The Last Mother's Day

I went shopping for the last Mother’s Day gift I ever bought about a week before the actual holiday, which at the time was me exercising a great deal of foresight. I was 23, and one thing that had changed as I evolved from a teenager to a college student to an adult was that I was becoming much worse at giving gifts than my younger self had been. I used to love giving presents; the indulgence was almost the same as if I were treating myself. I would volunteer to go Christmas and birthday shopping for my Dad, my brother, and my grandparents because I enjoyed it so—I was literally put in charge of my grandparent’s Christmas stockings—and I was very good at it. For a short time I contemplated opening up a personal-gift-shopper business. But since I entered my twenties, and since the scope of my priorities narrowed considerably after coming out and moving to New York, to the extent that my own gratification has become almost all-consuming, gifts have become tedious and difficult. Everyone I know seems to have all that they want or need, and when I do try to give thoughtful gifts—books, namely—I can sense that it’s being received as a kind of imposition. Why can’t I just treat them to brunch? This is something I am working on.

But the last Mother’s Day needed to be different, because my mom had just gone into remission after seven month’s of treatment for leukemia. I spent a beautiful Saturday exploring the West Village, eventually walking through the Bleeker street fair where I came upon a necklace I thought to be understated and beautiful: a dozen and lumpy pearls, spaced out by about three-quarters of an inch on a thin gold chain. I know nothing about jewelry—as little about jewelry as I do about clothes, which is something else that changed when I entered my twenties: I began to loathe shopping for anything but food—so when the designer told me that the pearls were “more real” because of the imperfections, and that the necklace was one of her favorites, a “truly original piece,” I completely believed her. I paid $50 for it.

I sent it down to Mom in North Carolina with a card and she seemed happy with the gift. Mom literally had a new lease on life, and was elated by almost everything. She was ready to host a luncheon. Having only moved to North Carolina from Idaho about a year before she was diagnosed, she didn’t have much time to make friends. But the few she had made through a golf club she invited over one weekday afternoon. She discussed her menu with me, and I gave her many colorful suggestions, and in the end she went with a recipe for Quiche Lorraine from the Junior League of Boise cookbook. The only reason I mention this luncheon is because there’s a photo that was taken during it: my mom is at the head of the dining room table, mid-afternoon sunlight is bursting through the blinds, she’s wearing a lime-green top and floral-print capris from Talbots—and strung around her neck, coming down just to her clavicle, is the necklace I gave her. In the photo she still looks forty pounds lighter than normal, and her hair is growing back only in patches, and the chemotherapy has given her a dark, unglossy tan, but she possesses an inner glow that—well, you know what kind of inner glow it is. It is the “alive and living” kind of inner glow.

The next time I saw her wear the necklace the circumstances were very different. Mom had come out of remission after about a month, and my grandfather, my brother, and I were all in North Carolina for an indeterminate period during which we slowly acknowledged the ramifications of her cancer. We all went to the doctor with her for a visit; I can’t remember if the doctor had requested it, or if we had demanded it. All five of us were crammed into a small exam room where he delivered her predicament, which was not a good one. He explained that attention would now shift from “treating” my mother to making her as comfortable as possible (this included a prescription for morphine), and that hospice workers would be in touch, and, in front of us all, he asked if my dad was ready to sign a Do Not Resuscitate form. We all broke down during that appointment, first my mom, then my dad, then the doctor, and, quietly, the rest of us. When we left in separate cars, my Dad returning to work in one, my mom, grandfather, brother, and I in the other, she said “I guess I should be used to the bad news by now,” and announced that we’d be going out to dinner that night.

My mom dressed up for the occasion, in another Talbot’s duo, and wore the necklace. When she came downstairs, I told her what the necklace designer had told me, that the pearls were real and valuable and that it was a “truly original piece.” She regarded me skeptically, amused, and said, “Hm.”

The place we decided to go to was one of those sports bar-slash-steak house restaurants with enormous flat-screen TVs in every field of vision, where the waitresses wear tank tops and miniskirts and are mostly spray-tanned. We were seated outside, adjacent to the parking lot. When the waitress took our drink orders, my mom defiantly ordered a virgin margarita, as if we were there to celebrate (for most of her life she drank Chardonnay, but since she’d been sick, she’d not been able to drink any alcohol at all). When the server returned with our drinks, she warned my mom that the bartender wasn’t sure how to make virgin margarita. “It doesn’t taste like anything,” Mom said after taking a sip, and asked for a virgin strawberry dacquri instead.

