She loved to walk while holding her children’s hands, she loved to sing and twirl us around in a dance. In death, she leaves her mark all over the country, in armoires, ottomans, wallpapers and throw pillows. She taught herself interior design and became one of the most-respected designers in the Philadelphia area. She used to say, “The masses are asses.” She volunteered as a clown in hospitals and in fund-raising for ALS. She was loving, wise and patient and she cared not a whit what the world thought. She was funny and fierce and loyal and brilliant and while she never became a doctor, everyone ran to her for advice. How can I tell you about my mother? She went by Rhoda, Rho, Aunt Rho, Mrs. No surprise, my folks remained childless until they moved out. For six years they lived with my grandmother, who made no apologies for bursting through their bedroom at any hour. They wed on Christmas Eve, because the restaurant was available. She married the only man she ever dated, my father, when she was 20. Instead, she became a teenage parent to her heartbroken mother and younger brother. She lost her father when she was 15, and with him went her dreams of college and medical school. How can I tell you about my mother? How do I fit her 84 years into words? She didn’t change the world. Instead, like one of those NASA rockets, she stripped away piece by piece en route to the heavens. She did our family a final kindness going that way, because she was too great a force to disappear all at once. We lost her gradually, first her balance, then her movement, then her speech, her recognition and finally, last weekend, her breath. The difference between all those columns and this one is pretty simple. And, finally, what it was like to stare at her as she withered, wondering whether she knew me at all. How I beckoned her to the stage at the Fox Theatre during a charity benefit, and a friend yelled out, “She’s in the bathroom!” I wrote what it was like feeding her after her stroke, a spoonful at a time.
How she refused to learn email because she feared I would stop calling her. (She wrapped me in toilet paper, which was fine until it started raining.) I wrote about how she marched me into the library after a librarian had told me “that book’s too hard for you” and my mother yelled, “Never tell a child something is too hard for him! And never THIS child!” I wrote about how she insisted I stay in college, even when my father lost his job. I once wrote a Halloween column on how she made me the Mummy. Over the years in this space, I have, occasionally, written about my mother.
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