ciroccoj | Mother's Day at the cemetery

So, the visit to the cemetery.

I haven't really cried much over my mother's death. I haven't been stiff-upper-lip or anything, but the fact that she was sick for a long, long time made the loss easier to adapt to as it progressed, so barring a few occasions like her funeral and inurnment, and getting her life insurance check, I haven't really done much outright teariness. And I certainly didn't expect to when I went to the cemetery on Mother's Day. We never really celebrated Mother's Day at my house until I became a mother myself, so it's not like it had huge emotional significance for me in respect to my mother.

I got to the cemetery and noted how it looked fairly busy, yet still quiet and serene. Went to put her cloth flowers back in place, thinking I'd come back with the kids sometime this week and put real flowers for her. She always loved flowers, and even though I don't, and I don't really believe she's watching from somewhere beyond the grave... I don't know, I guess I'm somewhere between 'just in case I'm wrong and she is watching, this will be nice for her' and 'even if she isn't, flowers help me to remember her and what she was like, which is the whole point of mourning after all.'

Anyway, I thought about my day so far, and how the kids had brought me breakfast, and how I wished I could have told her about that, and I thought about how much I missed telling her stuff. And then I remembered her friend Shirley, at her inurnment, when she said something like "She was the best friend a girl could have", and it struck me that, motherhood aside, I really miss her friendship. I miss telling her things and hearing her opinion about them. I miss her reactions to things that amuse or offend or interest me. I miss the in-jokes we had, and the stories she told. I miss her smile and speaking Spanish together.

Back in the fall, I went to dinner with three high school friends of mine, one of whom I've stayed close to since high school, and two of whom I hadn't seen since about 1990. At one point I mentioned that my mother had died a few months earlier, and one of the two I hadn't seen in 15 years was quite taken aback. I thought of my reaction to friends of mine who'd lost parents over the years, and was a little puzzled when she seemed so shocked. Then she said, "Your mom was so nice. I always remember her talking to us, whenever we went to visit you. She would join right into the conversation, not like the other parents who just stayed in the living room. I never forgot that. She was a really nice lady, I'm so sorry."

I'm not trying to idealize my mom, because she had her faults like everybody else. She could be very stubborn, and was of no earthly use whatsoever during the more difficult part of Chris' residency. In many ways, she made it all worse, because whenever I complained she would dismiss everything I said with, "Well, it's like any profession, really," and imply by her every word and expression and tone of voice that I was a big whiner and needed to grow up and stop letting such minor things as Chris' 110-hour workweeks get to me.

But she was a good friend anyway. She was a single mom and I was an only child, so for most of my childhood it was just her and me in the house, and we were very close. A lot closer than most kids and their parents. She treated me as an equal, or at least as a person and not just as a child, far more than just about anybody else's parents did. She would talk to my friends as persons too, genuinely interested in what they had to say and what they were like - in fact, two of them were at her inurnment, not just because they were my friends and wanted to support me, but because they loved her and missed her too.

She respected my right to make my own choices, and let me make them far earlier than most parents. And I responded by asking her advice, and acting on it, a lot more than most of my friends did. I was picking all my own courses way before most kids did, for example, but I would voluntarily talk them over with her and take what she said seriously. I would tell her about problems I had with friends and boyfriends, and trust her to listen and let me make my own choices, even when she didn't approve of them. I think she only ever asked me, once, to not hang out with a friend she disapproved of - and that's because he was a fellow cook at the restaurant where I worked and he'd been arrested shoplifting a bunch of 10-oz steaks. I very readily agreed :)

I know I try to relate to my own kids the way she related to me. Part of why I always wanted kids was that I wanted them to have the kind of relationship with me that I had with my own mom, and I wanted the kind of satisfaction in parenting that my mom seemed to get from me. She would often point out how wonderful it was to be a mom when I did something neat; it never ceased to amaze her that I could draw and do math, where she could do neither. She was proud of my marks at school and the way I handled my post-secondary education. She was proud of me when I showed social conscience, when I voluntarily sought out unusual literature or experiences, when I showed interest in politics or science or art.

It was neat when she would sometimes say things that could have been so condescending if they hadn't come from such a positive place. Like, "Look at you, all grown up - seems like just yesterday I was cleaning up your spit-up, and now you're speaking in complete sentences and choosing which OAC's to take in order to get into the programs you want in university."

She was pretty much my biggest fan, which is (I think) one of the most important roles of a parent. Not that you have to be blindly supportive of your kids no matter what awful things they do, but you should be their cheerleader, the person who understands them most, the person who will go the farthest to support them and be there for them. The person who will try to help them figure out how to behave right because you love them and want them to succeed and be happy. And you have to understand that being all of that to another human being is an enormous responsibility, but it's also filled with wonder and incredible joy.

So I was standing there, thinking about all of that, and thinking how much I missed talking to her and how much I missed her friendship. And it was a little too much, and I started to cry. Like I said, I haven't really cried much over this, but it felt really unfair to have lost somebody I was so close to, and it felt really unfair to her and to my kids that they never got to become friends as adults. I even cried thinking of how unfair it was that she'll never get to meet

ninja_kat's child(ren), nor they her.

I was there for a while, thinking about all of that, then trying to comfort myself by thinking of my kids. And I thought of something that Percy, Shirley's husband, said at her inurnment: the rather cliched "She's not really gone, I see her in you." Which may be a cliche, but there's a reason cliches exist; they often express truths that are universal, such as the fact that our parents leave traces of themselves in us, for good and bad. And I know she left a lot of herself in me. A lot of my sense of humour, political and moral beliefs, and tastes in music and food, come pretty much straight from my mother. And a lot of my parenting beliefs and actions come from her too.

So then I thought about how the kids would never know her as a friend, and realized that, god willing, they'll come to know me as a friend, and in a way they'll know her too, through me. And someday they may mourn the loss of our friendship, but hopefully they will eventually come to the conclusion that, painful as it is to have lost it, it was a gift while it lasted, and is not totally gone as long as they remember it.

I think I better stop writing before I tear up again. I will add, however, that I am glad I went to the cemetery. I think a lot of that needed thinking and working through.