An Ordinary Mother’s Day

“Did I wake you,” my older sister asked when I flip open the cell, the Saturday night before Mother’s Day. “I just wanted to ask you to only bring a small bouquet because Mom has only a small, white vase.”

I know the vase well. Except for holidays, I always bring Mom a small bouquet, usually a bunch of purple of daises that I pick up at the Korean produce bodega on Newark Ave. on my way to the Hoboken train station. She put them in the same white vase my sister mentioned.

I sojourn in the suburbs to spend time with Mom at least once a month, for more than a decade, it was usually on a Saturday afternoon, not counting holidays. Ironically, Mother’s Day was one day I fulfilled with a card, not a visit. It is a fake Hallmark holiday after all. This Mother’s Day is different. It’s her fifth day living at an Assisted Living Facility in Paramus. She turns 90 in June, and although she is healthy and sharp-witted, there is a noticeable fragility creeping in and she is undeniably unable to live alone in the house where I grew up.

My Saturday visits had evolved into a structure. They started in the early to mid-90s, a few years after my mother became a widow. I had moved to Jersey City and a few years later, had broken up with my live-in girlfriend. Another break-up, but after this one I felt compelled to spend some more time with Mom than I had been. I’m sure all the typical psychological reasons were in play. And, maybe I still had some peace to make with my childhood. But it was also love. I love my family, I love my mother. Love is not always an overwhelming thing but it is a fact, and it obliges us to express it, show it. No matter the context, no matter if it’s familial or romantic, love coerces acknowledgement.

At first I tried to take her to a grand lunch or dinner, but that didn’t work. My mother grew up during the depression, no matter the price, everything was too costly. Why order an appetizer when there’s bread on the table? Isn’t that whiskey expensive?

Then it dawned on me, why not just hang out with her while she does her thing. Her thing on Saturdays was 5:00 pm mass, the anticipated mass for the Sunday obligation. It was a Vatican II deal that became quite popular in our household because it kept the entire day of Sunday free. The timing was perfect. I could get to Bergen County in time for lunch, spend a few hours doing Paramus stuff, which mainly was either going to a Mall, or going to Van Saun Park, a county park with a small zoo, or putting flowers on my father’s grave at George Washington Cemetery. Often, the afternoon included hanging out in the living room of the house, where we watched television and I would take a nice nap on the couch. Lunch was at a diner, or sometimes we just picked up sandwiches at the local deli. This solved the whole spending too much thing. Even a depression-baby tightwad like Mom couldn’t complain about a ten dollar or less per person meal.

I found out about the N.J. Transit rail system—I had been going into Port Authority in NYC and taking the bus out there, always a grueling trip. The train was great, right out of Hoboken, came into Ridgewood, the town bordering Paramus. My father had taken this train—actually, the one out of Oradell, a different line—to and from the Erie Lakawana Station, where he boarded the PATH to Wall Street. Kimball traveled this commute for more than 40 years.

Mom would take him to the train and pick him up. She has always liked word puzzles. Waiting for her husband in the car gave her some precious moments of quiet time, away from her gaggle of six children, where she could pencil letters in the tiny squares of the crossword puzzle or the tiny circles of the Daily Jumble undisturbed. I noticed my mother had this smile at the train station when she would pick me up for the Saturday visit. She always got there early and waited. The crossword puzzle paperback was always on the dashboard. My visits replicated her routine of 40 years—the anticipation of the train rolling into the station, watching the passengers flow out the door until she recognized the one she was married to.

“All those times I used to wait for that train for your father,” she would say.

After the visit, she would drop me off at the station, but always insisted on waiting until I was on board the train, then she watched the train head down the tracks. It became a joke between us—me insisting she should leave and she insisting on staying. The train inspired memories of her husband; we both knew that was why she liked waiting with me for the train.

My brothers and sisters have children. There was always a lot of activity and energy when they would visit, especially when my nieces and nephews were younger. It was often a circus, and always an occasion. Most visits took place on a holiday, so there were also the familiar rituals of celebration that had to be followed. My Saturday visits were low key and ordinary.

I’m one of two of the six that still attends Catholic Mass, so that was something we could share, just like lunch or shopping or walking through Van Saun and looking at the peacocks and the bison. These activities were only slightly unusual than her typical Saturday afternoons. We just passed the time together, enjoying the day and each other’s company.

