Happy Mother's Day In Heaven, Mom — The Love Lives Forever

LONG ISLAND, NY — It's the card stores that still hurt the most. Even 31 years after I lost my mother, on that suffocatingly hot day in August when she was only 53 years old, I'm still unable to walk into a Hallmark store or down the card aisle at the CVS. After all these years, it still hurts.

When I was growing up, my mother and grandmother, they were my world. The Three Musketeers, we'd call ourselves — and we were. A single mother, my mom turned to her own mother when I was born, and together (along with my grandmother's brother, my Uncle Norman) we made a family. As Stitch says in the well-loved Disney movie, "This is my family. It's little, and broken, but still good. Yeah, still good."

How I loved them both. My grandmother, with her soft pink cardigan, reading me Golden Books every night — I'd hide extra books under the one, larger book, trying to make the moments snuggled up beside her last longer. And, even though I'm sure she was exhausted from the day, she'd still always make time to read them all, every one. When she made mashed potatoes, she'd place my small hand over her own so I could "help" mash. Then she'd give me the biggest spoon we had so I could have the first taste. When I was older and facing the first, raw heartbreaks, navigating first loves and fractured teenage friendships, it was my Nanny who took me in her arms, that soft pink cardigan soft on my cheek and said, "No matter what happens, I'll always be here. I will always love you."

My mother and I had our own deeply etched memories. The chilly March day she took me out of elementary school, bundled me in a thick coat and a pink hat and told me that we were headed to Ocean Grove and Asbury Park, our magical "summer place," on a special mom-and-daughter adventure. Although the season hadn't started, we walked along that worn boardwalk, the gull sounds overhead, the wind whipping our hair. We held hands and drank fresh orangeade from a stand, our lips salty with the sea, and no day had ever felt more touched by wonder.

My mother lived for Christmas. Months before, even as early as January, she'd start shopping —we didn't have much, so the gifts weren't lavish, but there were always piles and piles surrounding the artificial tree that we'd assemble each year, dividing the branches into groups that we sorted by the colors at the tips. As we decorated the tree every year, my Norwegian grandmother would be in the kitchen making krumkake, a thin Scandinavian cookie, rich with butter and sugar and so much love.

I can close my eyes and still hear the vinyl record playing "Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer," still hear the hiss of the krumkake iron in the kitchen as she made the cookies, one by one.

My mother, grandmother and I, we were a circle of three, and when my mother was first diagnosed, I think I was in denial. Those days of chemo, of last gifts that she made sure to buy, that she insisted I have, even though she needed a wheelchair to get to the store — a Lenox music box that played "Yesterday" and a figurine of a mother, cradling her baby — I think she knew, in the long years to come, how much those gifts would mean. When she was gone.

Those last days were marked by conversations. My mother staring at her illness-ravaged face in the mirror one day. "I look like my grandmother," she said, her whirling, cha-cha dancing, Chinese-auction loving self now confined to a bed. "This is no life."

Or when she handed me a wrapped Christmas gift to give to my son four months later, a Christmas she wouldn't live to see. They were red Barney sneakers, too big for his tiny feet. I was worried, like so many young mothers. Was he growing fast enough, meeting the percentiles at the pediatrician? As she handed me the sneakers, my mother's fragile hand took mine. "He'll grow, honey," she said. "Don't worry. He'll grow."

And then, she was gone, buried on a brilliant blue August day. Her colleagues at the Manhattan securities office where she worked brought, instead of flowers, a tiny, decorated Christmas tree to the funeral. How my mother would have loved that.

My grandmother died only a few years later; I think the heartbreak of losing her only daughter was more than her mother's heart could bear. At the hospital, I was alone in that room with her when I said good-bye. I told my beloved Nanny that everything I was and ever would be was because of her, because of how she'd loved me. Tears falling onto the white sheets, I told her that I knew she didn't want to go, I knew that she was afraid to leave me alone. But she was in pain and had to say the words that broke my heart forever: "It's okay to go, Nanny. I love you. I'll be okay."

I left the hospital, a young mother with my baby boy just a toddler. In all the years that have come since, I've missed them both. My mother and grandmother, how much I wish they could have seen my son grow up. I wish they'd been there beside me at the dizzying sea of school concerts and plays, the soccer games and graduations. The time he performed Off Broadway and then, we ate at Junior's, the place my mother, grandmother and I had loved so much. My mother, savoring the cheesecake and my Nanny, loving the beets that came in those relish trays to every table.

I've missed them with every holiday turkey I've cooked, every bowl of stuffing I've prepared, my mother's handwritten recipe for that stuffing — I've framed it now, and it's had a place of honor in every one of my kitchens — guiding me gently through the years.

But there is no day that they're missed more fiercely than on Mother's Day. How I yearn to wrap their gifts in pink paper, write the cards by hand, telling them how much they are loved.

This year, though, along with the sadness, I feel a sense of what feels like joy. Even with all those decades alone, after they died, somehow, I managed to raise a little boy who's become a man — a young man who exemplifies the best of all they ever were. I see my mother's smile in his soft brown eyes. I hear my grandmother cheering him on as he makes krumkake every Christmas with the krumkake iron I bought him, for his own home.

In my son, I see the qualities that they imbued in me, a road map for life — loyalty, kindness, empathy, diligence, a strong work ethic — in every single thing my son says and does. He has taken that road map and done things neither my grandmother nor my mother ever could have hoped to have done — traveled more widely across the world, moved across the county to forge his own path — and done it all with their same quiet kindness.

Tradition, it's important to my son. He's gotten his own hard-covered journal and every year, every holiday, he asks me to write, in my own handwriting, a family recipe. The family chili, that my grandmother learned to make from her own mother. My son used to love to help make that chili when he was small, standing on a chair beside me with a wooden spoon to help stir. "I'm helping with the chili soup, Mama!" I can still hear that tiny voice, so filled with pride.

Each of the recipes in that book have been passed down through the years by my mother and grandmother, faces and voices that my son doesn't remember. But the recipes, the stories, the love — always, the love — they live on. Those are the things that my son does remember. Those are the things that have blanketed every memory of our own that we've woven together, mother and son.

Together, my son and I have created a family. Together, we've had our own experiences, rich with laughter and joy and tradition. I feel them both, in my heart, every time my son and I are together. Where we are, so they are, too. Because in the hearts of each of us, live all of those who've come before.

Because of them, I learned how to be a mother. Because of them, I have a rich and beautiful relationship with this precious boy who's become a young man filled with all the values they cherished.

They are gone now, yes, and card stores are still painful, but my mother and grandmother live on, inside me, and now, inside my son. Their legacy is lifelong.

And this Mother's Day, I celebrate them — today, tomorrow, and always. Thank you to my mother and grandmother, for the greatest gift of all — the lessons that taught me to become a mother I hope they would have been proud of.