In My Cups

Dearest Mother,

I can call you that now. I suppose you always were "dearest" of my mothers, since you were the only one. But what I mean is, you're gone now and memories soften around the edges and fire burns out and anger fades...now I can make you part real and part what I want you to be. As someone with whom I correspond and share secrets—ah, now that was part of our real relationship, too!—I am free to write out whatever I want to you. The difference is that you won't refute or criticize or wave away. You are a vessel and I am the burbling water that pours into it, free of fear.

I'm drinking a glass of sherry and it's an autumn night and I remember that you always snarked at my taste for that brew. You said it was only for "little old ladies." I suspect, by your generational ruler, that when you said it my current age would put me in that category! So, mother, I am a little old lady now and I drink sherry.

But I have very different associations with that apertif, have had for years. Here are some of them:

• making a trifle and soaking lady fingers or pound cake in sherry in any of my various temporary kitchens. Always delicious!!
• laughing, chattering, and numb in the face with a group of my favorite officer's wives in Cornwall, drenched in sherry in the middle of the day. Lord, it was hard to sober up and cook dinner for Rick at night! Tea parties, they called them, but more sherry than tea.
• elegantly dressed and sitting at a long, gleaming table in the Officer's Wardroom on a Ladies Night, sipping sherry—or port or madeira—with a group of uniformed fly boys and their ladies, and my husband.
• wine tasting in the Napa Valley and getting tipsy on various kinds of apertifs, including sherry.
• admiring the luscious nutty color and smooth flavor of it on my tongue—just about any time.
• Reading novels—usually Irish or English—where people of refinement sip sherry. Since I have a taste for period pieces and UK locales, I've drunk a lot of literary sherry.

It's only a small step from sherry to malt whiskey, the taste is different but the color can be similar, and the face numbing qualities even more pronounced. You and I shared an affinity for that liquor; I let mine drop off in favor of wine but you never did. I can't remember the last time I had a whiskey, but I will always think of you when I see Glen Fiddich.

No, I take it back, I do remember: we toasted to you post mortem with your preferred drink. It seemed fitting.

There are pinpricks of light and love that stream through our clouded relationship, mom. These are some of them and they're enough to make me wish you back, stronger and younger than you were at the end. Maybe being an old sherry drinking lady at this point, I could stave off your bullying and demand the good bits prevail. Maybe not. But I wish I could try. You did love me. And I would be a liar if I didn't say that I loved you, too. Perhaps too much. Perhaps that was the trouble. Love and need are as smoothly integrated as wine, and I couldn't tell them apart most of the time.

Here's a sherry to you, mother. Hope there's whiskey where you are. Now that would be a place I wouldn't mind going to.

Mom, Are You There?

I don't believe any of us have the answer to the great question of Death. Lots of theories, beliefs, opinions—but regardless, no concrete facts. Alluring evidence from children in Third World countries who remember former lives and navigate to their old homes and spouses. A Dalai Lama that is reborn over and over for centuries. Believe what you want, I say. As long as you don't harm anyone as a result of that belief. Because we'll all find out in the end. Or not, of course.

I was such a great believer in my mother's philosophy of soul and lives and afterlife, for many years I lived in secure comfort that something substantial would happen after I die. And, despite Houdini's failure to contact anyone, that my mother would make herself felt from The Other Side. I mean, I've experienced some things that make no sense unless you believe in a psychic connectivity.

After mom died, I inherited some of her Japanese wood blocks and prints. I already had some of my own. Since I moved into a smaller, shared, home, they have been hung where I can see them any time, practically at a glance. The experience is more concentrated than it was in a larger place where they were spread out among many rooms.

The antique print, White Rain at Shono, hangs next to the sink in my bathroom, where I can enjoy it several times a day. I never tire of its delicacy and humanity, as straw-coated figures dash up/down a hill through the slanted rain, the lowering sky behind them. It gives me pleasure—and it brings my mother closer to me.

It has a sister print with snow and a Shinto gate, and I trade these out in the cold weather so I can enjoy the winter scene as I do the rainy one in Spring and Summer.

Then there's the pink nightgown, with its tiny polka dots. I bought it and wore it, then—for some reason—my mother needed/liked it, and I gave it to her. She wore it for a few years. Then, when she died, I took it back and I've worn it for some more years. It is shapeless, baggy, and unattractive. But it has always been the most comfortable nightshirt I've worn, not possessing even a hint of trim or a single button to annoy you when turning over in bed.

And when I see myself in it, I think of you, mom. It's a physical garment that we shared and it's acquired value as a result. I will be very sad when I finally pitch it.

There are, of course, many things that she gave me, too. Some still bear the uncomfortable shadow of her gift-giving dysfunctionality; but since she is gone, most of them have mellowed into gifts that mean she thought of me, that she tried to buy things she knew I would like, that she loved me. And like a hundred tiny voices, all these objects cry out to me as I encounter them every day. The anger, the struggle for power, the need for space—these have all sluiced away with Time's passing. I am left with the reminders of love instead, like shining shells left behind by the ocean's tide. Treasures of the heart.

I haven't seen your spirit, Mom, or gotten "a psychic headache" (that tight band around my head), or had the hairs on my neck stand up. I have, I swear, heard you call my name out loud—just as I did when you were alive, sometimes. This last happened in Aunt Vivian's house on a hot Fourth of July weekend. But I couldn't be sure if it was inside or outside of my head, or just a misperception of some random sound in the other room.

What I do know is that I am surrounded by you in many ways, and I catch those glimpses all the time, and I feel them with love instead of anxiety. Because of that, you ARE here.

And I'm glad of it.