Things to Say to a Dead Mom

           My mom is on my kitchen table, cremation no. 91739 (I accidentally spelled it “creamation”, but there’s nothing creamy about it) performed on February 2, 2012 by Long island Cremation Co., Inc. (another business I couldn’t imagine owning. I feel like it’s one of those operations passed down through generations, fathers grooming their sons to burn and box bodies. Lucky boys.)

            I put her next to my Aunt Olga for the night. I figured I’d give them a chance to catch up on things. Last time they saw each other it was Thanksgiving, about three years ago. Our dinner was like a scene in a black comedy. My mother was going on and on to my aunt, who was too polite to tell her that she had no idea who she was.

            Today we’re bringing Mom to the cemetery where her parents are. The cemetary people are going to insert her in the ground next to them. I think she’d like that. She adored her parents, particularly her dad.

            I’ve got her next to the computer right now. I just had a conversation with her (albeit one-sided.)

            Now, her soul isn’t in that box, I know, but still I felt compelled to say something to her remains while I had them.

            Writers are always looking for climatic moments.

            I put my left hand on her box, and my right hand on my aunt’s box for support, and I asked my mom if she loved me.

            There was no answer.

            But I know my mom did love me. It just wasn’t a traditional love. It was a love often smothered in her issues. You know how you can use a pillow for rest¸ or to kill someone? That was my mother.

            She had no idea of what she was doing. I told I knew that.

            I told my mom that I forgave her.

            I told her I love her, and I appreciate the things she did for me.

            I kissed my index finger and planted in on her box.

            There’s something about physical remains that are so, well...physical.

            You can talk to someone’s spirit anytime –I believe ­­–but there’s something extra poignant about having that box there to hone in on. A focal point, if nothing else.

            Another thing I look for as a writer is a focal point in a scene. It’s like an anchor.

            Life begets writing, and writing begets life.

            My aunt once told me, “Each man is the sum total of everything that has happened to him.”

            True. I might add: “Each man is also the sum total of all the relationships he’s had.”

            My relationship with my mom is (was?) complicated and sometimes dark, but in the end it comes down to this simple fact: we loved each other.

            It takes death to bring things down to the bone.

Hokey Pokey Wednesday: Doing the Holiday Gift Dance

             I’ve made a decision to stop buying silly, useless holiday gifts in the name of love.

            The retail industry is adept at tugging on our heart strings. They embed the message: Show your love through gifts.

            The more you give, the more you love them.

            This is so not true. If love could be measured in money, rich kids would all be happy. Check out the celebrity reality shows past and present (IE: Hilton, Kardashian) and you’ll see that some rich kids grow up miserable and broken.

            Shopping not only eats at my wallet, but also my time. I absolutely refuse to go the mall. But I even resent shopping locally. I just cannot stand the commercialism – and worse – the misleading promise of it all.

            Of course we should give our kids something – but not everything!

             I notice that I’m getting all sorts of e-mails about stocking stuffers now. That’s become the next big marketing push. Heaven forbid those stockings aren't bulging with goodies - even if you've spent hundreds of dollars on a gift already!

            I show my love to my kids every day by guiding them through life, giving them food and shelter, and nurturing them with love. Material gifts are a bonus.

            I’m not saying anything new here, I know. And I’m not going to wage a full-scale war against holiday shopping. Let people whip themselves into a frenzy at the mall. I’m not giving into all that nonsense anymore.

            Buddha said, “Simplicity brings more happiness than complexity.”

             I think that fits this situation well. Too many gifts clutter Christmas.

            Think of babies and animals, happy to play with boxes and wrap.

            I’m heading to my writing group now. This is my gift to myself.

            The greatest gifts are, in fact, things that cannot be wrapped – like helping my son through the maze of colleges and applications. It is the gift of his future.

            And like hugging my son Casey, and telling him how much I love him.

            Spending time with our kids is a gift.

            Shakespeare wrote, “Things won are done. Joy’s soul is in the doing.”

            I don’t think “shopping” was the “doing” he was referring to. Just a wild guess.

Tightrope Tuesday: Walking the Holiday High Wire, While Parenting

            I never learned how to ride a bicycle.

            My mom bought me one, but never taught me how to ride it. I mentioned this to her once, when I was grown. She looked at me with contempt and told me, “You should’ve taught yourself.”

            If there is a child who taught him or herself how to ride a bike, I applaud them. I did not have to gumption to try such a thing. I was alone all the time and it was sad enough. I didn’t want to be alone on the ground with a scraped knee, or worse, crying with no one to hug me.

