Life
Empty Nest: My Mom Died Six Days Before Sam Started College
That’s too many goodbyes in one week.
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On our September trip, which included dropping our son, Sam, off at college in New York and a brief vacation in Montreal, my husband, John, developed an unnatural attachment to the GPS on his BlackBerry. He monitored our progress on the cab ride from Kennedy into the city, as we walked from SoHo to the Village, while we rode the train past Lake Champlain to Montreal, before we hiked from our hotel to Schwartz’s restaurant on the east side of town, and so on. “Look!” he’d say, rolling his thumb over the tiny track ball to show me on the microscopic map just where we’d be going in the next few minutes. Under ordinary circumstances I might have found this activity a little annoying—couldn’t we just … be?—but in that particular case I understood. Anything that purported to tell us where we were at any given moment—anything, in particular, that could keep my world from spinning off its axis—was most assuredly welcome. In fact, I envied both John’s optimism and his faith.
Six days before we were to take Sam to school, my mother died very suddenly. John and I were visiting her at the time, while Sam was traveling with my father to San Francisco. My mother was 78 and not in the best of health, but even so, she felt well enough to walk her dog early on that very sunny, very hot Texas morning and did not come back. The only benefit of losing your mother the same week you have to take your son to college, I can now safely say, is that the latter, dreaded for months, suddenly didn’t seem so bad. As Sam put it, surrounded by his suitcases as he looked around the room that would never really be his again, “For the last two weeks I’ve been running around saying goodbye to all my friends. Now I know that wasn’t really goodbye.”
I loved my mother dearly, but a therapist I know did pose an interesting question. “Did Mimi’s mother need to be the center of attention?” he asked John, with what I assume was the voice of experience. You may think I’m being a little insensitive here, but I have to say this: The streak of black humor that has run through my family for generations—I got it from my mother, who got it from her father—has proven to be a very useful quality over the last few weeks. In fact, I tried out the same joke on my brothers when they rushed into town for the funeral. Jeff had just used his last week of paid vacation to move his son from college to grad school, and Ed had embarked upon his first vacation with his wife and child in a year. Needless to say, they got it.
My memory of what followed is still a little spotty. My mother died on a Sunday and we buried her on Tuesday. I remember picking out something that would suit my clotheshorse of a mother to wear for all eternity; the solace I felt, alone, composing the short eulogy my mother no doubt knew I would write for her. I have to say, I was deeply grateful for the moments of absurdity that she, too, would have enjoyed. For example, my 6-year-old nephew, who at various moments during the funeral saw fit to declare, “This is SO BORING!!!” By the following Sunday, we were at Sam’s Welcome Week in New York.
I have now been told many times in the last few weeks that grief is an ocean and the best you can do is ride the waves. Hence, there were many moments in New York when it was possible to forget I had lost my mother at the same time I was sending my son off into the world. The city was gorgeous, with the warm sun and cool breeze that hint of early fall. It was life-affirming to stand in line with hundreds of other students and their parents, laughing and chattering in a half-dozen different languages. Sons, like Sam, usually arrived with just a few duffel bags or rolling suitcases. Daughters, on the other hand, seemed sure they would never see home again. Indulgent fathers unloaded small mountains on the sidewalk: refrigerators, ironing boards, fans, hot rollers, and shoes, shoes, shoes.
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