Age can't dim the ache of loss of a mother

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

My mother's birthday was yesterday. She would have been 76, not old by today's standards. But she died when she was 63, and I lost her many years before. I should be used to not having a mother by now.

But you never get used to it.

Right after the accident, when the smell of her was everywhere, in the kitchen, in her closet, in the car; when the half-full crushed package of her cigarettes (Kents) was still in the top drawer, I kept waiting for her to return. I pictured her walking into the kitchen with groceries or straight from work in heels and a suit. I imagined her pulling into the driveway, the crunch of gravel, the squeak of brakes, the thud of the car door, the click of her shoes.

I revised the night she fell down the basement stairs. I had her grab the banister. I changed one little second and all the successive seconds fell back in place. And I had my mother again.

Except that no matter how I willed it, she lay in a coma and didn't wake up.

It was worse not having a mother when I was 24. Then everyone had mothers. The world was full of them. In the hospital, after my daughter was born, I heard her footsteps rushing down the hall, quick steps in a hurry to see her first granddaughter.

But it was her sister who had come.

Sometimes I would take my children to South Shore Plaza and I would see other young mothers with their children and their mothers. And I hurt watching them. I saw the looks that passed between them, looks that didn't need words. I heard them laughing. And I envied them. For the longest time, I couldn't walk into a Hallmark store. They were too full of "Merry Christmas, Mom" and "Happy Mother's Day" cards.

Now, three decades later, not having a mother isn't so out of the ordinary. There are lots of us middle-aged and older out there on our own. But being older doesn't diminish the longing for our mothers, anymore than time does.

My friend, Janice, lost her mother a year ago. "Someone said to me, 'Wow. It doesn't seem like a whole year has gone by.' And I said: "Are you kidding? It seems a lot longer than that to me. I feel as if I haven't spoken to my mother in forever."

Beth's mother died three summers ago, but the realization that her mother won't be stopping by still ambushes her. There are places in her memory she can't go, doors to the past she has locked shut. "It hurts too much to remember happy times," she says. "Will it always?"

My father finds comfort at the cemetery. He brings flowers and stands at my mother's grave and talks to her there.

I don't go to the cemetery. I find comfort in my son's blue eyes, which are so like my mother's. And in my daughters' voices, because my mother used to sing. And I find comfort in the mirror, in the pieces of her I see reflected there.

Mothers die, but they really do live on.

I lost my way for a while when I lost my mother, because I was sure I had lost my guide. But I hadn't.

She's been there inside me and beside me all these years.

But I wish that I could see her as she would have been at 76. I wish that I could drive to her house and pick her up and take her for breakfast and listen to her complain about getting old.

I wish that if only for a day, I could be one of those people who sighs when you ask them what they did today: "I saw my mother."