I dressed Tin in his Italian outfit yesterday early evening and brought him to St. Theresa’s with a box of cookies from Angelo Brocatos along with a homemade thank you card that had a photo of my mother. This is something I have been meaning to do since my mother passed at the end of November. These are the people who took care of my mother when I was no longer able to – they bathed her, fed her, and even joked with her as they were her peers as well as her caretakers. The charge nurse had worked under my mother at St. Anthony’s years ago when mom was the Director of Nursing there. She had tears in her eyes looking at the photograph of my mother.
I went to thank these people and introduce them to Tin. Particularly as Mom would pat the bed and say she was making room for the baby – and they thought she was nuts – I had to explain to all of them that she was responding to the baby I was waiting for – and the adoption process I had been in since mom arrived there – with its ups and downs as there were two failed adoptions that took place over the time she was at St. Theresa’s.
And then success, Tin’s arrival, came days after mom’s funeral.
When I was going up the elevator, I almost told Tin we were going to see Mimi as the familiarity of the parking lot, the walk into the hospital, the ride up to the 5th floor reminded me of my daily visits to see my mom. When I caught myself, I felt the full impact of mom’s loss, of my gain with Tin, of all that had profoundly happened in my life recently.
There is no time period to grieve a parent. I began grieving a month into my mother entering the hospital as I knew she would not recover. I’m still grieving. Most people like to say your parent had a full life to console you or that she has found peace. Granted my mother’s health had deteriorated so much that I too felt a sense of peace when she passed. But the mother I buried and for whom I grieve is not that person, at all, she’s the mother of my youth – the stunningly beautiful woman who threw her head back to laugh out loud, who danced at whim, who gushed with unconditional love over me. It’s her I miss.
And now with both parents dead, an orphan at 51 years of age, I feel life has changed, punctuated by mom’s passing, made even more pronounced with Tin’s coming – everyday my son enlarges the image of my mother and who she was to me – the one who fed me, changed me, played itsy bitsy spider with me, taught me how to blow a bubble, dressed me and combed my hair – who knew that I would know and understand and come to love my mother even more in her absence by Tin’s making her more present every moment.
Who knew.
