A special tribute

...to Walter Cronkite tonight on CBS. He is 90. He cried at one point on the show, which was clips of his life "on the air" and comments from his colleagues across all networks and walks of life and his personal comments about his life.

He apologized for the tears and then I realized, if he could weep, so could I. It was in the segment on JFK's assassination. That wound is still there for America, for him, for me and so many others.

Such a contrast to the "spin doctors" of today. He negotiated Egypt and Israel sitting at the same table from the "evening news." How much better can it get than that?" Well, having the first Beatles interview prior to Ed Sullivan - I am sure comes in there some where.

And sad, how far away have we strayed in terms of today's "take" on the news? We trusted him and today we "filter."

To watch the program was to watch my life...from my tender college years through today...it put so much in perspective.

I am going to try and get the video/dvd for me, my daughters, and all my friends...we all need to watch, feel, and learn.

...and that is the way it is, May 18th 2007.

Mother's Day without the Mother

I have been thinking about death, not just death in the abstract, but my Mother’s death. She died nine days before Christmas and was buried three days later on a very cold December morning. I think when you bury your last parent something profound shifts within. However, I did not know that as I sat on those cold steel chairs under the canopy at the cemetery listening to the minister read the last scripture. It was visualizing the moment they lowered the casket into the vault that I felt forever old. I wanted to watch it lower, but the funeral-people are very careful about those things and they usher you away. It would have been easier to watch.

I am reading Joan Didion’s book “The Year of Magical Thinking” to more clearly understand why I was not my usually rational Virgo self. I was not. I had not prepared my daughters very well for this moment either. They were both married with children and had lives apart from mine – apart in both distance and connection. My former husband and his wife of twenty-some years came. He was a pall bearer. It was such an act of kindness for my Mother never stopped loving him, but neither have I. I am not referring to romantic love, but the love of a soul who has known you in your youth and watched you grow along with the children, our children. No other man has ever had that opportunity.

When you lose the person with whom you took your first breath there is a vast emptiness. It is an interior loneliness. No one will ever know you in the same way and that person is gone. We disagreed on many things some of which were quite important, but in the end she was Mother, and I, daughter and it overrode all else. In some ways it gave us permission to explore our differences because there would always be that first breath, that primal place of connection. Now, who will know me in the same way? Who will allow me to disagree and continue to love me? Perhaps more importantly, I am adult and why is it important or necessary?

On Christmas Eve day that year, a mere five days after the funeral, I called my daughter in New York and was clearly not my usual self. Her words still echo as if she had just spoken them, “Get over it, just get over it.” How do you get over “it?” I hope Joan has some answers in her book. So far her writing has encouraged me to allow the irrational self some acceptance and not rush the getting over part. I am not upset with my daughter for saying it; I am upset with me for not understanding it. When I heard those words I knew death had changed our entire world for I would not ever be the woman I was before. My daughters would have to catch up for not only had they lost their Grandmother who they loved deeply, but their mother was not at home either.

Mother’s day is next weekend and this is the fifth Mother’s day without her. The lilacs still bloom and I still cry when I catch their scent. It is my mother. My daughters and I do not speak of that cold December we prefer to talk about “Grandma” and all that she gave us including those moments of rigidity that nothing could bend. I am on a quest to understand myself that first year and when I do my daughters will know. Unlike then, today they always seem to know and I have stopped wondering about it. I sense it goes back to that first breath and I was there and that connection is primal.