            My ex-husband tried to teach me once, but I couldn’t get past the terror of letting go of my gravity.

            My son Casey tried also, when he was about nine. I had to beg him to give up. It was like I was the child.

            Some things are meant to happen in childhood. When you’re an adult, they’re so much harder.

            Faith is like that for me. I wasn’t exposed to much in the way of it when I was little. Certainly not organized religion. We did celebrate Christmas, but to me it was a time when Santa brought gifts. I thought everyone had a Christmas tree – until I moved to the Five Towns. There, in second grade, I was questioned unmercifully by the other kids. They wanted to know if I was Catholic or Jewish. I had never heard of either of these things, but I desperately wanted to belong. I asked my mom about it that night. She said, “Tell them you’re agnostic.” She didn’t bother explaining, but even if she did it wouldn’t have mattered. Agnostic was not a choice!

            I went back and said I was half-Jewish and half-Catholic. I wanted to be liked be everyone. Instead, no one embraced me.

            There is probably more to this that I’ve blocked out. Our minds try to shield us from the little horrors of our youth. Suffice to say that faith was hard to come by, because I wasn’t quite sure what it even was.

            My aunt was a late-blooming Buddhist. She tried to teach me. I loved my aunt very much, but her zealous, in-your-face method of meditation instruction was not kid-friendly. I really wanted to like it, but I didn't. I couldn't even understand it. All I knew was that you were supposed to say, “Mu.”

            That I have been brought to any faith at all shows us that miracles happen. I do believe in God, but not in the traditional sense. I know there is a power watching over me, guiding me, taking care of me – if I let it. I call it "God" because everyone else does. I could just as easily call it "Harry."

            All of this makes the holiday season a challenge. So many people have their religious rituals and traditions. Then there’s me – with a deep spirituality, but not belonging to any of the groups that bind people together. I tried being a Uniterian. I still call myself one. But after a few months of services I couldn’t handle it anyone. It felt confining. And redundant. The initial comfort I felt in the church was gone.

            My children have no religion. They seem okay with it, perhaps because I explained the concept of religion to them and why they don't have one. I just couldn’t impose something on them that I couldn’t embrace myself. Casey went to the Uniterian Sunday School for a while. But he grew weary of it around the same time that I decided to stop attending services. It was good timing.

            This is not meant to be a condemnation of organized religion. I’m simply saying that it’s not for me.

            So what is Christmas without Christ? Well, it’s a time to show the people you love just how much you appreciate them. It’s a time for gratitude.

            Even though I've come to this conclusion, I get very sad around the holidays. It’s like I'm walking a highwire above all my ghosts of Christmases past, and they're poised to engulf me - smother me - if I fall. And yet, I have to be a parent. Someone who provides guidance, without having known any - and solace, without having experienced any. I have no idea what I'm doing. 

            But the hardest thing is the very thing that redeems me.

            Parenting is my saving grace. My children love me unconditionally, as I love them.

            How can I be a good mother during the holidays? By doing what I do best: Loving my kids.

            And taking that leap of faith: That everything else will follow.

Hokey Pokey Wednesday: Our Search For Happy Endings

This post was going to be about what passes for Christmas these days: Shopping.

What is our holiday message?

Gifts = love.

If I buy you a gift, I love you. The more expensive the gift, the more I love you. And if you buy me a pricey gift, that means you love me. This is dangerous, appalling and just not true.

This brings me to my broader topic: Happy endings.


Christmas has become retail's way to manipulate us toward a fake "happy ending." All those commercials with glowing faces, jingling bells...and of course, lots of shopping. Every single one of them gliding us to that magical morning when we bestow our gifts and get the love we crave.

Or, we open our gifts and realize that the spouse who treats us like dirt the rest of the year actually loves us because they've purchased a big-screen tv for the bedroom. Now, we can numb ourselves in a large way. Problems solved.

But happy endings don't last. How can they? We don't freeze in time...We don't stop existing just because we've gotten the moment we were promised. The only true "end" comes when we die. So building our hopes around a "happy ending" (a wedding is another good example) can only lead to an emotional letdown. What goes up must eventually plummet. Television and the media revel in the "coming down" as well. All you have to do is watch reality tv, read a magazine or catch the evening news. 

The problem is that we're raised to think we can only be happy if someone else loves us.

It's the Cinderella complex, and hey - it's in every romantic comedy (and yes, I watch them too.) No matter how messed up the couple is, they find their way into each others' arms. Sorry, but that's not going to happen in real life, folks. And if it does, it won't last - because people revert to their true selves.

