Reflections on a Parent's Birthday

A Poet Sees a Change in Grief, a New Way of Thinking, as the Anniversary of her Birthmother's Birth Comes and Goes Without Celebration

Linda on her birthday. My stepfather took this photo of the flowers I sent her. She was so happy to receive them. Linda and me in New York, going to a show together. And then, Linda and me, with the puppy she got me as a grown up.

Yesterday was my birth mother’s birthday. It was a strange day. All week long, my daughter and I knew it was coming. My daughter called and asked if we could go to Chart House to celebrate grandma. That’s what we had done last year. Chart House was a favorite restaurant of my birthmother and her husband, Lee, a popular restaurant to go to in the early eighties. And today, you can still get mudpie there, which was all the rage back when I met Linda.

Somehow, though, by Linda’s actual birthday, the steam of our desire to celebrate had evaporated, and we weren’t hungry, and couldn’t summon the energy. I spent the evening out at Dana Point, watching the light fade beyond the bluff, sitting on a bench while I listened to the restlessness of the waves, and talked to a couple of strangers sharing the bench with me.

Aimelie had an early dinner with her boyfriend. “Maybe some other time,” she said.

Was that the way people slipped from our memories, gone physically, then the important dates of their lives gone too? Or was it some other heaviness, or pain, or shift put aside to bear this day without tears, without sorrow?

Or was it some form of guilt, because I had another mother, lying in a hospital bed, unable or unwilling (I didn’t know which) to answer the phone when I called? How could I reach out to the dead one when I wasn’t communicating with the live one?

But all day, I was still thinking of dates. The date my grandmother was born. If not for her birth, then no Linda. And if Linda had not gone off to college and met my father, no me. And if no me, no daughter. All the days and events that perhaps hundreds of years from now would still mean a human with something of her roaming this earth, a person with no memory of the person who loved to make lists, write neatly, look with joy at a spreadsheet, or watch with delight as her lilies poked their heads out of the ground when the snow melted in spring.

Sometimes, it seems as though when people leave us, the memory of them fades, and the impact they left seems to disappear.

And that perhaps is what left me with the biggest weight of sorrow yesterday that found me unable to celebrate, unable to even speak about Linda on this day. My daughter must have felt this too. She came over to pet the dog in the morning and told me she wasn’t sure about going to dinner.

“Well, do you just want to talk about grandma?” I asked. I was about to offer to run upstairs to my bathroom and bring down a musical jewelry box Linda had bought me for Christmas a few years ago. The message on the box was “DAUGHTER: I can’t imagine where I’d be without your love surrounding me.” It was the only message from her that I have. I never even thought to record her voice.

But my daughter turned her head away and walked down the steps and left a bit later.

Perhaps this is a silent grief, the feeling we experience with the passing of time, when our sorrow is less raw, and we feel our own selves spinning toward that time where we too might become a memory, and we wonder what all the effort is for.

Or it’s a new phase of grief, where we mourn that we didn’t get to know the person better, were less close than we thought, understood that we hadn’t gotten all the essence out of our relationship and there’s a shame and guilt to this grief, a feeling that we could have done better, known more, been more caring in life.

I remember when Linda was dying of cancer, and we were talking about what to do with her ashes. My stepsisters and I threw out some suggestions.

“Do you want your ashes and Lee’s to be together?” My stepfather had died just a few months before.

Linda shuddered.

“No,” she said, almost violently.

My oldest stepsister was upset. She didn’t mean co-mingled but side by side perhaps.

“Do you have a favorite place in the redwoods you would like your ashes spread?” I asked.

Linda did not answer.

Capable of making so many decisions, she left figuring out this puzzle up to us.

Later, I pushed to know something deeper about her. “What’s your favorite place in the redwoods?” I asked.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Linda said.

“We just want to know her better,” I told my daughter later. My stepsisters and I all wanted to be closer to Linda, wanted to extract whatever wisdom, love, and guidance she had left to say.

She gave us lists of things to do instead.

“Not everyone has to tell you their secrets, Mom,” my daughter said.

But how was I supposed to figure out what to do with her when she was gone? This wasn’t the same as my adoptive mother saying, “Just dump me out on the ground somewhere. I don’t want to have a funeral. These people have never been nice to me here.”

What I did know was that these ashes would not be sitting in my house for years to come. That keeping her dead body around was not the relationship I wanted with her after she was gone.

We’d already endured one shift in our relationship recently.

When Linda decided not to go to our church anymore, she called to tell me. She was tearful.

“Will you still love me?” she asked.

“Of course,” I said. “Maybe we won’t look at things the same way, but we are still us.”

My adoptive mother had a different view. “Never speak to her again,” she said. Because my birthmother had left our church, she was dead to my adoptive mother.

“Mom!” I said. “I would never do such a thing.”

When Linda wanted to visit Mom after my dad died, Mom said, “Well, I suppose I will have to try to be nice to her.” I felt awful even letting Linda be in my mother’s presence. But Linda was Linda, and true to herself, she wanted to pay her respects to my mother, and she did.

There were other things that I learned about Linda after she died.

She did not tell me that she had participated in providing information for a book that would rock our church two years after her death. And that, there, when I found her name in the acknowledgements, I would also find a key to some of the things that had been deleted from her computer and her cell phone at the time of her death and that had left me reeling. Not only had those things been deleted, but so had all traces of me.

Linda’s birthday is also just a week away from the day that she died. So as I remember and celebrate her birth, it is shadowed by remembering that the anniversary of her death is also approaching. July 7th with be the third such time the earth, sun, moon and stars will all align in the same configuration, but without her among us. It is also the second anniversary of the season where I stood in a cemetery in Boise and watched a small box covered in lilac, pink and plum flowers be placed into the ground. Her final resting place.

Many times, as I think of these two days, I wonder what she left me.

I am not like her – I like to cook and entertain, and yes, while I work – intensely, I resent the time it takes away from thinking, learning, writing, communing with the universe.

Even though she died at the age of 77, she had never retired. “If I stop working,” she said, “my mind will eat me alive.

She saw gardening from a large sweep of land, with drawings and plans by professionals, trees brought in by backhoes. I see gardening from the tiniest of places, in pots and on steps. She wanted a place to showcase her success, and I wanted a haven no one could take from me. It doesn’t need to be perfect, but it must be welcoming and open to all. I love hospitality. She wanted an estate that she could make perfect.

And I don’t shy from the pain – this ancient pain of separation between us. I probably wallow in the pain, or at least recognize that it is sometimes a swamp where being still in it keeps you from being dragged down, while she was fighting every step of the way to avoid it. We couldn’t even talk about our mutual sorrow over her coming death.

I paint with words; she could paint with paint. I explore my art. She ran from hers.

We did not have the same tastes. She loved everything brown and gold, and I will not have brown or yellow in my house – even though we could go shopping separately and come home with a similar outfit – mine, little polka dots in black, hers, big polka dots in brown.

My tastes are more like my birth grandmother’s – she loved landscaping paintings with cows. I just plain love cows, and she and I had the same Waverly bedspreads in our homes.

When I laugh, my grandmother’s voice escapes from my lips.

And yet, when I walk down the stairs in the morning, and look into the oval mirror at the bottom, I don’t see me at all, I only see Linda.