Without her

Mother’s Day without my mother is hell. Without her, the second Sunday in May is just another Sunday in May. Some years, Mother’s Day has the audacity to fall on the anniversary of my mother’s death.

I don’t know what to do with myself. Everyone is celebrating the day with their moms. I used to do that. Now what?

When she was here, I’d buy her flowers or perfume. My brother and I would take her out to brunch, or she’d cook us supper (my mother’s idea of fun).

One year, several weeks before Mother’s Day, we celebrated her seventy-seventh birthday at an Italian restaurant. My father had died the previous year and she was learning to live without him. I gave her potted yellow flowers. I thought the flowers would look nice on her apartment balcony. I thought she’d enjoy coddling the baby buds, watching them grow into resilient adults, just as she had done with her children. She could water them and repot them and prune them, and they wouldn’t talk back, like her children did. I envisioned her balcony ablaze in yellow, her neighbors red with envy. Balcony gardening would become her new favorite hobby. The vision was solely mine, of course. “I hate repotting plants,” my mother informed me. You can imagine how she greeted the tennis shoes my brother gave her.

Please don’t suggest that I visit her grave. My heart is broken enough.

Sometimes I think about buying her a card, but where would I send it?

Sometimes I slip on her wedding ring. I flip through the pages of her address book, penned in her familiar handwriting, filled with the names of friends no longer here. I wear her blazer with my jeans.

After my father died, she continued to sign my birthday cards “Love, Mom and Dad.” I thought it was a silly gesture, a sign that she was refusing to move on with her life.

Can you hear it? The pot is calling the kettle black.

The point is, I have plenty of keepsakes. But I don’t have her, and keepsakes won’t bring her back, not on Mother’s Day, not on any day. Living without her is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.