A few days before my mother died, my friend Anne Hamilton had a vision that my Dad was patiently waiting at the Gates of Heaven for her holding her purse. “Patiently or impatiently,” I asked. “Patiently,” she said. “It’s up to her.
Anne went on to say that she saw my mother ascending to heaven, meeting my father and that they were both young and radiant as they were when they met.
Irene was just 16 and Arnold was 19. On their first date they went dancing on the boat to Bob-lo. Their song was “Harbor Lights.”
It’s hard to talk about my mother without talking about my father too. They were one of those inseparable couples. If my father went to a Lions Club meeting, my mother went along. Yet, they had absolutely separate domains.
My mother’s, as everyone knows, was the kitchen. My mother never met a recipe she didn’t think could be improved by adding a lb. of butter and a carton of sour cream. Her sucker cookies are famous. When she visited us in New York, she’d always bring with her a box of cookies carefully layered in wax paper and tin foil and usually a very large brisket, and a package of marrow bones for her pea soup. If you ever tasted her pea soup you know why she was a better cook than most Top Chefs.
My mother had a career – wife, mother, Bobe.
She took these responsibilities very seriously. When Michael, my son, was a small boy and I was a Single Mother trying to balance making a living with making a home, Mike suddenly spiked a fever. I needed to work in the morning. I called my mother.
This woman who had never traveled anywhere without my father -- took a plane from Detroit to La Guardia, a bus from the airport to Grand Central, found the train to Larchmont, and then a taxi to my house. Within hours she was standing on my doorstep, ringing my bell – naturally she brought cookies.
When I needed a car for my new job, my mother volunteered to bring one. This was long before cell phones. The idea was my father would drive their car and my mother would follow him to New York in a little gray Escort for me. Except my father pulled out of the drive and zoomed off and my mother, so she says, didn’t see “that meshugenah” again, until she parked behind him in my driveway.
Once my husband Jed and I were driving down to North Carolina at the same time that there was a hurricane on the Coast. We got a message from my mother on my cell phone, “Oy vey, Turn Back! Turn Back!”’
Two years ago I published a book. I ordered a copy for my mother. In one of those strange unexplainable flukes in life, the copy for my mother and the copy for my cousin Allee were printed incorrectly. None of the sentences made sense. I didn’t believe my mother when she told me this over the phone. “Okay, I humored her, mark the pages and send it back to me, I said. She did. She stayed up until 3:30 in the morning and hand wrote 88 little white slips of paper meticulously detailing errors she had found. I wish I had saved them.
When I visited my mother in the hospital a few weeks before she died, I asked her what she was was proudest of in her life. She answered “My 3 children. The lives they lead.”
“I had a good life with Daddy,” she added. “We never had much money, but we did a lot. We traveled, we had good friends.”
On Sunday, February 13, Jed and I flew in to see my mother. The next day was Valentine’s Day, my father’s birthday. I was terrified. I thought if she could choose, she would want to pass that day so she could be with him. We arrived about 2:00. My mother was already on a morphine drip. I’ve been told even though someone isn’t responding they can still hear you. I held my mother and told her how much I loved her and what a good mother she had been. I got to sing “Good Night, Irene” to her. Her face was slack. She had been breathing erratically for about 25 minutes. At about 4:00 pm, there was a moment when her face suddenly got radiant, suffused with joy. I teased her, “Irene, do you see Arnold right now? She did not take another breath.
I spent the next few days emptying her apartment – my Dad’s tuxedo and black tie, the beaded purses, the clocks and Royal Doultons, the bags of cashews and pecans, the funny hats and magic tricks, the hundred-thousand pictures of the grand children and great-grandchildren, and an almost full jar of Saunders Hot Fudge.
As for last words, my sister-in-law tells me she turned over once the day before and clearly said, “kishka.”
I don’t know anyone else like my mother. She was a presence in my life. I don't know if there will ever be a time when I don't think of calling her at least once a day "Good Night, Irene."
