Echo

• DateMay 11, 2014
• AuthorMary Heather
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Every Mother’s Day, after I’ve eaten the girls’ homemade scones and opened their cards with certificates for extra love and quiet writing time, after I’ve expressed my love and admiration to my own mother and mother-in-law, and when I’m alone for just a minute, I think of another mother — a mother who is not my own, but who surfaces in my mind every year on this day.

Eleven years ago, I celebrated Mother’s Day as an expectant mother — just far enough along to have publicly shared the news.  I was an elated mother-to-be, a pregnant woman without morning sickness, for whom springtime took on hues more vibrant than usual.

For me, those first few months were a distilled, almost cliché kind of happiness — my pregnancy a postponed and then achieved-as-planned goal that I now see as blind beginner’s luck — and Gavin and I were in a good place to add parenthood to our life skills.  We were so focused on the intense hazing of parenthood in its early stages, that I don’t think the magnitude of its lifelong commitment, or the emotional holdfast that binds you to your children long after they leave had even occurred to us.

But a few days after that Mother’s Day, as I glowed with the secret feeling of being maternal in disguise, we got a call from one of our closest college friends.  Another friend — one of our core group back in the day — had died suddenly from complications of diabetes.  He’d been found in his apartment by a colleague, after his mother — worried that her son hadn’t called her on Mother’s Day — had asked someone to check in on him.  He had never forgotten to call on Mother’s Day.

The news sent me and my husband reeling, but for me it cut even deeper than the surreal emotions surrounding a funeral/college reunion, or the fact that the drive down there was like a scene from The Big Chill.  In the funeral home, I sat in my folded chair, rubbing the beginnings of a baby bump while I watched our friend’s mother greet callers with red eyes and wadded tissues in her hands.  Every few minutes she placed her hands of the backs of her other grown sons, who stood next to her, and who looked so much like my dead friend it was like being able to see an echo.

That was the first time I realized the magnitude of what I was taking on — that there were no guarantees that everything would turn out okay, even after you’d successfully raised your child and ushered him through school and college, graduation and beyond.  It was the first time I realized that the duties of a mother could include something like this.

Most women who choose to be mothers learn and faithfully uphold the pact of parenthood — which is to guide your child to all manner of milestones, and help them navigate the obstacles along the way.  It’s hard work — we know this — but whatever pain we encounter is usually justified by the reward.  Nobody tells you about the fine print.  Nobody tells you how quickly and how easily your reward can be whisked away.

I don’t know what I said to our friend’s mother in the vacancy of that moment.  I’m sure I said that we loved her son and that I was sorry for her loss — words that seem empty without the specificity of what I meant.  —Which is that I would never forget her son because he was part of the story of my future.  He was the one friend who let Gavin borrow his car to take me out on our first real date, even though he never lent his car to anyone.  He was that kind of person: a good, generous person, especially when it mattered.  He was the type of person who never forgot to call his mom on Mother’s Day.

I’m thinking about her today.  As I sit with my own family, enjoying the flowers and the homemade cards and the excitement of two little girls proudly expressing their thanks, I’m thinking about all the mothers along the way who had a role in this.  And hoping they realize that no matter what happens in the end, their love has made a difference and has a way of echoing back.

Photo credit: Kristi Eckberg Photography

About Mary Heather

I am an East-coaster and a West-coaster. I am an academic and a creative spirit. I am an environmental scientist who always wanted to write, and a writer with a nagging nostalgia for the complexities of environmental science. Above all, I am a mother — so whether I’m writing about the natural world, family, or place, I like to consider my work as environmental advocacy in the broadest sense.