Forty years ago tomorrow (how can it be 40 years!?), six weeks before her 63rd birthday, my mother died. She had been diagnosed with cancer a few years earlier.
This wasn't my first brush with death. My father had died 16 years before, and both sets of grandparents were long gone. Yet of all those losses, this was the one that affected me the most deeply. All these years later, it still is.
What follows is an abridged and edited version of the story I tell about that day in my Acts of Surrender memoir.
It’s March 22, 1984. I’m packing for another trip to Montreal to see my mother in the hospital when my sister calls. "You know," she says with disturbing prescience, "maybe it would be smart to pack your suit and anything else you might need for the funeral. Just to keep in Montreal. That way if anything happens on a weekend you’re here…" She leaves the sentence unfinished.
I fold the only suit I’ve ever owned into my suitcase. I’ll leave it in Montreal for the inevitable moment that I hope will never come.
The moment comes sooner than either of us could have expected.
Four days later, I step into my mother’s room at the Jewish General Hospital. She’s pale and drawn, her scalp visible through a delicate web of white. I’m shocked at how little of her seems to be left. How can this be the tough, tenacious woman who bore, raised and protected me? This wraith could be flattened by the early spring breeze fluttering outside her window.
The day passes. First, my uncles come and go, then my stepfather comes in. Finally, my sister arrives, anxious and tired, from work. Susan spends a few minutes in the room with Edith, then she and I take the elevator down to the hospital cafeteria for a quick dinner. Thirty minutes and a tepidly mediocre meal later, Susan and I step back onto Edith’s floor.
Something has changed.
My stepfather stands outside the room, pale and stooped. The corridor seems darker. The metaphysical concepts of energy and vibration are foreign to me, but the air itself seems different — at the same time both somber and peaceful. I know that someone must have told us that our mother died moments after we left for the cafeteria. And I know that Susan must have rushed into Edith’s room with me. But my only memory has me sitting in the same vigil chair I occupied all weekend, holding Edith’s still warm hand and sobbing.
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If my mother's soul had already vacated her body, I am certain now that it had not yet left the room. I didn’t believe in souls and spirits in those days, but in revisiting that scene as I write this, I know that the limp hand I held was somehow also holding mine, that the Esther she had once more become was waiting to be sure that Susan and I were all right before moving on. She had waited, too, to die — choosing her moment with the same care and precision she had applied to so much of her life. Edith could have died at any time. Instead, she waited until I was in Montreal and on that day, waited until she had seen her daughter. Then she waited until both her children had left the room, either so that we would be spared the trauma of seeing her die or she would be spared the trauma of leaving us.
My mother rarely pressured me to be or do anything other than what I chose to be or do. Yet as courageous as I had allowed myself to be while she was alive — to come out as a gay man, for example, or to quit a secure job for the risks of freelancing or to leave my hometown — all my choices and actions had been colored by how I thought she might respond and had been filtered through her world view.
With her gone, all her hopes, fears and expectations for me were gone too. Suddenly, without being conscious of it or of what it meant, I was free...even if it would take a few more years before I could begin to grow into that freedom, before I could let it unalterably transform me and my world.
Adapted from "Acts of Surrender: A Writer’s Memoir" © 2012, 2013, 2019 Mark David Gerson
Read more about both my journey and my mother's in Acts of Surrender: A Writer's Memoir
The Esther character in my novel Sara's Year is loosely based on my mother's story. Look for it, the other titles in my Sara Stories series and all my books on this website or in paperback or ebook from major online booksellers
We all have stories to tell. Ready to pen yours? You don't have to be a seasoned professional to get your stories onto the page. Pick up a copy of From Memory to Memoir: Writing the Stories of Your Life today and dive into your own memoir!
Photos: #1 - My mother on her second wedding day in the early 1970s. #2 - My parents in Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts, Quebec in 1941, likely shortly before or after they were married.
