Griego: Mother's Day memories of love, laughter

Monday, May 8, 2006

Sixty-six years old. That's how old my father would be now. I can't believe it the first time I do the math, but there it is: May 6, 1940, to May 6, 2006. Sixty-six.

It startles me, this realization of the passage of time. Five years have elapsed since his death. In my mind, he is always young, and in his perpetual youth exists my own. We remain father and daughter, running partners, basketball buddies, perched together on a ditch bank, fishing worms out of a Folgers can, the snapping turtle I will catch and he will free still lurking, unsuspecting, in murky water. It will be many years before my mom becomes sick and dies and he becomes, somehow, less a father and more a child, wounded, the ditch bank traded in for a bar stool.

If my father's birthday reminds me of time's passage, my mother's death represents its suspension. It is the frozen calendar against which my own life is measured. She died two weeks shy of her 45th birthday. I turned 42 a couple of weeks ago. The math is easy.

"It's strange to be in our 40s, isn't it?" my sister, 11 months my junior, says after wishing me a happy birthday. "I think of her all the time, and I know you do, too, but I think of this as the time when mom was sick and didn't know it."

By the time the cause of her lack of appetite and inability to keep food down is diagnosed, the cancer has spread, a thin layer across her stomach, into her lymph nodes, peppering her spleen, pancreas, intestines.

In this brief space of time between our father's birthday and Mother's Day, my sisters and I wonder at how we miss them both so much and yet mourn them so differently. I suspect one reason is because our mother's death carried with it a sense of injustice, of illogic.

My father's death did not. He drank; the drinking became his disease, and the disease brought his death. Only when it was too late did he realize that his sickness would one day make pain and relief indistinguishable. My sense is not so much that he wanted to die, but that he didn't know how to live, how to be, how to love without my mother beside him.

And so, Mother's Day approaches, and my sisters and I talk, and we remember, more than anything else, her love. She was a young parent and the four of us tried her. Her temper was long but fearsome when ignited, and we were each swatted upside the head with a hairbrush more than once.

But she laughed often, and whatever their trials may have been, my father could make my mother laugh until she cried. She was always hugging and kissing us, and in one of my favorite pictures, we are standing next to each other, plump cheek to plump cheek, smiling.

My mother never knew any of her grandchildren. She died when my sister was eight months pregnant. It was my mom's fiercest wish that she live to see the baby, but she knew she might not. She decided to write this first grandchild a letter. And found she could not. What to say to this baby of her baby, the child of her second child, the sensitive middle daughter who had always taken such good care of her.

How to convey so much love and hope for a child she would not see grow up. I imagine her sitting there, pen in hand, frustrated, weeping, unable to put her feelings into words or, perhaps, to face so directly the life that would continue without her.

The mental clock my siblings and I keep tells us that if we live as long as she did, we have three years, four years, five years remaining. For a long time following her death, that clock loomed in our minds, foreboding and grievous, a morbid preoccupation. But time - and parenthood - now offer us another perspective.

"I try to show my kids all the time how much I love them," my sister says during the birthday call. "I try and make sure they know they can always talk to me, and we talk a lot. You don't ever know."

That our mom died so young, so unexpectedly, left us with an acute consciousness of life's unpredictability.

And while each of us faces the daily struggle of maintaining perspective, of focusing on the stuff that matters, that understanding has proven to be a gift to us as parents more powerful than any letter. There are moments when this knowledge overwhelms us, and we scoop our children into our arms and smother their faces with kisses the way she did to us.

We could not have understood then what we know now. When she was alive, my mother taught us how to love.

With her death, she taught us that we must not hide from love or withhold it.

We must share it, nourish it, protect it. That, my youngest sister says as our daughters chatter over breakfast, is her Mother's Day gift to us.

griegot@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-2699