Not Remembered

On Mother's Day, I was driving past a cemetery not too far from where I live. A few people were tending to the graves of their mothers. Earlier, a few of the women I met at my exercise class were planning to go out to brunch with their kids. One had come to class with hers. My thoughts turned to mothers dead and alive. How it must feel for those who no longer have a mother, no one they could celebrate. And for those who are estranged from their mother for reasons right or wrong, about the sense of isolation they might feel. Etsy always sends these thoughtful emails before days like this to see if you would be open to receiving promotional emails understanding that no everyone has the same relationship with the occasion. 

I never made a habit of wishing my mother on Mother's Day because it was not a tradition I grew up and the concept is foreign to her. Knowing her she's likely to find quarrel with it, think it minimizes the contributions of a mother and so on. But I did think about a woman I know since childhood, a few years older than my father. She lost her daughter after a long illness a couple of years ago. She has severe memory loss and can swing back and forth between the 1950s and the present in a few sentences that make sense to her and no one else.

As much as she has forgotten, the memory of the dead child remains sharp and piercing. She can wake up in the middle of the night, go to the balcony and sob loudly calling out to her daughter, asking her to come back. I could not helping thinking of her as I turned at the intersection past the cemetery to the street that leads to my house.