Finest thing.

Our mother taught us the hard lessons of life. When it would have been easier to say yes then to press on through her child's tears, she choose the path thicketed and thorned, for it would lead to a beautiful island where her children could light a fire and make their way in the world, through plenty and drought.

The crickets sang in the grasses. They sang the song of summer's ending, a sad, monotonous song. "Summer is over and gone," they sang. "Over and gone, over and gone. Summer is dying, summer is dying."

The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last forever. Even on the most beautiful days of the whole year-the days when summer is changing into fall-the crickets spread the rumor of sadness and change. -Charlotte's Web

The crickets sang of no rumors. Like my mother, the crickets sang of truth. There is a glass wall, thick, clear, soundproof, between myself and my sadness. The bed my mother bought me has been taken away, I lie here in the heat in the bed I bought with my husband. Where does my sadness lie? When the yellow light comes through the trees, will it be waiting for me? I read that the deeper their love for the departed, the harder it is for mourners to leave the cave of denial, and I felt not so terribly wrong for eating, for sleeping, for picking which black dress to wear. Summer will go, it will leave us (I cannot say die, batteries do not die, only people, and for me, only one person) yet it will, once again, return. Beyond the glass wall, I know, unlike summer, my mother will never rise again but here, in the stillness of July, 37 days later, 899 hours later the daughter that I am now, the daughter of a dead mother, waits for her great love, her first love to rise again.

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.

Your mailbox is full.

I wore the white dress today that I wore the night before I was a bride, on a night while my mother was still alive. Today, the dress was dusted with the pollen from white lilies, a mark, I'm told, that is hard to remove. I can smell the sharp sting of the tiger lilies my mother's Tante Muriel Iris brought to the house when I was small. I can smell the perfume I sprayed on my mother's pillow as she lay dying (Near, it is called). As we are made, we are marked. The kriah ribbon lies in a silver shell next to my bed. It is torn, I am torn, and I wept to remove it on the last day of shiva. I do not yet miss what I will not have. I miss what I had two weeks ago. I miss caring for her, I miss the bittersweet house full of love and sadness, I miss her brothers, I miss my brothers. I miss the moment I heard her take her last breath, for though she was leaving, and left she has, it was her breath.

I basked in you;
I love you, helplessly, with a boundless, tongue-tied
love.
And death doesn't prevent me from loving you.
Besides,
in my opinion you aren't dead.
(I know dead people, and you are not dead.)
-Franz Wright via The Long Goodbye by Meghan O'Rourke

I have no secrets.

The end of a pickle floats in this morning's coffee. The bath grows cold. I have no secrets. I only wear clothes heaped in the basket next to my closet; a bent hanger has jammed the door shut. A woman named Gloria will come in the morning to clean around my discarded dresses, my piles of denial and I will not give her keys. Weeks ago, I dreamed of H., who stole my precious thing. I thought I'd want to write to her to tell her that my mother is dead, and what of my mother's mother's engagement ring she plucked from my white bathroom? but I cannot write to her. I cannot decide which shoes to keep, hunger is easier than deciding. I cannot cry.

I saw my mother again, on the shores on Sunday. The sea carried us past her, in a cove, on the sand, but there in the distance, I saw her again.

I read, so I can see life, for I do not feel my own.

The safety deposit box is opened. There are savings bonds, a diamond ring, a deed for the house. The letters come. I wear a thin gold bangle shot through a perfect pearl. Even when you cannot/ see the moon, it is ok/ She is always there.

I am waiting for my mother.

The phenomenal return home.

My mother died 7 days ago. It has been one week since I kissed the hollow in the nape of her neck, since I ran my lips against the downy hair on the back of her head. I have lived 165 hours without my mother, and I have not, for one minute, understood that she will not appear in our driveway in her big white car, that I will never again hear her voice talking on the phone in the laundry room.

