My mother died late Friday afternoon of Labor Day weekend in 2018, just as the sun was setting and Shabbat was coming on. I was flying back to New York City from vacation to see her when she died. Even though I don’t believe that souls ascend to a heaven in the sky, I hold an image of her coming up and through me as my plane descended. 

The taxi driver offered me a bottle of water as I wept in the backseat of his cab. I got to mom’s apartment and my brother Matt met me at the door and caught me when I collapsed. I sat in the chair next to my mother’s bed and held her hand, which was losing its warmth. I could see a last sliver of the sun through her bedroom window, setting over the Hudson River. 

Matt went out to pick up Chinese food, and we sat with my aunts and uncle to eat. Two hospice health aides ate with us—one who had been on duty and one who had come to the house to be with us when she heard that mom had died. Mom’s two Jewish children, her Unitarian sisters, unaffiliated brother-in-law, and Catholic caretakers all lit Shabbat candles together as my mother’s body lay in her room. We ate the Chinese food which had been a staple of our Upper West Side childhood; we had it for dinner almost every Thursday night of our youth. The sesame noodles were not as good as I remembered.

Aninut

My uncle called the funeral home to come pick up mom’s body. Two young guys in ill-fitting suits rang the doorbell as we were sitting at the dinner table. They came into the front hall and  lifted my mother’s body onto their gurney. They told me that they would have to carry her down the ten flights of stairs because the doorman was not allowed to leave his post to run the service elevator. I went down to the lobby, ready for a fight. The doorman had been a good friend to my mother over the years, especially after she got sick. He was almost in tears as he told me that the superintendent had forbidden him from leaving the door to run the service elevator. I called the super and I asserted, “My mother has lived in this building for fifty years and she is not leaving for the last time by being carried down the back stairs!” That seemed so important to me at that moment. I hung up, and took the doorman’s place guarding the front door as he went to help bring my mother’s body out of 285 Riverside Drive for the last time. 

 

Shiva

We could not bury her on Shabbat, so we waited a day until Sunday and then flew to Martha’s Vineyard, the island where I was born, and buried my mother next to my father. My family stood at her grave on a grassy hillside in a clear warm wind and the island rabbi chanted the prayers. We started shiva back in the city at her apartment on Monday night, with a memorial service at her Upper West Side synagogue on Tuesday.

 

That whole week was so hot and so full of people, tears, bagels, phone calls and things to do. That sweaty, crowded first night of shiva was crammed with people praying, crying, laughing, eating. I sat on my mother’s L-shaped couch, my back to 101st Street, and faces from each part of my life emerged from the crowd for just a second and then receded: my mother’s college roommate, my father’s book agent, old neighbors, my kindergarten best friend, my college roommate, my brother’s wife’s co-workers. There were so many people who mom had studied with, taught, and cared for as a Rabbi, and they all faded in and out of view. It felt like a drug scene from a 1970s after-school special where they showed how stoned the misguided teen protagonist was by having faces emerge from a blur and dissolve into a rainbow.      

One afternoon during the spring before she died, mom and I sat on that same couch and talked through the logistics of the end of life. “Shiva will be terrible,” she warned me. “Full of people praying, which you won’t care about. You should only do three days of it, instead of five. Make sure someone is looking out for you—bringing you food and ready to help you escape conversations you don’t want to have. And when you get overwhelmed, you can go into my room.” Even as she and I discussed it that day, both of us crying while we planned, I could not fathom that she wouldn’t be there with me when it happened. 

She was right; it was terrible. Too many people, too little space, too many carbs and too much sadness. Everyone wanted to tell me about how special my mother was to them.  My kids made fun of the particular way I always clasped my hands and tilted my head when someone was telling me how much they had loved my mother, how much they would miss her. I tried to listen—but mostly I just tilted and un-tilted. 

My friends looked out for me.  They brought me bagels and seltzer, or something stronger when the moment called for it. But when I went into mom’s quiet room to escape it was even worse than the rest of the house. I sat on the carpet, because we had gotten rid of her big bed and brought in a single hospital bed with rails during the last months of her life. I couldn’t bear to even look at that bed where she had died, let alone sit on it. I stared at the full-length mirror on the back of her bathroom door from my seat on the rug. I tried to find the reflection of someone who could bear this level of sadness without her mother. 

