Letters from My Mother

While doing some spring cleaning today, I happened upon a handful of letters my mother wrote me between the fall of 1981, when I went away to college and January of 1987, when I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I'm about halfway through them and had to stop, because of a heaviness in my heart. Hearing her voice brings her back, but it also reminds me of how much I've missed out on, since her death in 1988.


Writing those words, I came to a chilling realization: In two years, she will have been gone for twenty five years -- the same amount of time I got to spend with her on this earth. That just feels so unfair to me.


My mother was a letter writer of the old style. I have many memories of her sitting on her chaise lounge, spending days on one handwritten letter to her friend Kay, or her cousin Sharon. Her letters to me are chatty, newsy and filled with humor, including a very short story called "McKay," about a lobster I bring home to cook for my girlfriend. McKay is the lobster's name. She often encourages me to study hard ("keep that pretty Runyan nose to the grind-stone!"), but stops at one point -- presumably during one of my early academic slumps -- to say, "Good grades in school are better than bad, Dan, but your happiness is the important thing!"


She takes pride in her artwork, particularly a bust that she created in her YWCA sculpture class. I remember the piece well; it's a woman's head, topping a long, elegant neck. Her hair is in a bun, and she has a faraway expression. It always made me think of Modigliani. I'm not sure where that bust ended up. It may be in my brother's home in White Plains. I'd love to keep it for a time, if it's there.


More than anything else, my mother's letters to me are filled with warmth and love. I often say the thing I'm most thankful for that my parents gave me is the capacity to love.


She ends one letter with "And every night at 7:00 PM, consider yourself hugged -- whether you want to be or not." The one that made me have to stop reading closed with her saying, "I am so very fortunate to have people like you, Mike and Hanno as my family. Don't ever forget how special you are."


She, too, was a special person. I knew it then, and did my best to express it in my awkward, late-adolescent way. As I've said, she would have adored Jeanette and the boys, and she would have been endlessly amused watching me struggle with Diego and Jackson in the same way she and my father did with Mike and me. I'll read the rest of those letters when I feel I'm ready to, and then I'll put them in a safe place, so that I can share them with the boys, and describe the remarkable woman who was my mother.