was in the hospital, for the second to last time, on a night my brother and I saw her go into septic shock and shouted for nurses, doctors, anyone, she was dying and she was not ready and it was terrifying and I held her hand and she asked me why I was crying, my stepfather said, "My home is where she is."

Oh, Mom, the things I didn't know. Where is my home without you, Mom? Who am I without you, Mom? Where has my childhood gone? Where are the memories of 32 years? Who will tell my children what I was like as a child? Remember when Marc and I set out to catch butterflies with a bucket of water and a net? "Did we mean to drown them?" you wanted to know. I don't know the answer, but without you, there is no one to ask the question. Mom, my children will not know the sound of your voice and it's ups and downs, the punctuations, the funny inflections (Coral became Caarrrl, please, oh please, don't let your voice slip from my ears). On our camera, there is one video of you telling a story, 2 weeks before you died about Michael being bad when he was small. I press it against my ear, like a seashell. I want to hear the sea. I want the sound of your voice. I want you. Oh, Mom, Mom, Mom, my girl. I am drowning, quietly, alone, in the small 5'1" space where you used to be.

Mom, I was afraid, that night when you came to me, but last week, I was drying my hair and a breeze passed over my shoulder and I was dizzy and the apartment spun and the light caught the butterfly in the frame that we bought in Paris and the pale pink wings shone blue. The apartment was still. I was not alone. Magic was with me and the air shook. Do it again, Mom. I don't want to be alone.

This is not about what happened in the middle of the night.

Belvedere, Villa Gamberaia, Beth Dow via 20 x 200

I will tell you the truth. Sometimes in the flicker and clicking, the rapid departure from one imagined place to the next, a real sting can pinch the underside of a winter-white arm. Like you, I am a vagabond in this world of ours, this world that is without actual walls or locks on the doors, this world that has no odor, no scent to ring off alarm bells: good day! or bad. After the sting, the order of things goes disappear, protect, retreat, define. And then, a gathering of one's rights and wrongs, an assessment, straight back, freedom, flight.

"What I like about the landscape of Italy," Gianni informed me, "is that there's none of this nonsense about the great outdoors. That sort of thing's all right elsewhere. Here you could practically say it's an indoor landscape. It's Nature with beautiful manners -- no, that's too tame. Rather, it's as if Nature was capable of thought, of joy." -The Bay of Noon, Shirley Hazzard

Sit with me a minute. Pull up your chair, turn down your music. It's been so long since we've talked. I've needed these 2 months and 13 days of silence to live with the last 9 months and 6 days I have lived without my mother  and with the 32 years we lived together.

What I have done since we last spoke: I bought some dresses, I learned to do a crooked cat eye. I went to Tulum with my husband and I took hot showers outside. I unburdened myself of a secret. We opened Nana Hannah's credenza and divided what is inside. We have not donated your clothes to charity yet, Mom.

What I have learned since we last spoke: my mother will never be dead to me. I will spend the rest of my life waiting for her to come home. We will sell our home, we will move to other apartments, my mother will not know my address, but what is an address when she knows who she made.

In 10 days, we will mark our first wedding anniversary, in 16 days, on April 9, comes my mother's birthday. She would have been 58. 6 days later, I will turn 33. My brothers turned 27 and 30 without our mother. My boys, I didn't tell you (I never want to make you sad or lay my sadness over your metronome like a fine, worn cotton kerchief that can break its steady beat), but my heart broke for you on January 13 and March 23. This year, I will mark these days - last year we celebrated, and one day, we will celebrate again.

On May 6, we will lay the stone on my mother's grave. Blanche Batnick, April 9, 1954 - June 17, 2011. Beloved mother, wife, sister, aunt, grandmother and friend. Loved always. Let that Loved always echo beyond the confines of perpetual care, let that Loved always clap off the beat, like she did from here until there is no more.


On May 13, we will we spend our first Mother's Day without our mother and on June 17, 2012 we mark the first anniversary of her death. We circle in time, summer, fall, winter, spring - we pass the days of the last year we spent with her, the frightening ones, the day where she felt well enough to shop for shoes, we pass the days I squandered. Those days haunt me so that I must hide from them, and I can only find comfort in: what is an address when she knows who she made.

I love a man who lives to make his art. The only way he can live in this world is by writing songs I know like my eyelids on a summer's day, songs into which he pours all the beauty he can find. He is possessed by creation and newness. I am not like him. I am possessed by the world, by what is here, and what is gone.  I write these words to find the girl and her little brother with their mother's green eyes, and their little brother with their father's blue eyes. One day, I will not be vague, I will not hide from my sadness (I cannot control it, my 2nd greatest wish is to cry). I might even do what I told you I would do.


These words were not easy. On July 25, L. wrote to me: Although I know you do not feel connected to your sadness, rest assure, you are at a kind of magical stage of subconscious connection. She is speaking through your heart, mind and pen (or rather, your laptop). Sadness will roll in with the tides of mundane memories, with holidays, with realizations about the lack of phone calls. Unfortunately, it will eventually come. But for now, know that the unexpected thing about loss is a strange super-powered infusion of love that you gain from the person that you lost. It is almost like a shield that they give us for our hearts. And that shield is made up of the energy created by the POWER of your connection to them. Some may call it denial or shock, but really, I think it is the protection given from our beloved, the one who knows that our fragile hearts can only take so much at a time... Lest they break in two. And that is the last thing that they would ever want to happen. In the beginning, my grief was a conduit. I did not need to fight to speak to you, which was for the best - I am no fighter. I have lived with my grief through summer, fall, winter and an early, early spring (earlier still than last year:We are home from Paris, where June's sun visited in April forcing the sleepy cherry blossoms into wide-eyed morning, before, even their siblings have risen in Japan.) I know this feeling of grief like my eyelids on a summer's day, and yet I still feel so very unsure of what will be there when I open my eyes.