Mom turns 90 in June. The Saturday visits went on until she stopped driving, roughly 1993 to 2008. During that time, her remaining friends started to die off. If you live well into senior citizen-hood, you deal with increasing loss. When I attended Catholic grammar school, unlike today, most of the teachers were nuns, the Sisters of Charity, a teaching order. Elizabeth Anne Seton, the first American citizen the Vatican declared a Saint, founded the U.S. branch of the order. Mom worked as a secretary of the school for my entire eight years there—actually she started before I was enrolled and stayed after I graduated and she then went on to work at Immaculate Heart Academy, a high-school for girls operated by the same religious order. Many of the Sisters of Charity sisters became her friends. She would spend time at Convent Station, the home-base for the order near Morristown. They went on many excursions together.

Look, Mom has faith and attends mass regularly. She and the nuns never did holy stuff, they never went on a pilgrimage or what not. Even if you have a calling to a vocation, you’re still a person. You want to hang out with friends and have fun when you don’t have to work, and the nuns were from my mother’s generation, maybe a couple of years older. One time she and Sister Rita came to Jersey City and I bought them lunch at the great VIP Diner (The Vip on Sip). Our next door neighbor in Paramus, who was born and raised in Jersey City, gave these two women (pushing 80 at the time) precise directions to the VIP. They both couldn’t stop talking about how great the directions were and that they didn’t get lost. They were more impressed with their arrival than the destination itself.

Mom worked in the school system of the Archdiocese for more than 20 years. By the time of the VIP visit she had been more than 10 years retired (actually, she became a part time secretary for the parish of OLV working in the rectory office, a position she still holds). She was friends with Sister Rita and Sister Julian for more than a quarter of a century. These nuns had been her good-time buddies for a very long time.

One by one, the Sisters of Charity she was friends with passed away, as did many of Mom’s other friends. After the age of 80 I guess, one has a lot more peers below the ground than above the ground. I’ve come to realize that gradually, our Saturday afternoons together became her main source of social activity. At the same time, as the years went on and the Saturday visits continued, I found myself just having more fun—at least as much fun—with Mom than I had with many of the other activities in my life. A friend of mine once told me, I hope my son brings me flowers and takes me to lunch when I’m in my 80s. I’ve thought about her comment a lot. She was wrong in her implication that the visits were an obligation. Spending time with Mom became as beneficial to me as it was to her. Maybe I had more in-depth conversations with other folks, and of course, old people can be exasperating, but there are these moments in life when you find yourself astounded that your parents are actually interesting. They’re interesting in and of themselves and not just because they’re your parents.

Families embody time. We make friends and acquaintances, but the person you are that they meet, the person you are that they know, is only the person you are now. They don’t know what went into making you that person. Your Mom though, she does know. She also knows what went on before the moment you and the world met. While I take pride in spending that time with Mom, giving her a pleasant Saturday afternoon—the fact of the matter is, what she enabled me to discover is priceless and ineffable. And, only she could give me that awareness and self-knowledge.

Unfortunately, time includes unwelcome change. After Mom had to stop driving, it was increasingly apparent that that she could not adequately take care of herself. My brothers and sisters and I have been dealing with this ‘what to do about Mom question’ for quite a while. It was just an endless academic discussion until 2009, when specific actions had to be taken. Luckily, the old man made sure she was well provided for so unlike many people in this situation, the financial aspect is not as big an issue.

The move to the Assisted Living Facility was an ordeal that took many months of debate. There was no simple answer, the process was step by step. The question was where, and when that was resolved, the question was when. Mom lived in the same house since the early 50s. Will the transition be worse than her living alone? I wanted to keep her at home as long as possible and bring in a companion person who could help with the house work and such, but my mother nixed that idea. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to move, she just lacked an eagerness to change. You can’t force her to move. On the other hand, there was the safety issue: what if she trips and breaks an ankle and is lying in the house for days? There were some disagreements between the siblings, but only on certain details, no screaming or anything. That is part of the frustration, not the absence of arguments, but that reaching a consensus was not the same as reaching a conclusion. Making the big decision only created a multitude of other decisions to deal with.

Anyway, Mom did move and now I was spending this Mother’s Day with her at the facility, with my younger (11 months) sister and her 12 year old son. The facility is very nice, like a resort hotel for senior citizens. Most of them use walkers or canes, a few are wheel chair bound. They were having a Mother’s Day brunch. The dining room was like any large, boring restaurant except not as crowded. Employees milled about, greeting residents and wishing everybody a Happy Mother’s Day, trying to generate a festive atmosphere. There was a buffet, although many of the old folks had to be served by the waiters. Several of the tables had families, mini-Mother’s Day parties, bright Mylar balloons tied to chairs. Then there were other tables with just old people. I noticed staff going up to these women, wishing them a happy mother’s day. My brother, who once worked in an old age home and told me that there were two types there—seniors who were visited regularly by very involved families, and others who were drop-offs. I was thinking of that term, drop-offs, when I saw the groups of residents, real elderly, sitting by themselves and nagging the waiters for decaf.

