23 years ago, also a Saturday, just before 6 a.m. I was aware that I heard the phone ring. A few minutes later, my father was standing in the room with the news. My mother had died.
I was 26 years old. Exactly one month prior, I walked out of the stage door of Whitman Hall at Brooklyn College having performed my recital for my degree. I made the choice to return to Vermont as my mother’s long illness had progressed very quickly over the previous few months. 10 days after returning home, she entered the hospital and died 20 days later.
I’ve been thinking a great deal about how I still feel her loss so keenly. We had just begun to reach that point in a mother/daughter relationship where it moves into a deep friendship. I lost that as well as my mother. I had also arrived at the moment of my life where I was finally coming into my own. But with her death, I felt….stopped.
And that is how I still feel today. I have tried to write this blog for hours. I keep writing about choices, emotions, hopes, etc…and it all sounds forced and self serving.
SO…Mother, I miss you terribly. I know I’ve made choices in my life that took me on a different road than I was planning. Some of that came about with losing you; losing your advice, support, and opinion.
I am working hard to examine my choices and continue to move forward. How I wish you were here to talk to…to give me advice. I try to think what you would think or say, but I’ve lived almost as long without you as I did with you. It’s hard to know what you would think anymore.
I think I am making progress on my journey forward. I think you would approve of some of my recent choices. I feel more and more I am finally coming into “me”. I hope you would like who I have become.
I love you, Mother.