Having the blues is different from singing the blues. That's getting rid of the blues. These are blues I will never get rid of, but I will sing them the best way I know.

The is and the were.

Because the world is unknown to me, I wonder, if we go to Joshua Tree, to a place that I do not know, to a landscape that I can only dream up, will I find her there, waiting for me? I live in a world where my mother was and I am. We, none of us know our fates (her favorite joke? Want to make G-d laugh? Tell him your plans.) but it is conceivable that I will live longer without my mother than with her. The tense of her being has changed, she has passed, they say, she was, they say. She is I say! But that will slip away, and every night I fall deep asleep, for every day I say, over and over and over again, she is dead, my mother is dead.

Z. told me tonight "I am so sorry about your mother." And he meant it, I know, with a full heart, but how do I explain that I stand, thirsty, at the bottom of a cavernous cavern, and his words are a drop of water falling from heights that I cannot see. No one should know this feeling, until the knowing is unavoidable, but oh! oh! what I wish I did differently while I still had the chance.

Where I have been.

I went to the Stationery Show today. The first time I went, 8 years ago, I had a different name, a different job, I lived in a different city. 8 years ago, my mother had just had a double mastectomy to rid her of invasive lobular breast cancer. Today, I have a new name and my mother has stage IV metastasized breast cancer that thrives in her bones, her stomach, her lymph nodes, her blood.

Every night on my way home from work, I used to speak to my mother on the telephone. Now, she sleeps before I leave work. I walk home and I talk to friends about my mother, or I talk to her in my head, or I write to her, and tell her things I am afraid to say. When death is far away, it is easier to speak of it freely. Now that death creeps closer, we are in a delicate waltz.

My mother has always taught her children what her mother taught her: live each day as if is your last. Now that we know what will end her days, my mother and I think differently. Do not live each day as if it is your last. It is a terrible burden, terrible, terrible knowledge that no one should lay down to sleep with. Live each day full of love. Live each day with grace, with dignity. Be the best you, the person your parents dreamed they would make, the person you have always wanted to be.

Cancer has fractured my mother's shoulder, it has put her in the hospital too many times, it has kept her from her granddaughter's birthday party for fear of infection. Cancer causes my teetotaler mother to live on cocktails of painkillers. But, cancer has not made my mother anyone other than the joyous, sage, impish, speed-loving mother who will remain my North Star for the rest of my days.

The unexpected.

It is almost the full moon. The hospice lady told me that my mother might die on the full moon, that people usually do, and I believed it, but my mother, not usual, did not. On Friday morning, June 17th, my uncle, the third of three brothers, six years older than my mother, who loved her with a love often reserved for one's child (he did promise their mother, on her deathbed, that he would care for my mother, and he did, Uncle B, you did) kissed her head, and told her that he would see her later. I pulled him aside, and whispered, if he could, please tell her that it was okay if she did not see him later. He did, as he cried, and she didn't wait, but she would have, had he not asked, and he was brave for saying what he did not mean.

I cried on Saturday night, in a church, as I listened to my husband play. It was the first time, almost, that I had cried since her funeral. I always thought that when she died I would instantly get sick. Nothing that I thought would happen has happened. I am rigid, I wait, still. Turns out, almost a month is not enough.

And if you wonder if you ought to, if it is right, say something. The bereaved (provenance: bereafian "to deprive of, take away, seize, rob") are more frightened than you. There is fear in mourning, there is anxiety. Moments when you forget that you are a mourner, are terrible for the remembering. If I could wear it on my sleeve that I am different, no longer the same, I would. Part of me lies with her. It is all I care about, my mother, and it is all I want to talk about. I want to tell you about her, and I will.

Unveiling.

Dear Mom,

The last time we stood here was a little less than a year ago. The sun was shining; a huge yellow butterfly hovered round your family and friends, suspended by an invisible thread from wherever you are.

I am writing this on Friday and Saturday, the forecast calls for no rain. Your favorite joke, aside from the mildly inappropriate Father Nelson one was "Want to know how to make G-d laugh? Tell him your plans." I am gambling by writing this, but I know you too well, my girl (I do not have your golden casino touch): you will keep the skies clear today, the sun will shine.  And if rain does fall, it will mirror our tears.

Mom, we stood here, the day of your funeral, 322 days ago. 322 days is not a year. It is 43 days short of a year. You showed us all what a day is worth. We follow the path you set for us, you gave us the gift of your love, your moral guidance through the world, the love of books and animals and family and friends. You taught us that the dash between was more important than the dates on either side, and so, the dash between your date of birth, and the date of your too soon death (57 years was not enough), is long and fat, fed on love and rightness and Swedish Fish.

Mom, you died in the shadow of the Strawberry Moon. The super moon reigned this weekend, the largest and most spectacular of the year. At 8:35 pm on Saturday night, it reached its perigee and slipped close to the Earth. Mom, you are our super moon, the most dazzling moon that ever was. You hold us in your incandescent orbit, always.

We love you.

I love you.

I am your daughter, Leigh Michelle Batnick Plessner, and I thank you for giving me life, and teaching me how to live it.