Remembering Mom & Yellow Gloves

Today marks thirteen years since my mother died. Some years May 23rd feels like a celebration of life; some years, a funeral. This year, it feels somewhere in between.

Last night, my husband gave me a weeping cherry tree and the dichotomy between the pink blossoms and the down-hanging branches so poignantly captured the dilemma of a death anniversary—of how joy and sorrow messily coexist. Of course, this trial is not mine, but the human condition: to navigate between hope and despair, to center and re-center, to seek an equilibrium between memory (or projection) and presence—to stay in this moment.  

Buddha taught that happiness is in the present. Today, and in my embodiment work, such an invitation asks that I both honor grief—feel it and let it flow through like a river—and also resist its backward pull.

But this pull is strong, especially when coupled with my desire for my mother to know my daughter. Last weekend, for example, on a Maine beach, I got caught in the crosswinds of experience and remembering: as I watched my two-year-old collect broken clam shells on the water line, I thought of my mother’s beach collecting bag.

It was afternoon, five days ago. The tide was going out.

“Pock!” my daughter called as she ran over the sand on bare, tripping feet.

“Pock?” I asked when she stopped in front of me.

She held out her broken shells and gestured toward her pocket. “Pock!”

Again and again and again we played this game. Each time she reached me, I would bend to the corn silk of her hair and take the shell pieces from her outstretched hand. Like they were sapphires, I would examine and slip them into her filled-up jacket pocket. As she ran back and forth, I thought of all the summers my mother and I beach-combed for “big money”—cobalt blue sea glass. How my mother would hold it skyward on the flat of her palm as though determining its worth before dropping it into her weathered gray, canvas collecting bag. How I loved to hear her squeal “big money” from across the beach as I dug for quahog’s. How the reward was not the value our finds, but our togetherness.

How desperately I missed her.

How, in the clutches of nostalgia, can words capture the totality of such a loss? How can we make someone else feel our grief without beating our chest?

The Russian playwright and short story writer Anton Chekhov suggested that one must under-write grief—that nostalgia serves the writer, but not the reader. In simplistic, pared-down, spare prose, we can evoke a feeling rather than insist on it.

And so, on this May 23rd, I wrote this poem:

Yellow Gloves

Thirty-two hours before my mother dies,

at fifty-three,

I hold the yellow gloves of her skin—

trace the crescents of her fingernails,

oval burls of her knuckles,

slip of gold around her left ring finger.

Her bones, fragile-hollow as a bird’s,

so unlike the solid grip that braided my hair

and stitched the hemlines of my youth.

I map the tarot of her palm, 

cold, dry and papery. In prayer,

I lift her ochre hand, press together

the curving lines of our lives.