MOTHERS DAY

 

My Mother, Dora Saunders nee Miller

Mothers’ Day this year falls on Sunday, May 8. It is also the thirtieth anniversary of my mother’s death. She died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 64 and missed out on the final third of her life. I will be 63 on Monday and this was the date that I had originally set to retire. A part of me realizes how precious life is and my plan is to live much longer than my mother did. Nevertheless humans are quite fragile and there are no guarantees. 

I remember my mother for her kindness and for the way that she loved us two kids. People enjoyed my mother and she liked being around people. I owe much of my self-assurance to her unwavering confidence in me.

Here is a section from a short but true story that I wrote several years ago, about my mother’s death.

My paternal grandmother, whom we called by the Yiddish term “Booba,” moved in with us in 1964 when we moved to a council flat, or ‘maisonette’ on Swaton Road. Her head was balding and her top lip sprouted a soft moustache; there was a noticeable bump on the top of her head. 

Booba

She found her place at the ‘head’ of the table and sat there quietly most of the day. She drank tea and dunked her digestive biscuits. She preferred to wash her clothes in an enamel basin on the stove. When she got cold she would warm up the tea kettle and hold her hands close to it for heat.

Years later when I heard that my grandmother had died, I rushed home with the intention of comforting my parents. As I approached the corner of Campbell Road and Rounton Road, close to where my parents lived, I began to feel light-headed. I looked up at the sky above the railway bridge and it seemed to me as though the whole sky was filled with the image of my Booba. She smiled down at me with a reassuring beneficence. I was filled with both sadness and gratitude as I entered my parents’ home. My mother was crying in her domain - the kitchen. I walked past her to my father. After all it was his mother who had died. I went straight to the living room where he sat in his usual armchair. I put my arm around him and we both cried. I believe that this was the first and only time I ever saw him in tears.

L-R: My Father, his Mother (Booba), & his Father circa 1922

It was some thirteen years later that my own mother died. By this time I had traveled afar, gotten married, was living in Wisconsin, and my wife was five months pregnant. It was the day before my birthday. I came home after work with a parcel that I had picked up from the post office that morning. The package was filled with a variety of English chocolates that my mother had sent me. I had been notified of the arrival of the package and had gone to the post office several days earlier, only to find that for some reason it had been forwarded to Chicago. The parcel had been tracked down and returned to Madison where I finally was able to collect it. As I tore open the brown paper wrapping, the telephone rang, and it was my brother letting me know of my mother’s sudden death. She had apparently had a heart attack and died in the street. It was a Thursday evening and my mother was to be buried as soon as possible. I asked if they could delay the funeral until I got there, and could hear my father in the background frantically screaming, “No. We have to bury her tomorrow. It’s the law!” I was supposed to meet a friend for dinner that night to quietly celebrate my birthday. When I called to cancel, my friend told me that a surprise birthday party had actually awaited me that evening. He would call to let people know what had happened.

I flew to England as soon as I could and arrived the next afternoon. I had missed my mother’s funeral. My father met me at the underground station and we walked back to his flat. 

My Father in his prime

He told me how during their last week together, he and my mother had become ‘closer than ever.’ He thought that there was some sense of premonition, as though she were trying to make amends for the pain and suffering in their marriage. It seemed to my more cynical self that this was more likely a part of the grieving process, my father trying to put things into a manageable perspective, perhaps assuaging guilt and replacing it with a more tractable version of reality. Nevertheless, my father seemed shell-shocked. I worried for him. How would this man ever function without the woman who had looked after him for the last forty years, had cooked for him, laundered his clothes and changed the bedding, had cleaned the house and done the grocery shopping. As I was thinking these things, we turned a corner near where my father lived. “This is the spot where your mother keeled over and died,” he told me. A familiar light-headedness returned, my knees felt weak, and at that moment I realized that this was the very place that I had seen the vision of my grandmother all those years before.