 

Sheloshim

Once that was over, we tried to remember what to do. I know I had a meeting my first day back at work, but I don’t know what we talked about. Friends dropped off meals, cards arrived in the mail. I talked to my brother every day.  We mostly went through logistics of our days, each of us hoping for a little bit of her voice coming through the other.  

Mom had a huge painting hanging on the wall of her dining room. It was of a bedroom in Jerusalem, an unmade bed with golden sunlight slanting through the window. After she got really sick and stopped making sense anymore, she told me that she would come live in that painting, in our apartment, after she died. I was frantic to get it out of her apartment and into mine. I had to fight with her building superintendent to let me move it out of the building without the proper insurance. The fight felt desperate and the stakes high. Getting it out of her building and up on my wall felt good, but not that good.

I was the oldest daughter of an oldest daughter of an oldest daughter. I became my mother’s emergency contact after my father died when I was twenty and she was forty-seven. Taking care of my mother as she died of brain cancer thirty years later was the culminating project of our life together. I corresponded with her friends and caretakers, planned her daily schedule, made up her grocery lists, and traveled with her in time and space as she remembered and forgot where we were in her illness and journey. There was a two-week span when she called me early every morning to ask when her funeral would be, or if it had already happened.  

“Mom, you are still alive,” I would explain, “we have not had your funeral yet.”

“Oh.” she would say, “But will you speak at it? Will your brother?

“We will speak when it happens”, I assured her,  “but you are still here.”

Now that it had actually happened, there was no one to call to gossip about it with, to make fun of our relatives with, to love and worry about and get annoyed with. There was no one to hold my whole life. 

Instead, there was being in her apartment without her. There was stopping her bills, canceling her credit cards. There was fighting with her cell phone provider to let us out of her contract. There was sorting through her letters. There were so many photographs, but no one to tell me where they had been taken, or to laugh with me about how bad our hair and glasses had been. My brother wanted to have dinner there on the anniversary of my father’s birthday at the end of September. Some of the furniture had been moved out, but it still felt like the living room I had been living in all my life. 

 

Shnat Ha-Evel

And then came birthdays without her, and my son Jacob applying to college and my nephews losing teeth. There were messages from her friends—some of whom became my friends, some who became my problems. Before we had fully emptied the apartment, I invited a bunch of people to come choose a scarf or book or knick knack that reminded them of her to take with them. At the last minute, I couldn’t bear to be there for it, but when I arrived back the next week, much of her stuff was gone. 

When I was five years old, I had trouble sleeping. I remember lying in the top bunk of the bed I shared with my brother. I worked the calculus of the journey into my parent’s room: I would have to climb down the ladder, my wanna-be Laura Ingalls Wilder flannel nightgown getting snagged in the steps. I would have to traverse the floor of our room – littered with toys. I would cross the dark hall, and then silently sneak to my mother’s side of the bed. If I woke up my dad, he would make me go back to my room. If I got to my mom’s side without waking him, she would slide over and put her arm around me and I would be safe for the night. There was no greater comfort than being in their room, in their bed. On the nights before I went off to sleepaway camp, my dad would let me spend the night in a sleeping bag on their floor, soaking up their safety for the weeks I would be away from them. 

Sometimes I feel like I soaked up so much of my mom—that she is so deeply infused in my DNA—that I don’t even miss her. In almost any given situation I know what she would say or do; I can almost hear her voice, almost see her in the chair in her living room where she sat for her morning meditation, cup of tea beside her. Sometimes it almost feels like enough. 

I start to call her when I read an article she would like or hate—when I see an old friend who only she would know or hear a piece of gossip only she would care about. When Jacob starts to make a list of colleges to visit, I can’t figure out how to do it without her input. Her information would be even older than mine, and I would have bristled against it, the way Jacob bristled against my advice. But I was so used to that pattern that I didn’t know how to act outside of it.      

And the days go on. 

We go away for Thanksgiving, not wanting to see the whole family gathered without her. We have Chanukah in our living room instead of hers. We don’t go to Zabars on Christmas morning for bagels. I don’t worry about what she is doing on New Year’s Eve of a year she will never see. I paint my hall a sea foam blue that she does not advise me on. I call my children the names she called me—”sugar plum”, “sweetie pie”, “ toots”. They are patient with me.

