Nine years

My mother died nine years ago today.

I’m not trying to be maudlin; that’s just how it is and what can you do about that? Some sentences are like that, especially when they push against the swelling wave of all the Mother’s Day messaging that starts rolling towards shore this time of year, crashing into me the second Sunday of each May and leaving me soaked in some unpalatable mixture of longing and resentment.

Each Mother’s Day, the fact that I myself am a mother, that Rowan and Isaac are going to bring home some kind of sweetly crafted double–Mother’s Day gifts, feels like an afterthought: that’s nice, dear, but where do I send my card?

Okay, that last sentence was maudlin.

But that first sentence: “My mother died nine years ago today.” It has two parts, and I am pondering the difficulties of both: the simple modifier-subject-verb of the first half and the descriptive clause (is that what we call that? I’m supposed to know those things, but today I’m not looking anything up. And is “modifier” correct?) of the second half. “Nine years ago” is just as unbelievable as the fact that she actually died — how is it that she’s been gone for nearly a quarter of my life? And yet, she shapes it, informs it, almost daily, and the memories and emotions are as clear now as they were then, unless I’m fooling myself into thinking otherwise. Am I?

That’s the most difficult thing about death — what I know today about the past nine years and what my mother doesn’t, can’t. Those two boys, of course, but all the tiny, daily things that make up a life, like what we’re having for dinner and that the roof is still leaking. I imagine daily phone calls in which we discuss these things; I imagine seeing her name pop up on the call display and sighing because I have things to do besides talk; I imagine picking up the phone anyway, every day. I console myself with the ways in which she does shape my life. I talked about it with a friend in Los Angeles last week, as she and I made up the guest bed in her home for me. “Really,” I kept protesting, “you don’t have to help. I can do this by myself.”

“Nah,” she said, stuffing a pillow into its case, “I can’t let go of the way my mother raised me.”

And we talked about that, the ways in which neither of us believe in ghosts but feel our mothers’ presence all around, live our lives according to (occasionally, or often, in defiance of) the way they would have, but always with them around us.

So she’s gone, has been for nine years now. But she’s here, too, so today, Sunday, every day, we’ll focus on that.

Contact

Yesterday, I performed one of the boringest tasks known to the millennial generation: I switched e-mail accounts. The process involved tracking down and updating every last one of the jillion or so sites (and I’m sure I’ve forgotten many) and businesses and organizations that somehow rely on contacting me via e-mail, as well as messaging every single contact in my address book to let them know about the change. Tedious as it is, it’s a useful process, every so often, to go through your contacts and see who’s actually still there, which of those whimsical Hotmail and Gmail addresses still works, which contacts haven’t yet expired, which people I want to hear from and those I imagine I’ll never talk to again. A couple of dozen dead e-mail addresses bounced back to me and I — diligent girl that I am — deleted them from my contact files, along with names I no longer recognized.

And then I did something simultaneously tiny and enormous.

I deleted my mother.

For close to nine years, I’ve kept her in my Outlook contacts, importing her information from system to system along with everyone else’s: the street address of the house she died in; the long-cancelled phone number; the e-mail address she never used but that my father set up for her because he was tired of her using his account; information about her spouse, now remarried. I’d go to look up another Goldberg and there she would be, her name popping up always a slight jab to my gut, a tiny twisting in my soul. Like when, several months after she died, I had a roll of film developed (was it really such a short time ago that we developed film?) and when I opened the envelope of photographs, there she was like a ghost staring back at me and I couldn’t breathe.

I’m mixed about this. On the one hand, who needs the reminder of heartbreak? Like the semi-conciliatory phone message from my high school boyfriend that I never erased from my answering machine (remember answering machines?), just flipping the cassette to the other side: why? On the other hand, it’s a big step, or at least it’s a step that feels significant: to hit “delete” on the name of the person you miss most in the world, whose name popping up today in my inbox or on my caller ID would be the most welcome of everyday miracles.

I made the call, in the end, on the basis of futility: keeping her in my contact list will never provide me with closure, let alone contact. Keeping her there isn’t so much a form of respect as it is desperation or denial. Much better to wear her rings so that part of her is with me constantly. Much better to pull out a picture and show her to my kids, write another story and say her name out loud: Ruth Laine Goldberg, I have a new e-mail address. You’ll never use it, but I know that we both would have wished that otherwise.

December 6

Geneviève Bergeron, Hélène Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Edward, Maud Haviernick, Barbara Maria Klucznik, Maryse Leclair, Annie St.-Arneault, Michèle Richard, Maryse Laganière, Anne-Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, Annie Turcotte. I still can't read through that list of names without tearing up. We remember.