Ironically, a movie I hated - The Break-Up - is more realistic. The couple breaks up (as promised), and they take time to work on themselves. They run into each other in the end. Will they get back together? We don't know. That's where we're left. I like that, in retrospect. At the time I saw it, I'd just broken up with a boyfriend. I sobbed through the whole thing. I didn't think I could be happy without a man. I felt cheated because the couple in the movie did actually "break up" without magically working things out.

We can love people. We can miss them. We can grieve for them. But ultimately, we cannot let them control us. We need to seek inner happiness. If we love ourselves, we are never alone. We are our own best friends.

Now that's a happy ending.

Requiem for my Aunt Olga Bloom

           

           My friend Orel called me last night and told me I’d been omitted from my Aunt Olga Bloom’s obituary in The New York Times.

            It upset me. She was the most influential person in my life, and I was the same in hers. She'd said it many times.

            But Aunt Olga would say, “Let it go, love. What does it matter? We hold the truth in our hearts.”

            She would be right, of course.

            She was always right.

            It was maddening, sometimes.

            But oh so comforting, as well.

            In my dark childhood Aunt Olga would arrive outside my house, shouting, "Hello, Old Chum!" She'd whisk me away in her battered Volkswagen Beetle, riding shotgun in a seat with no back. She’d removed it to carry planks of wood for her barge. Off we roared! On expeditions. It didn’t matter where. It only mattered that it was the two of us. She was the only person in my life who made me feel special. I would be locked in a mental institution right now pounding my head on the padded walls if not for her.

            We did not agree musically. She loved classical music, obviously. I adored rock & roll. But I did like Chopin, I admitted grudgingly – for teenagers hate to enjoy anything adults treasure. I also came to look forward to “The Four Seasons,” which they performed on the barge every Easter. And, at Christmas and New Year’s, The Brandenburg’s were pretty okay, too.

            I guess it was all pretty okay. It just took me a while to appreciate it – like many things in life. Rarely do we comprehend the beauty of what is right in front of us.

            I did appreciate Aunt Olga, though. We loved each other madly. She tried so hard to get me to play the violin – she even bribed me, paying me ten cents per line – but all I wanted was to write. It took her so many years to accept that. It wasn’t until she read my manuscript Evolution that she embraced me as a writer – a real writer. “My God, child,” she said, “I stayed up all night reading. I couldn’t put it down. You’ve written something worthy of Shakespeare. And the insights into humanity...You are so young for them...”

            That was one of the happiest days of my life: When Aunt Olga approved of my work. I don’t know if I could’ve found the strength to write such a gut-wrenching thing, if not for her love.

            Then there was the book I wrote about us: Saved by the Music. She couldn’t get past the opening at first, saying “I can’t bear to think of the sadness in your life.”

            But I told her she was the one who got me through, and she was able to read the rest. And she was proud – of me, and this tribute to her.

            Because she was proud of me, I was proud of me, too.

            My aunt taught me that there was no such thing as "no." There was only “not yet.”

            When people laughed at her dream, she laughed louder, agreeing that it was indeed a funny thing – but knowing that all great accomplishments started out with something humorous, or even ludicrous.

            When she brought me to her barge – the barge she was inspired to buy because of me, to give me a safe, creative haven – she stretched out her arms and declared, “Welcome home, love!”

            It was a disgusting, grey place – but it was home because she said so.

            My aunt was my home.

            And then, because I wanted so badly for her vision to come true, I helped her. I didn't love doing it, but I did it anyway. With me by her side, Aunt Olga turned that atrocious barge into Bargemusic.   

             Aunt Olga and I did share the same romantic tendencies. I read a love letter she wrote to her second husband, Toby: “I worship you,” she wrote. “You are God.”

            I so could have written that.

            She was a free spirit who truly lived the life she wanted, and she didn’t give a damn about what anyone thought about it. She was a floating, Russian Auntie Mame.

            She was Aunt Olga.

            Thank God, she was Aunt Olga.

            My old chum.

Tomorrow: A Revolutionary Life Revisited

Aunt Olga and Lovely Bloom during the early days of the barge

I apologize for missing today's Revolutionary Saturday.

On Thursday - Thanksgiving Day - my aunt, Olga Bloom, passed away.

To say she was beloved is an understatement.

My aunt's concert hall, Bargemusic, was known the world over.

My aunt brought joy to this world.

Tomorrow, I will hopefully be able to get my thoughts together and write a suitable tribute to Aunt Olga.

They don't make them more revolutionary than her.

As Aunt Olga - first and foremost a musician - was fond of saying: "I love you darling, but the season is over."

It was a helluva season.