The day after she died, my brother and I stood on the back of our family boat, as it rolled past green backyards with sprinklers and swimming pools. We passed swans along the way, and families of ducks. Herons stood on the wet, grassy patches that sprout from the bay. I saw my mother, sitting in her chair, laughing with glee as the salt water sprayed our faces. I saw my mother standing in the marshes, on the lawns, at the edge of the park she took us to as children, smiling, squinting and shading her eyes with one hand, waving at us with the other, happy that we were together.

I am going back there tonight. I will be with my brothers, I will drive her big white car and I will have lunch at our favorite place. My stepfather will hug me. I will fold her clothing, and wear her pajamas. I will look at the ants tumbling through the mountains of grass and not understand how they are allowed to be here, but she is not.

My mother and I shared 280,320 hours of life. It will take more than 165 hours to understand that she is gone, forever. She lived from April 9, 1954 until June 17, 2011 - 57 years, 2 months, 1 week, and 1 day and not a minute longer - but I am still waiting for her to come home. I will rub my eyes and hug her, she will tell me that she loves me and she is proud of me, and we will hold hands and know, together, that these 165 hours were all a bad dream.

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.

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.

For Lisa, because she asked.

We gathered together again, grown tall like the cat tails on the marsh at the end of our block, once over taken by fire, the trucks sounding, smoke billowing when the school bus dropped us home. We have already lost one of our mothers and now we sat on the steps, drinking beers and laughing, with husbands and wives, waiting, as we lose another mother, this time mine.

She is asleep now, on the hospital bed that waited for her as we rode home in the ambulance on Friday, mother and daughter. We looked backwards out of the windows with our green eyes and we couldn't tell, on roads so familiar, where we were, on the roads that led her to visit her children in Washington, in Philadelphia, in Indiana in the days after the monuments fell and her son was too scared to fly home, so home flew to him, and our New York license plates elicited cries of love from here to the farmlands that stretched out before our open eyes.

The children are grown, Elliott Street is for new families, other families and these days, love flies here to say their goodbyes.

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.

7 stars to treat with care and concern. Do not forget tenderness.

We slept, early, angry and deep, at the hour the North Star went out. The fountain flows for a day, the lights twinkle, the leader praised and then a new monument rises, with a new face. Stubborn ram, angry archer, make right in your home what you cannot make right in the world.

The Loss of diamonds.

a return to Giverny, Erik Madigan Heck

The Giverny we saw was less clotted with nympheas; they've bloomed every summer since 1893, or so. I trust they will bloom again.

Technivorm Plessner

Welcome home, beautiful baby.

Imaginary doings

Foujita cat

A good muse does not fall asleep in an unmade bed. A good muse does not leave her dresses in a tangle on the floor.

"Eyelids of the morning"

wisteria from AnOther

Rise, Mother, rise! We are under April skies and I need our nighttimes back. It is lonely walking home without you.

Flick, flick of the multi-tailed whip

Iris Schwarz

Mess. Once, twice, three times. Over again. Hiding places are running out.

Mundane desires

David Hockney from Nowness

Drawers need to be emptied, vegetables sliced perfectly, papers torn, shelves lined, windows flung wide open. Looking forward to a day to take out the trash.

Dreams that are wild, dreams that are strange.

Leonor Fini

Sleeping the sleep of 100-year princesses. Need round Dior gray rabbits to gently open my eyelids to the sounds of petunias' melodies.

My castle, my books.

...a languid Mexican actress read a poem with much tenderness followed by Harold reading it with much passion. It was 'Paris'. I wanted to dig Silvia Fuentes in the ribs and say: 'That's written to me, you know.' I felt an extraordinary tingle when my eyes met Harold's at the end of this, the first poem, written during our first 'honeymoon' at the Lancaster Hotel in 1975 and he gave me a small private smile. -Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter, Antonia Fraser

May we all be so in love, deep into our 70s.

The elusive listener who listens.

Alexander McQueen butterfly shoes

Some souls, they knew, what was flying around.

Cabbages

Zebra and girls by Kareena Zerefos via Honor

It is time to say thank you.