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TwitThisAn Outpouring of Love
In 1985, on Easter Sunday, Kate and I weren't prepared for how bad Mom looked when we visited her. Two years earlier, she'd been diagnosed with uterine cancer, but with surgery and chemotherapy, it had gone into remission. Now it was back. Still, her spirits remained optimistic. "I'm going to beat this thing," she would say, and we believed her.Until we saw her that day. She had lost over 20 pounds and her hair was thinning, but she had gone all out, as usual, in preparing for our visit.
The table was decorated with fresh-cut flowers and a basket filled with colored eggs, and she had dressed in a yellow organza dress. When we were seated around the dining room table, Hal served the ham, but Mom ate only a few bites.
Seeing our tears, she said, "Don't be sad, girls. It's a part of life."
After lunch, she sat down at the piano and played like old times, her fingers dancing gracefully over the keys. She was half-singing, half-humming. She knew she was dying, but she didn't show any fear. She was weak and emaciated, but I thought she never looked more beautiful and at peace as she sang the last song for us, "The Impossible Dream."
I began sobbing. Through my tears, I finally told her of my shame for having treated her so callously in the years after her release from Camarillo.
"Can you forgive me?" I asked her.
Smiling, reaching her hand toward mine, Mom said, "There's no need, honey. I understand why you were that way."
Late one evening in September, the call came from her doctor: "She's terminal." It took a few minutes for his words to sink in.
Hal met Kate and me at the hospital, and we went to Mom's room. I stood beside her bed, watching life fading from her thin body. Overcome by the prospect of losing her again, I crawled into the bed and lay beside her.
We had come full circle. We needed no words to acknowledge that.
As I held her frail hand, she gave me some last-minute advice. "Your only problem, dear," she said, "is that you don't know your own worth. If you could just see what I see. And don't be alone. Life is hard enough."
Soon after that, her hand slipped from my grasp. She drifted off to sleep.
Kate and I took a short break for dinner. When we returned 30 minutes later, she was gone. Her connection to us was so strong that she could let go only when her daughters weren't near her.
Mom had asked to be cremated and her ashes buried next to her mother's grave in a cemetery in the San Fernando Valley, near where we used to live. When I went to the office to retrieve her ashes, the man at the desk returned with a brown box. It was still warm.
Many of Mom's friends and former co-workers came to the memorial at her condo. It was so crowded, some people had to stand outside in the front yard. Hal, my mother's dear Hal, cried as he passed around appetizers.
Mingling with everyone, I was struck by how differently the lives of my parents had ended -- one with almost no one beside him, the other surrounded by an outpouring of love. After living through the darkness, my mother left behind an example of how one human being, with goodness and strength of character, could find her way out into the world again. She showed what a parent could be, giving me a legacy of love that has guided my sister and me since then.
When I noticed people looking at me intently that day, I knew they were thinking how much I resembled my mother. And I smiled, proud to be Mom's daughter.
From Reader's Digest - August 2006
"STEALING LOVE," COPYRIGHT © 2006 BY MARY A. FISCHER, IS PUBLISHED AT $23 BY HARMONY BOOKS, A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE, INC., 1745 BROADWAY, NEW YORK, N.Y. 10019.
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