On the way home from my mother’s funeral, I bought earrings.
She would have raised an eyebrow of disapproval for sure, but an hour out of my Massachusetts hometown, after sharing consolation with relatives, extended family, and familiar faces aged beyond reason, I was heading north on I 95 to an outlet jewelry store just across the Maine border.
I felt tired and depleted, but oddly satisfied that the final task was done. Months in a nursing home, years taking care of her near my home, perhaps even a lifetime of trying to please my mother had finally come to an end.
The sounds of the funeral were still playing in my head.
My first thought was how it had gone wrong. I’d told the funeral director, a much-older cousin, my mother’s request that Gounod’s Ave Maria be sung at the funeral. “Gounod, not Schubert,” I emphasized repeatedly, worried he would not know the difference. “I know, I know, it’s all been arranged” he dismissed me, clearly annoyed that I was doubting him. A single measure into the accompaniment I knew it was Schubert’s version. I stifled the impulse to stand and yell “Stop!,” and sat rigid in my pew, listening to this, my final failure.
The one thing she asked for…the one thing…I was still muttering to myself as the funeral Mass ended. But anger would only shame his good intentions, and I knew I would not complain. Disappointments were to be carried, not confronted. Held close, clothed in forgiveness, but never let go. Don’t say a word I heard her whisper as we rose to leave the church. I breathed deeply. It got easier when I heard the organ strains of Gentle Mother, his surprise to me, as we exited the church. Teach us wisdom, Teach us Love. It was the only time I cried that day.
Jewelry holds meaning for me. It marks moments and relationships better than words or photos ever could. I reached up from the steering wheel to touch the tiny garnet earrings and pendant my sister gave me just before she died two years before.
Ok Martha, take me there. Help me find something that says it well.
Martha would have understood. We wore it differently, my sister and I, but we both knew the struggle, the feeling that there was more than one generation between us and our mother. She looked at us with fear as much as admiration, confusion as much as envy. Both of us wanted lives she never dared to want, and could not understand wanting. Women’s role, women’s opportunity, women’s responsibility had all been clear to her until her daughters said “No thank you” to the life she cherished, the one she imagined we would ultimately seek.
A college education was essential. It was a privilege her own family could not afford to give her, and she was determined her daughters would have, even after my father’s unexpected death at 53, when Martha was only 15. But once we’d both completed that, our priorities diverged. Political causes drew Martha, 70’s marches and protests that terrified my mother. Graduate study was my goal. But when Columbia rejected my doctoral application because I was “21 and a single woman who might waste our investment” if I found the right man and dropped out to follow him, she soothed me with “ I know you’re disappointed, dear, but they do have a point.”
The chasm grew as it became clear Martha and I were not just setting temporary goals, something to do until we’d found husband and family. When I finally got that doctoral acceptance, I was pregnant with my first child. I called to share the good news, and she said, “Oh how lovely, dear. Too bad you can’t go.”
Almost every summer for the next 30 years, she asked hopefully if I was planning not to work, now that the kids were in school, or my husband was a partner in his law firm, or some other marker had been passed. That I chose to work was an enigma, that I did it for more than financial reasons translated into feelings of rejection or disappointment, though I was never quite sure on whose side that would blossom: Her wish that I want what had been so fulfilling to her; my disappointment that what made me happy was so hard for her to comprehend.
We breathed into that difference with great respect. She was a happy full time mother of three children, and I was blessed to be one of them. She was artistic, creative and an only-child extrovert who loved making my father’s huge extended family her centerpiece. She entertained, played piano by ear, and made our house a showplace of family warmth. I was the slightly introverted child who sat on the staircase, looking down and enjoying it all. Every single pull toward kindness and compassion that exists inside me, I hear in her voice.
My father’s untimely death drew a hard line across her life story: an end to the perfect part; a reluctant adaptation to the rest. Nothing and no one would ever replace what she had lost. Suggesting otherwise risked triggering an anger that terrified me.
As she aged, she rarely demanded my time, but clearly wished I wanted to offer it, to travel with her, to replace the companionship she so missed. She respected the time I gave my own children, but after that, the unspoken question was clear: If I could be free, why didn’t I want to? How could work be more appealing than time with friends and family?
Resigned acceptance was no cover for the unchosen feeling I saw in her expression. We negotiated, we compromised. I’d take time off to take her to the doctor, but not to the hairdresser. We’d have a two- hour lunch and her parting words would be, “ There’s something I’d like to talk about, when you are free.” “Ok”, I’d say, gritting my teeth, “I’ll call you later.” Every fall we went for a foliage weekend up in ski country. Just the two of us. It came closest to the undivided attention that seemed to soothe her soul.
We made peace with what would never change between us. The one thing we didn’t do well was talk about how we felt. Wanting someone to want differently is a cruel kind of loving.
All of this coursed through my mind as I pulled into the parking lot in Kittery.
The jewelry I needed that day was not simply beautiful, or evocative of loss, but something that captured the ambivalence and honored the confusion we’d lived with our whole lives. I wanted a symbol of the effort we put into trying to understand one another. Even more, I wanted an acknowledgment that this was our way of loving.
I roamed the store slowly, ignoring the clerk’s question, “Can I help? What are you looking for?” then finally saying, “I’m not sure, thank you, but I’ll know if I see it.” He backed off, unsure how to respond.
Then I saw the earrings. Simple round circles, about the size of a dime. They had depth, like a tiny tennis ball cut in half. These were bigger studs than I usually wear, but had a secure clip- back in addition to the post, and I smiled, remembering that my mother did not get her ears pierced until her sixties, and still liked the security of her clips. These I would never lose.
They were 14 karat gold: one half yellow, one half white, but the line was impossible to see running down the middle of the ball. I kept moving them around under the lights, trying to understand the magic. A brushing of tiny scratches covered the surface, along with slight indentations you had to feel with a finger. These gentle wounds caught the light, softened and obscured the distinction, so that the eye moved from white gold to yellow, silver to gold , with no break at all, just a gentle shift in tone that made them one.
There’s a special kind of love that reaches across a gap that cannot be bridged. That loves alongside hurt and disappointment and failure to understand. That keeps reaching out, and cherishes moments of understanding. That never stops building the bridge.
The last week of her life I lived at the nursing home at the staff’s request. They could not soothe her when she woke at 3 am and I was not there. She clawed at the darkness, screaming my name. So I stayed, and when she woke I sang to her, and told her stories, and listened to her requests about “two more things I want to do before I die.”
Two moments gave me comfort. Her roommate, accepting my offer of a wheelchair push to therapy, said quietly as soon as we left the room, “Your mother makes it very hard for you.” Later my mother’s offhand words, said in response to nothing, “Never mind, you are a good daughter.”
Two simple truths, never absolved, never resolved.
I’ve worn those earrings now for 20 years. Most days they’re the first ones I reach for, knowing they’ll match whatever other jewelry I choose. Silver and gold, blended and separate.
Wounded and whole.
Thank you for this ♥️
Thank you for your beautiful writing about the loss of your mother and relationship with her throughout your life. Your prose is magnificent, filled with thought-provoking gems. I can’t wait to read the next writing you share.