“A lot of people use those walkers here,” my mother said, adjusting her red haired wig. “Do you think I look as old as the people here?”

“You don’t look a day over 87, Mom,” I said.

It’s quite amusing her vanity five weeks before her 90th birthday. In truth, she is healthier than most of the people at the facility—certainly as healthy as the healthiest resident—and, she is a few years older than the average age of the residents. But the same worry that preceded her moving here comes to mind. Will being around these people make her more resigned? Will it age her quicker—or will being free of the stress of taking care of the house rejuvenate her? I don’t know the answer, nobody does. It will be a while before we get an answer. And, the fact that the answer remains elusive only increases our anxiety, even though it’s now a done deal. Here she is, here she lives.

After lunch, we hang out in her apartment. On her new couch, I take a nice nap, just like old times. She, my nephew and I play gin rummy. When we decide to head out, there’s a woman playing a piano in the corner of the dining area. Couches have been moved around the piano. Residents—elderly women, with their walkers nearby, some wearing shawls—one has tubes running to a portable oxygen tank—sit on the couches, glumly listening to the piano player, an overly ebullient woman who sings: “You made me love you, I didn’t want to do it.” The drop-offs watch the newbie leave with her family. They seem like un-adopted teenagers left at the orphanage.

We bring flowers to my father’s grave. “I want to share them with Kimball,” she would say about my Saturday bouquets. When she was driving, Mom would visit Dad’s grave once a week at least—She planted flags every memorial day and 4th of July, a wreath on Christmas, special crosses on Veteran’s Day sold by the local chapter of the Catholic War Veterans.

“That’s where my name is going to be.” She pointed to the side of my father’s inscription.

It’s an austere tombstone. That’s the style at George Washington Cemetery. Only bronze plaques, set on the ground. These plaques have a small bronze vase that you take out to put flowers in.

“Do you want Josephine or Helen Josephine,” asked my sister.

“Jo,” said my mother. “Everybody calls me Jo.”

“There’s not a whole lot of room,” said my sister. “Dad doesn’t have Kim, just his full name.”

“We can put Jo in quotation marks,” I said. “Do you want “Jo”, Helen Josephine, or Helen “Jo” Josephine?”

“Just as long as it’s there,” she laughs.

This conversation may be morbid, but we’re all chuckling. I’ve never heard my mother comment on where her name should be on this grave marker that we’ve been looking at together since 1988. Has the move to the assisted living facility made her think about death more than before? Then again, what is the usual rate of thinking about death for someone on the eve of her 90s who has seen most of her contemporaries go to the great beyond?

Just another echo of the frustrating uncertainty my sibs and I constantly hear in our heads.

The shiny green lawn of the cemetery is thickly dotted with the flower-filled vases. All the dead mothers I think. People stand around several of the graves—some alone, some in groups. I see one guy sitting on a blanket. He is hunched over and alone. His lips are moving. He’s talking to his mother. Not the memory of the woman, or if he has faith in the afterlife, some sort of clairvoyant conversation with her eternal soul. He’s talking to his mother in his mind. The relationship may be a one-way street now that she is gone, but his love for her, that is still real. That is still the present. That will only die with him. Just because that person may be gone, no longer here or with you or part of your life, your relationship with that person, that loved one, doesn’t disappear, doesn’t go away. Vanishing easily is not what love does. Often, love doesn’t vanish at all.

I don’t know if I’ll be that guy or not. I do know that I’m lucky to be with Mom in the flesh. It’s still a fake Hallmark holiday, Mother’s Day. What was special about it was that nothing special was done, just like the Saturday visits. Ordinary time was spent and now that Mom is living in someplace new for the first time in more than half a century, maybe achieving the ordinary is the best that can be, and should be, accomplished.

My sister drove me to the train station and Mom wants to stay to watch me get on the train. She wants to watch the train come in and the train go away.

The four of us stood on the platform, and she said to me, “All those times I used to come here with you on Saturday.”

Similar words about waiting for the train for Dad, now she is saying them about me.

I gulp, on the verge of tearing up with joy (and sadness too). Then we heard the train whistle. The headlight of the Bergen Main Line, Suffern to Hoboken, twinkled in the distance.