Making the Stories Survive

It’s a funny time of year, isn’t it? Warmer weather, flowers in full bloom, the promise of summer on its way. It’s our first Mother’s Day as dads, and that’s kind of a cool experience. But my head’s been spinning as the end of April and early May approached. It was a year ago that I first opened up to you about my Mom’s battle with cancer. I opened my heart, and my mom did as well, to help shine a light on a fight waged fiercely but all too briefly. A week after publication, Mom lost her battle.

We were there with her on her final night, Dom and I. We said goodnight to her and kissed her on the cheek, having admitted her to hospice care. Four hours later, it took just one phone call from the doctor, and suddenly the whole ugly mess was an incident owned entirely by the past.

I had entered the Time After. When I couldn’t pick up the phone and hear her voice, when I couldn’t visit and feel the hugs or the kisses. And when Mom couldn’t ever meet the child we were hoping to one day bring home.

In the days that followed, my family coordinated the cremation. My sister and I traveled with Mom on her final trip through the mountains to the crematory, and in one push of a button I was able to destroy every bit of cancer that Mom couldn’t do on her own. I kept my word to her, that I’d be there right until the very end; it was unbelievably hard, but a promise is a promise. In our most vulnerable hours, even, the bond of a parent and child is unbreakable, unwavering.

There were so many warm wishes from the Gays With Kids community, folks reaching out to offer strength and support. So many friends and family members shared their love. And in the year that has brought us to now, to this day, right up until these very letters frantically conspire to escape my fingers, into a keyboard and into the black and white world of permanence on my screen, I have drawn on that love on so many different occasions. Thank you, thank you. Thank you.

My family was the recipient of food. Of cards. And yes, of prayers. There was the constant reminder that “Mom will be watching you” and “Mom is looking down on you now” and “Heaven must have needed another angel.”

As an atheist, this was the first time I was forced to truly confront grief without God on my side. Religion is a big part of the lives of my brother and stepfather, and they were able to turn their grief inward and upward, trusting that Mom’s passing was part of a bigger, unseen plan. I just thought it was bad genetics and a stubborn refusal to consult medical professionals at the right time. It wasn’t spiritual, it was scientific. And it is harder to process when it’s only facts, which are immutable and unchanging. There’s no argument, there is no easy escape, the only way out is through.

A few months later, we were matched with a birth mother, and learned that we would finally become first-time dads; my heart ached with the millions of questions I’d never ask Mom about raising a child. “Your Mom is so happy for you,” I was told. No, she isn’t. She’s gone, and she isn’t coming back, and I have to figure this out without her. I have a husband who has gone far beyond anything to be expected of a man, in the ways that he has lifted my confidence, filled the gaps in my heart with love, and caught me every time I’ve fallen. I have a brother and a sister who are two of my best friends. I see my Mom in them, in the ways that they laugh, in the jokes they make, in the ways they love and learn. And lose.

When I held Gabe for the first time in the hospital, when we brought him home for the first time, when he cried at night and I didn’t know what to do, when he smiled up at me before falling asleep, when he stepped onto a beach for the first time, I felt the cavernous space she’d left unfilled. And in a year of extreme lows and highs, it’s easy to take inventory of all you’ve lost. But boy, my boy, we’ve also gained.

And so that made me think about legacies. Not my own, that sorts itself out in its own way. I’ll leave behind what I leave behind, and it will be enough. But for my son, who will never know his grandma, there has to be a legacy. I don’t believe my mom is up there smiling down on Gabe. But the lessons she has taught me, the way she loved me, and the way she left me have all left imprints on me. You cannot tell by looking at me, but I am my mother’s son. And to process that loss, I had to understand that my mom wasn’t lookingdown, she was looking out. Mom looks out from me, through my eyes, at the world around me. I’ve absorbed the best parts of her, like a puppy left contented by an afternoon napping in the sun. Charged in that way, she pours herself out of me into my son. Her laughs have become one with my own, and that marriage of laughter negotiates laughter out of Gabe. My son will be better because of his grandma.

She’s alive in the ways that I feel her during my day, in the energy that I gather from thinking about happy moments. There isn’t a need for a celestial reunion when I can draw on her here, and now. There are delicious recipes to share, and embarrassing stories to tell, and places to visit, and all of them are inextricably intertwined with Mom’s life.

Because it is in the routines and the remembering that she gets to stay here, with us still, not an angelic hovering presence with a golden halo, but a silly and quirky woman with faults and flaws who did her best and didn’t get to finish.

I am a dad for me, for my husband, and for my son. But I am now the dad my mom wanted me to be, and if my legacy is defined by the imprints I leave behind, let this be enough. It has been one year of my thirty-one. And I have time and space stretched out in front of me, to gather what I’ve learned and to pile it into my backpack, walking hand in hand with my husband and son towards whatever is ahead, informed and strengthened by every step that’s come before.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. We love you still.

*This piece was originally written for www.gayswithkids.com