Tonight is the anniversary of my mothers’ death (well, so we assume, but it is the night we learned of it.) After years and years of emotional mental pain, fueled by her profound experiences in Belgium during the Holocaust, she made what was undoubtedly an UNBEARABLE decision not to usher in another new year. She has been dead for more than 1/2 my life.
Many of you were with me when I learned this, and watched me move about a party as if nothing had happened to forever change my world. Most of us were 21 or 22, and when I think back on it, and recently expressed to some of you, I can’t believe how awkward that must have been for everyone there.
Anyway, the point of all this is to say that I will honor her tonight as I have on many others, by in some way, letting her know, that I’m so sorry I couldn’t understand when I was 9-21 what her turmoil and thoughts were like. However, as an adult, a mother,I can only try to imagine what it was like to muddle through, manage to cook dinner, get me off to school, buy me my Brownie uniform and do the stuff that I now find myself doing, in the best way she could. And I have come to understand, that it WAS the best she could do, and when she sat with my head in her lap and played with my hair, I know that that was the purity of unconditional love.