A Mother's Love

 

Me with Mom (above) at college graduation; Dad with his Mom (left) at their New York City home in the 1940s.

I remember as a young girl sitting in the living room one evening with my Dad and being surprised to see him softly cry. Music blared from the old turntable: a Clancy Brothers' song of Ireland and lost love.

Dad explained in halting sentences that the song made him long for his mother. Della Connolly had emigrated from Ireland as a young woman. My father had lost her as a young man. 

Summoned back to New York from his West Coast training post during World War II, Dad was with her as she died of cancer.

"I wish you could have known her," he said, his hand moving to his cheek. "I wish you could have known her."

I wanted to comfort him, but don't remember finding the right words. I do remember wondering, in my naivete, how recollections of a mother's death decades before could still bring my father to tears.

I could not answer that for several decades, until I, too, had lost my Mom.

Now, 11 years after her death, I still find my composure crumbling at unexpected moments: When a Sinatra song drifts over the radio (Mom had cut classes in high school to hear him sing); or when election day approaches, and she's not calling me with questions about which candidate I like best.

Or when memory fragments from my childhood bob up, unbidden, like alternately sour and sweet fruit. In one, Mom hovers over me with a cold cloth and iced ginger ale, murmuring reassurances as I lie crumpled on the sofa, knee stitched yet still throbbing after being mauled by an aggressive Boxer.

In another, she's suspended effortlessly in the ocean beside me, offering encouragement as I demonstrate how I can float and tread water. Her father taught me these skills during a sun-drenched vacation on Long Island; Mom would add to the lessons, teaching me my first swim strokes. 

In a final fragment, Mom and Aunt Janet are bawling inconsolably as they sit before our black and white television, their three preschoolers in stunned silence around them. The adults are listening yet not wanting to believe the unfolding news of a shooting that left the young, handsome president, John F. Kennedy, with a bullet in the head.

At times like these, when memories engulf me, all I want to do is pick up the phone and hear Mom's voice.

Mom died of cancer at the age of 64. It took five years to claim her, moving from her breast to her liver and finally to her lungs.

She was hospitalized several times, for surgeries and other treatments. Each time brought me heightened dread: The fear of walking into her hospital room and seeing her curled up, in pain, her morphine long worn off. The fear -- never realized -- that she might not make it out from that stay.

William at 1

A few weeks before she did die, in her bed, with her husband and children around her, she made a simple request. It was August, and she was weak and hurting, yet she was thinking of her grandchildren, not herself.

For William, whose 1st birthday was approaching, she asked me to pick up a copy of "Hans Brinker" -- a book set in Holland about sacrifice and courage. Through my sister's marriage, my nephew William had inherited a Dutch past. 

I bought the book and asked Mom to sign it, to personalize it for the day William could read.

I forget how her inscription started. But I remember it closed, as her notes to us always did, with love.

Me, about age 7, and Mom, late teens, before husband and kids

I am 7 or 8, and I'm up the street from my parents' house, in the yard of a neighbor I don't know that well.

Kittens are scampering between my legs, tumbling on and off my lap, meowing, purring, preening. The mother cat hovers, not certain of what I'll do next.

I don't care that she's bristling. I'm really happy. Because my parents work, they've ruled out keeping pets that take much care. We're allowed turtles, and guinea pigs, and hamsters. But not kittens. So time spent with these tiny, perfect creatures is time I treasure.

As I play, I hear the faint hiss of a bus door opening, then the sound of an engine accelerating as the bus pulls away. Footsteps approach, quick and purposeful. There's the click, click, clicking of heels on road.

I'm on my feet now, arms and legs churning, toward the sound of those familiar steps.

I finally see my Mom, rounding the corner. And I am running away from the kittens, toward a mother's love.

--Chris Harvey