Autumn Brings Back Love and Loss

November 8, 1991

It's there every autumn, even now, 20 years later. When the light thins, when the air clears, a picture emerges like a developing Polaroid, or maybe it's pentimento. Maybe the image is always there, hidden under layers of life.

I see my son in a baby carriage dressed in plaid, wearing a hat that buckles under his chin. I see me beside him in a plaid maternity top. And I see my mother, in the distance, almost out of the picture, walking silently away.

My mother and I spent one of the last days of her healthy life at Franklin Park Zoo. Two decades have passed, yet I remember well the outfit she bought  my son. The pants, jacket and hat all matched. I remember, too, the  plaid maternity top I made. The light that day was thin, the air clear. This is the way it was.

I don't remember watching my mother walk away, though. This part is invention. For this is what she did. A few days after the trip to the zoo, she fell down her cellar stairs and the person she was, disappeared from my life forever.

"Does it get easier?" a friend asked me yesterday. Her father died two years ago. My mother didn't die when she fell. She lived disabled for 17 years and died three years ago.

What my friend was asking is when will the pain go away? When will she feel whole again? When will she stop feeling hollow and sore?

A few weeks after our day at Franklin Park, I drove to my mother’s house, the house I grew up in, and opened the closet where she kept her clothes and the smell of her in inanimate things made me weep. I avoided opening her closet from then on, but in department stores and movie theaters and crowds I’d smell her perfume. Once, at an airport, a woman who walked the way she used to, fast and purposefully, strode past and it wasn't the image of her striding that broke my heart, but the perfume she wore was my mother's, Windsong by Prince Matchebelli.

Then there were the times I would walk past a room or tum on a radio and hear a tune she used to sing, "Side by Side" or "Peggy O’Neil"  and the sweetness of the familiar song, her song, would leave me warm and cold, and full and empty, all at the same time.

My mother emerged from a coma but not as the person she was. You'll get better, my father and I promised her. Every day you'll improve. And  some days she did. It wasn't a total lie.

Yesterday my friend said, "I feel like an orphan. I miss my father. He was my best friend. There is a hole in my life without him."

I miss my mother, too. But the hole in my life that grew from her pain has been filled since her death with memories that are no longer wrapped in sadness. When she was alive, I was hollow. Better to feel empty than to carry the unbearable weight of happier times.

It does get better, I tell my friend. Time blunts the hurt so you're not as likely to cut yourself on a memory. The sharp edges wear down. Seeing friends with their fathers will hurt less every time it happens.  Running  into a stranger with your father’s build, or his smile, hearing his favorite song, watching his favorite movie, looking through papers and coming across his handwriting, even hearing his voice again on a video or a tape, will someday bring smiles instead of tears.

I used to cry every time I listened to a recording my mother  made when she was young and healthy and full of dreams. I wept because she was confined to hospitals and wheelchairs, and the life she was living was not the life she had dreamed.

Now I play the old Victrola and hear her voice and the sadness I feel is only for me. I miss my mother. I miss her especially in the fall because  that's when she was taken from me.

But that's when she was given back, too, her death a rebirth for both of us. She is in a better place and so am I. Memories long buried, I now savor. The past is finally balm not pain.

Give it time, I tell my friend. Give it time. Someday, you'll think about your father and you won't cry. Someday, I promise, you'll smile.