ALONE WITH MOTHER'S MEMORY

The Boston Globe

BEVERLY BECKHAM

I thought it was the rain, long days of it. No sunshine. No color. I thought, I'll be fine when the rain stops.

But when it stopped, finally, last Monday and the sky brightened for a while, I wasn't fine. It was June 5, my mother's birthday, and though she has been absent from this life for many years, the lack of her felt new, my loss startling, like walking into a familiar room and banging into a glass door.

She would have been 81. I would have said this to my father. I would have phoned him and said, "Imagine, Dad?" And both of us would have been silent, trying to imagine my mother at 81. And then we would have reminisced and remembered her as she was.

Now there is no one to remember her with me. No one else to awake and have it be the first thought. No one else who knows the year she was born, or that she lived in Haverhill once, before her father left, and that this was the happiest year of her life.

My father and I spoke in shorthand. Calvin Street. Davis Road. Wethern's Hat Shop. Mary Andrews. Mr. Rich. Dr. Thompson. Remember how she used to iron all those different dresses for the Infant of Prague statue and how she hated to iron! Remember how she "borrowed" a hat from Wethern's every Saturday night for church on Sunday, returning it first thing Monday morning when she opened the store? Remember Echo Lake? Sister Joseph Agnes? Second Hand Rose?

Grief and loss are like cat burglars. You don't know they're coming. You think you're OK. You think: Hey! Look at me. I can remember and smile. "Look, Ma! I'm riding no hands."

And then you're grabbed from behind and you're in a ditch crying, your heart newly bruised, all the old memories tender again.

My father not being here has set me off balance.

I have a picture of my mother on the wall over my computer. It was taken 18 years ago, the summer before she died.

The picture was home printed and has faded. Her blue house dress is gray, her gray hair is white, and her white skin is so pale that it's ghostly. And I think, every time I look at it, that I am seeing my mother disappear before my eyes.

And I think that this is fitting because she is fading. I don't miss her the way I did. I don't ache anymore when I see a woman my age shopping or having lunch with her mother. I don't look through old photo albums and hurt. I don't get sad when I see her handwriting or someone who looks like her. I no longer fall apart when I hear her voice on the old Victrola or wish that I could hear her voice in person just one more time.

I'm OK with her being gone. I talk to her. And sometimes she talks back.

"Call your father," she used to say when I would forget and let days go by without being in touch. And I would pick up the phone and say, "Hi, Dad. Mom said to call."

Yes, I'm OK with my mother being gone. But what I'm not OK with is remembering my mother and her life and her birthday alone.

I stand my grandson on a kitchen chair to comb his hair and I think about how my mother stood me on a chair to comb mine. "Ow!" he says. "Ow," I said. And I want to call my father and say, "You know what I just remembered?"

A month ago I drove to his house to pick up a dollhouse he'd been fixing. It had been in my cellar, wrecked by years of use and more years of misuse, and my father had rescued it last spring. "Let me take it. I'll fix it up and make it new again."

He was in the middle of doing that when he got too sick to go out to his shed anymore.

And there it was. He'd replaced the broken shingles, rehung the broken doors, stained the outside and was working on the inside.

And there he wasn't.

The loss of him felt final.

He was my father. But he was also the keeper of my mother's memory, the only other person alive who loved her and who remembered her as I do.

Now there is just me to remember. I e-mail my children. "Today is my mother's birthday. Her name was Dorothy Marie Haley. She was born in 1925. She was the second child of Viola and Bill Haley." And I tell them about the Infant of Prague and Echo Lake and how she used stand me on a kitchen chair to comb my hair.