Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Dear Mama

Dear Mama,

I wish I could show you this photograph. It’s a snapshot of me with Elizabeth Lynne, the daughter of your cousin Helen, and your nephew Greg, the son of your older brother Orin. This picture of the three of us was taken at a college basketball game in Orlando a couple of months ago.

I’d love for you to see this photo, just to let you know that the three of us are doing okay. We're middle-aged now. We were just little kids the last time you saw us, back in the 1960s. I’d like to believe that you would be proud of the three of us. I wonder if you ever thought about a time in the future when the kids in your family would be all grown up, and how our lives might be.

After I lost you when I was four years old, I lost most of your family, too. I was cut off from them for many years. I felt a bit like a grape on a vine plucked from a cluster, tossed on the ground, and left to wither alone. It wasn’t until I was almost forty that your kinfolk came trickling back into my life, one by one, and I started going back to Pikeville to visit after more than three decades.

I can’t remember much about my relationship with you. My memories of you are like wispy glimpses or blips on a screen, almost subliminal. My family photographs of you bring to mind so many questions that will never be answered. I remember your silk kimono and the lovely fragrance of your Persian Wood talcum powder. I recall curling up with you for afternoon naps in our house on St. Regis Drive, and playing in the backyard while you pinned linens on the clothesline on sunny days. I remember riding with you in your Chevrolet to pick up Carolyn in the afternoons at the elementary school. You drove with the window rolled down, smoking Winston cigarettes. You used to take me grocery shopping with you at the Jitney Jungle. When I've heard cousin Martha's voice on the phone, it sounds so much like yours. In her photographs, she resembles you, too.

I have a few belongings you left behind. They are my most beloved treasures. Your possessions help me feel a little closer to you. Your handwritten letters to my grandparents, the little satin ring pillow from your wedding, your Pikeville High School class ring, and a couple of your watercolor paintings are among those precious things. I have your Towle Candlelight silver flatware and your Early American dining room chairs. I also have a few pieces of your Poppy Trail china. To the best of my knowledge, I have everything that is left in the world of your personal effects.

I need to tell you that it is difficult for me to understand how you could ever leave me. I know your health was frail and married life didn’t turn out the way you wanted it to be. Maybe motherhood wasn’t so great for you either. Your departure wounded me in a way that can never quite be healed. Sometimes I am still a motherless child adrift in the world without the anchor of a mother’s unconditional love. I never learned some of the things that a girl needs her mother to teach her, like how to cook and clean, for instance. As odd as it may seem, I'm just now learning how to mop floors and dust, after having depended on housekeepers for many years. Now that I'm nearing retirement and a cleaning service is less affordable, I'm having to figure out, for the first time in my life, how to keep the house clean. And let's don't even talk about my lack of culinary skills!

Your firstborn, my big sister Carolyn, passed away in 2007. Cousin Jeff left the following year, in 2008. Cousin Diane died last year, in 2010. Aunt Ruth and Aunt Lois are also gone, as well as several of the others you loved. I keep in touch with Janey, Greg, David, and Jennifer, as well as Edgar and Reed. Charles lived until 2005. Immediately after his funeral, I drove across town to your grave to tell you that he had died. I kissed your tombstone and told you that I love you.

I hope you're in a good place. Sometimes I wonder sometimes if you can see me. I wonder if I would have made different decisions about my life if you had lived. There was a time when I had a mother, but it seems so long ago and far away, like a fairy tale about an enchanted life. I do not know what it would have been like to grow up with you. I am a continuation of you. I try to live my life as best I can and make positive contributions to the world. I promise I'll stay in relationship with your people, my people. I hope this is comforting to you. And I hope more than anything that someday, somehow, and somewhere in the universe, I will get to see you again.