I get a mammogram, schedule a colonoscopy, start doing Pilates. I ask my husband to promise me we will live long.

I say Kaddish at Saturday morning synagogue services. Traditionally, a child says the prayer every day for the year after a parent dies. I have spread Kaddish out among many people—a different friend or family member or colleague says it for her each day.   Or I hope they do. I stand on the days that I say it, mumble the prayer which I can’t make myself memorize. I dread and look forward to next year, to staying seated when the rabbi asks the mourners to rise, to moving out of the daily crushing mourning of the first year. I still have so much to do for her that the sadness has shape, form, urgency. It is still so new that it is strange and evolving and involving. What will happen when it is just how life is? 

Mom’s letters and pictures are as sorted as they are going to be. Her clothes are given or taken away. Her apartment is listed on the realtor’s website. Jacob is accepted to college. I go on a business trip. I notice that my friends’ parents are sick or dying too. I notice other people. 

I miss my aunts’ sister, my brother’s mother, my children’s grandmother. I miss how annoying it was when she picked out the worst news stories from the newspaper to tell me about—the constant bemoaning of Donald Trump’s first reign. I miss her voice, her smell, how soft and warm her skin was. I miss screening her calls. Now only my mother-in-law calls our home phone. 

I miss feeling like there was a layer between me and the world—that there was a grown-up with some answers. I miss how wise and funny and generous and late she was. I miss talking about what to cook for Seder. I miss meeting her for lunch and I miss being impatient to end lunch.  

We have her paintings and plants and photographs and books all around us at home. All winter I wear her socks and her soft cardigans. Tessa wears her rings. Jacob puts up her picture in his room. She is with us and she is not.

And we unveil her gravestone. Hakamat Matzeiah (raising the stone), is done within a year of a death. We travel to meet the rest of my mother’s family on Martha’s Vineyard in April. It is a cold weekend; we wear jeans and our down coats to the cemetery, and we don’t worry too much about the ceremony. Fifteen of us gather back on the hillside, between my parents’ gravestones. When my father was buried here he was in the row of graves highest up the hill. Gravestones have sprouted all around us since then, and the bush we planted next to his grave thirty years ago is sprawling. Tessa reads aloud to us from a letter that my mother wrote to her grandchildren. Tessa never cries except when thinking of her grandmother.

And then it is mothers’ day and her birthday. And some days are not so bad and others are terrible. And at random moments I think I smell or hear her and my heart stops for a second. And some days I feel happier and freer than I have been since she got sick. I worried about her long before she got sick. That was a lot of worry. Most of it useless. All of it useless. 

And my kids think I am the grown up and the realtor thinks I can decide what to do with her apartment and people who miss her look for me and I look around for her and she is not here. Tessa gets her braces off and mom will never see her beautiful straight teeth. And we are in a summer without her and soon our year of mourning will be over.

I have moments coming out of sleep where the very mechanics of life and death are blurry and I think—with great clarity—well why don’t I just go see her? And then I remember how this life works and doesn’t. Sometimes when I come up out of the subway, or I am on a plane as it lands, I am shocked at returning to the street level of a city that does not hold her. 

Often on our last day of a Martha’s Vineyard vacation she and I would go for an early morning walk on the beach. At the end of the walk, we would take off our clothes and go for a chilly, golden dip. We both hated the cold water, but that swim was a way of sealing the beauty of the summer and keeping it in us for the winter. We always knew that the moment was fleeting, that soon we would be vacuuming and packing and getting on line for the ferry and making the long drive back to the hot city. But that shimmering early morning time would be there too. And in the middle of winter I would picture that stretch of beach, and I would know that the birds were still calling and the waves were still breaking. In the heartbreaking days of missing her that stretch out before me, I am also on that beach with her. Our bodies continue to change over time—and we continue to walk, talk, gossip, plan, and argue, with our feet in the ocean. 

Lisa Pilar Cowan is a third-generation New Yorker and a non-profit professional. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her family. She is working on an essay collection about love and loss and duty. She writes about accompaniment during the illness and grief at the death of her mother, and the challenges of letting go of and holding onto newly-adult children. She also writes a regular substack – Side of the Road – on surviving and thriving in late-stage middle age during late-stage capitalism.