Memories of a Mother Who Left Too Soon

My mother is standing in the kitchen rolling out butter cookie dough. I can smell her face powder and the starch of her cotton blouse as she lifts me up by the underarms and sets me on the Formica countertop next to the confection. The sun streams through the bay window over the counter all dusted in white flour, creating a surreal brightness. I press cookie cutters into the dough, pulling out trees, stars and angels.

This is the strongest memory I have of my mother, who died 25 years ago when I was 8.

It was three days after Christmas in 1966 when she overdosed on sleeping pills. She was 36. Like most families touched by suicide, my father, two brothers, sister and I were shocked and full of confusion, guilt and shame.

A conspiracy of silence followed, with a familial pact to bury our memories along with her body, to let her name go unmentioned, to leave questions unasked for decades. It would allow us to get on with our lives. She was buried in her native Ohio. We went to her graveside just after her death and have not been back since.

We moved from the house where our family had been whole, left the friends who went with the old neighborhood, and my father remarried. Years ticked by and memories of my mother evaporated until nothing was left but bits and pieces of a presence.

I adapted by thinking of myself as someone who stormed life unscathed by my mother’s death, glancing back at her as someone who was fragile and weak, someone who had succumbed to depressions, someone who failed life’s fight--someone unlike me. I was not a product of my past. I would not live a tragic life.

But years later, all that changed. When my life hit its nadirs, I yearned for the comfort my girlfriends’ mothers gave them. When Mother’s Day came around, I found myself overcome by an emptiness, an abysmal sadness, a feeling of devastating loss. The date began to symbolize an annual mourning and melancholia. I would find myself crying from a mysterious well of emotion when I was alone, too embarrassed to admit to such sentimentality or to such lamentings over a decades-old pain.

At certain points in my life, thoughts of her ambushed me. As on my wedding day, when I stood in front of the church and I realized: “My God, she should be here.” Or when my sister, Maureen, had her first child, whom she named Audrey after our mother. We said, “It’s too bad she couldn’t be here to see her namesake and know her grandchildren.” Similarly, after my brother Pat become a father to two daughters, he confided: “You know, now that I’m a father, I can’t understand how she could stand to leave her children. It’s the ultimate selfish act.”

My journey back began. Sitting in front of our old house, looking at the few photographs I have of her and through conversations with my mother’s friends and my brothers and sister, I piece together a fragmented image of Audrey.

In one black-and-white photograph a friend of my mother sent me, I see a look on her face that I’ve not seen in the pictures I have of her. She is smiling with a childlike vulnerability, almost bashfulness. Her head is tilted to the side, her eyes all alight about something.

It is the first time I realized that she had the slight overbite that my brothers, sister and I have. I discover my face in hers for the first time. “Your mom was a real beauty,” one of her friends says.

A real beauty. I remember beauty seen by an 8-year-old. I see her sitting in the back yard, a cigarette between two fingers with her wildly reddened lips pursed, a sheer scarf wrapped around her head and knotted beneath her chin. I thought she was movie-star beautiful, that she looked most like Judy Garland because of her auburn hair and those lips.

Another of her friends asks: “Don’t you remember her laugh? When she would laugh, everyone had to laugh. It was a tremendous, wonderful, almost hysterical laugh. When Audrey laughed, everyone laughed.”

Her laugh. What a treasure to remember her laugh. But I can’t. I remember her singing “Oh My Darling Clementine.” In the car and around the house, she sang loudly with animated gestures, coaxing us to sing with her. She was in our church’s women’s choir and practiced her Ave Marias while she starched my father’s shirts, vacuumed or cooked dinner.

“Do you remember the bowling alley?” another friend of my mother asks. “Your mother loved to bowl. We had so much fun in that bowling league.”

I remember the bowling alley. Piling in the station wagon, four kids screaming, whipping each other with red licorice ropes until the din drove my mother to yelling for silence. I can see the bowling alley nursery, the greasy French fries and Cokes we were allowed to have there. I see my mother wearing black stretch stirrup pants and her bowling shoes and the trophies she collected in tournaments gathering dust in the garage. It was one of her greatest loves. We gave her a bowling ball one Christmas.

“She was religious,” one of her friends tells me. “I don’t think your mother ever missed a Sunday.”

Religious. I remember she gave me my first rosary. It was made of pale blue crystal beads. I tried to wear it around my neck because it was so beautiful, but that was taboo. I remember going to church and craning my neck around from the pews below to see my mother and father above us in the balcony singing at high Mass. She draped the black or white lace veils over her hair, letting the sides hang down past her chin onto her chest.

“Your mother was so vivacious, so full of life. She was just a beautiful, wonderful person,” the friend says. “She was the kind of person who you could call and say, ‘Hey Audrey, can I come over?’ And she’d say ‘Yeah,’ and you could come over, and she’d sit and have coffee with you and talk for hours. She was always there.”

Neighborhood coffee klatches. Half a dozen women all crowding around the breakfast counter, all dangling cigarettes from their fingers or lips, cups of coffee nearby, powdered doughnuts on a plate. Who knows what they were talking about, but I remember our house was filled with my mother’s women friends. She loved her neighborhood girlfriends.

“She loved you kids,” another friend says. “She loved you kids tremendously. Not one of you kids was ever neglected for a minute. You kids were everything to her.”

Love. I have no memory of love, but I have an image of it in a photograph of my mother crouching down next to me. The ground is a carpet of autumn leaves. I am 1 year old, and she has her arm draped around my shoulder and it looks as if she is whispering reassuring words into my ear. It looks like a gesture of love. But I can only imagine the stories behind the images. I can only imagine how differently my life might have turned out had she been here.

So in place of the memories I don’t have, there are the ones her closest friends recount. This montage gives me solace, a kind of peace I can only define as a compromise of the heart. It’s a salve for the ache that will always recur unexpectedly.

I have given up trying to understand what was going on in my mother’s head in the days before her death, knowing that is impossible. Now I recognize my need to let her live in my memory, to take out her photographs on Mother’s Day and to recognize myself in her. My sister warns that I will experience a biting sadness when I have a baby.

About 10 years ago, my sister asked me if I would go back to Ohio with her to visit our mother’s grave, and to see our grandmother. I told her I thought it was pointless. That a gravestone was not our mother. I said the gesture was an empty symbol and that I didn’t want to go.

Just after our mother was buried, our grandmother had told my sister and I that the demands of motherhood had driven her to her death and that Audrey had visited her, telling her and our grandfather what it was like being dead. We never saw our grandmother again.

Life is all about second chances. Our grandmother died last year, and I contacted my cousin, who said: “Gram saved everything.”

My siblings and I are all taking the trip back. We will hear Audrey’s voice in the piles of letters she wrote my grandmother, gather her personal belongings sent back after her death and look at photographs of her taken throughout her life--images we have never seen. We will go to her grave and leave her the sterling silver roses she favored. It is just one path through the pain.