I have been a very lucky person for my entire life, in pretty much every way, and I believed then, even after the doctor’s appointment, that I was lucky enough that my mom would miraculously recover. But the stress, if subliminal, had its impacts. It seemed reasonable at the time to be jetting back and forth to New York for a job interview (a job that had a start date I obviously wouldn’t be able to commit to for the foreseeable future), and I didn’t feel guilty—in some ways I felt entirely entitled—that those “job interview” trips home were merely a guise for being able to see my first serious boyfriend. Also, I was 23 and had formed many self-righteous opinions due to my liberal arts education and my first few years of living in New York. For example, my entire family except for me was wearing LiveStrong bracelets. I hated those things and claimed, haughtily, that Lance Armstrong was turning death into “the ultimate failure.” I believed that my brother in particular, who had a tan line from his LiveStrong bracelet and had read the entire Lance Armstrong oeuvre, was treating my mom’s sickness as some kind of sporting event. Confiding in my mom’s hippie friend and in her psychiatrist friend, I spoke of how I wanted my mother to feel at ease with dying, that it was natural if unfortunate, and certainly I didn’t want her to feel that she was failing anyone. While I still believe in this kind of thing, and still have issues with Lance Armstrong, I see that I was idealizing greatly—and also that I was being an asshole.

But at dinner that day, we were not speaking much. My brother, who is two years younger than me, had been obsessing over trucks. He wanted to buy one of those big ones with a backseat and a hitch and a tool box built into the bed; this was something he thought to be aspirational and sensible; I thought the whole thing was idiotic and I was willing to cite all the things New York people cite when it comes to SUVs in contrast to our own brilliant public transportation. While we were eating, an enormous truck pulled up, as inconspicuously as a bomb exploding, and parked directly alongside our table. The diameter of its wheels were my entire height, such that the driver needed the built-in stepladder to get in and out of it, and it was covered in decals suggestive of fire and virility. I scoffed audibly and declared it to be the stupidest thing I’d ever seen. This set my brother off. “Just because you don’t want something doesn’t mean that no one else can have it!” he said, viciously, to which I responded, “Just because something exists doesn’t mean that anybody needs it!” equally viciously. I may have paraphrased here, but the argument ended in stony silence, with me vowing to never speak to my brother again. I turned my gaze to the horrible parking lot where the horrible monster truck was parked, and as hard as I tried to stop it from happening, tears welled up in my eyes. I eventually faced the table to find my mom looking at me narrowly, though not unforgivably. (It wouldn’t be for several months that I’d realize my role in ruining this dinner.) When we got home, I followed her up to her bedroom, where she take off the necklace and prepared for bed before shutting the door. A few minutes later I went to bed myself. It must have been 7:00 PM.

After my mom died, in the months during which my dad made an unprecedented, astounding amount of purchases, my brother and I went to pick up a car part for him. The woman working at the shop was wearing a necklace eerily similar to the one I’d given my mom; the only difference was that this one had a silver chain. She told me she’d bought it a yard sale. I haven’t done the necessary homework, namely because I don’t know the keywords for jewelry (“pearl necklace” hardly narrows the search), but my sense is that the necklace I gave my mom is only special in the very relative sense: as special my mother would allow it to be.

*

Matt took me to breakfast this morning—my personal emotional warfare zone of Mother’s Day Brunch—where there were a few mothers out with their kids. I used to want that so badly, to fly my mom up to Brooklyn for Mother’s Day and to show her my life here: go grocery shopping, go for a walk, buy new sheets, drink bellinis, etc. But it didn’t seem that any of these tables were enjoying themselves in the way I fantasize about my mom and I enjoying ourselves. Then for a moment I longed to be with my immediate family, my Dad and my brother. But I quickly realized I was indulging a similar fantasy; I know from experience that their company does not provide the type of shared grieving I theoretically want. In fact, I was doing exactly what I wanted to do—I was with Matt, I was eating breakfast pizza—and afterward I would be alone for a little while. And, not for the first time, I would find some solace in thinking back on all the details, including my regrets.