Losing mother is difficult at any age
By Sally Friedman, Special Writer
It was five years ago. It was yesterday.
On one of those rare winter days when the sun reminds us it’s still up there, and an unexpected warm spell allowed flowers to push through the earth, we buried my mother on a grassy hillside in Pennsylvania.
It was a graveside service — just the immediate family — three generations of us. The fourth — my mother — was no longer our proud claim.
I knew I would miss my mother desperately.
She had lived for 97 years — three months shy of 98. And a daughter who has had that blessing is left wondering how she’ll ever go on without the woman who gave her life.
You do. But not without enormous pain and sadness.
Every day — yes, every single day — there is a fleeting thought about Lillian Schwartz Abrams.
It may be the sight of the little red pot from her kitchen that I couldn’t give away to a charity because that little red pot held so many memories of my mother’s kitchen. She deserved a better one than she had, a tiny corner in a high-rise building that must sometimes have seen like a prison as her age advanced.
It may be the random glimpse of a small blonde lady who somehow reminds me of her.
And so many times, it’s just in the air . . . a thought pulled out of nowhere about how we shopped together when I was young for a new winter coat, because that was the custom back then. My mother should have earned a black belt in shopping — she was a warrior.
I wish I’d recorded my mother’s voice and some of those calls every night as dusk settled in her kitchen and mine. We called one another for small talk — and occasionally big talk.
How I loved those conversations — and what I would give to have them now.
”Never again” is the lament about those we miss so much. “Never again.” The saddest, most final words.
I see my mother’s face in photos all around our home. At first, I couldn’t look at them, but now, five years later, they are a daily comfort. They remind me of moments along her long life’s timeline: her granddaughters’ weddings, her great-granddaughter’s bat mitzvah, long-ago Passover Seders when both she and my late father were still there, smiling at the Pesach table.
”Will we ever get used to her gone?” I’d asked my sister at the cemetery on that balmy December day. And neither of us could manage an answer.
My mother was the person to whom I would bring my deepest fears, boundless joys, and everything in between. Those of us who’ve been lucky know that there is no love quite like a mother’s in its depth and purity.
That’s tough to match, let alone replace.
And while I know with certainty that my father loved me, it was different. Not better or worse, just different.
So in Mother’s Day season, I have a tough time walking past the cards extolling mothers.
I try to forgive myself for never finding just the right card with the perfect message.
I wish I had showered Mom with more of everything, and most of all, with time.
If Mother’s Day itself is balmy, I’ll usually find a little time to be alone outdoors to just sit and remember.
My own daughters and grandchildren will soon come on the scene, filling the house and yard with their exuberance and noise. And that will be wonderful.
But never quite complete.
It’s this simple: In the twilight years of my own life, I still wish I had my mother, the woman I’d loved so long and, hopefully, well, to honor on Mother’s Day.
And I remind myself again, as I have for the past five years, that it’s tough to be a motherless child … at any age.

