Family Silence Shrouds a Mother’s Life : Relationships: A daughter faces the shadowy images of a mother long dead and finally begins the mourning process.

I don’t call my mother Mother. I call her Betty. Betty, my father’s first wife. Betty, my aunts’ sister. Betty, my grandmother’s daughter.

My only memory of Betty is suspect. I am in a crib in a dark room. The door cracks open. I see my mother’s silhouette against the distant slit of light. I see her smile at me and at life in general. All’s well.

But I would have been too young, most likely, to remember such an encounter. Perhaps the woman at the door was my Aunt Judy. Perhaps I have turned the image into Betty for some link beyond home movies and borrowed recollections.

In the home movie, it is my first birthday. I plop my hand in the cake as Betty watches, amused. Vying for the spotlight, my sister Elizabeth hammily skips in front of the camera. Betty swoops me up and with graceful deftness simultaneously bounces her 1-year-old, humors her 3-year-old, slices the cake.

She has not yet learned that the bothersome ache in her leg is bone cancer. She will be gone a few months before my second birthday, a few weeks after her 31st birthday.

Now, 32 years later, I am two years older than my mother-- her youth stalled in an eternal freeze-frame.

From the home movies, I know that Betty was brunette, petite, wholesomely pretty--high cheekbones, pug nose, sweet smile. From the borrowed recollections, I know that she was gentle and refined.

I know almost nothing about her final days. My paternal grandmother once told me that Betty put on lipstick minutes before dying; she wanted to look nice for her husband.

Such glimpses of that wrenching time have been rare--thankfully rare, so I’ve thought.

When a young widower reweds, a conspiracy of silence--both unintentional and good-intentioned--prevails for the sake of the new marriage. The father does not speak of his first wife in front of his second wife; there are feelings to consider. The grandmother does not regale her grandchildren with anecdotes about her daughter; they have another mother now.

An Old Pain

“Your mother died when you were a baby? That must have been hard for you,” I have heard throughout my life.

“No, I don’t remember any of it,” I denied, routinely and sincerely--as if pain not remembered is pain not important.

On the occasions that I allowed myself to mourn, I focused my sorrow on Dad, the one who remembers. Seeing “Love Story” as a teen, I cried from a deep and unrecognized source, my father’s tragedy personified. But I never reserved a tear for Elizabeth, nor for myself.

Yet over the past year, as I watch my niece, Alex, sprout to the age I was when I was being shuttled from aunt to aunt by my devastated father, and as I observe the mother-child bond so crucial to a toddler’s sense of security, I find myself yearning for Betty in a way that never before dawned on me.

Alex knows what’s going on. She spots a storybook picture of papa bear falling on his head and bursts into sobs, fretting, “Daddy hurt!” She catches my sister dressing for work and demands, “Don’t do that.”

A long-buried truth stabs at me: I, too, knew what was going on. I knew that my mother lost the strength to play with me, then I knew that she vanished. I knew that my caretakers were sad and distracted. I knew that my grandmother wept as she changed my diaper, that Dad’s voice cracked when he read to me, that Aunt Myra’s smile quivered. Although I would not remember these things, I always would know them.

Suddenly, I grieve Betty’s death as if I could, in fact, remember it. For the first time, I pity myself at 18 months and my sister at 3 years. I pity my father and my grandmothers, aunts and uncles, rolled back in time to 1957.

Most of all, I empathize with Betty. I can imagine--I want to imagine--what she endured.

“If I had to say goodby to Alex like Betty had to say goodby to us . . .” my sister reflected, the idea too overwhelming for completion.

She remembers it: the paramedics carrying Betty away on a stretcher. “Dad said, ‘Come tell your mother goodby, honey,’ ” Elizabeth recalled. “I was jumping up and down on the couch, and I said, ‘Look, Mommy, I can almost touch the ceiling.’ I wanted to make her proud of me. She said, ‘You’re such a big girl.’ ”

Odd. Elizabeth had never before shared this memory with me. She, also, had taken part in the conspiracy of silence--as had I, choosing not to feel the wounds that others chose not to expose.

The survivors survived. Two years after Betty’s death, Dad married the woman who rightfully would claim possession of the title Mom. My four delightful brothers came.

Dad earned himself an admirable life, full of devoted friends and great achievement. Still, I cannot help but notice his aura of stoicism.

Forever Wandering

Elizabeth and I enjoy rewarding careers, and we’ve always been popular and adventuresome. Still, I cannot help but wonder how different I might be if I’d had my mother.

Would I feel so rootless? Would I have left my hometown, Austin, for Los Angeles--a move that even 10 years later seems temporary? Or would I have settled down in Texas like my cousins did? Would I appreciate what I have rather than want what I can’t have? Would I trust commitments to last?

My sister gave me one more scrap of our dying mother:

Elizabeth is in the bathtub; Betty, wearing a nightgown, supervises from the lidded commode. “You missed a spot of soap,” she says, then leans over to assist, but stops mid-motion. “I can’t do it for you, honey, but I can show you how,” Betty offers instead.

As I listened to this, a slap of anger grazed me. “Get up and bathe your child!” I thought--absurdly, shamefully annoyed at Betty for letting herself fail us. My silent outburst felt so new and bizarre that I could not admit it to my sister.

I exaggerated when I said that I want to know what my mother endured. In some ways, I regret gaining possession of those two vignettes--Betty on the stretcher, Betty by the bathtub. Each stings with the sharpness of a raw gash. Someday they will blend into the picture of my total experience; for now they jut out like unruly misfits.

This overdue mourning has not been easy; still, I cannot help but think that it is necessary.