DIED 2012
MY BOSS AT THE university is a woman about my age, a slender, ukulele-playing poet with curly blond hair, a woman who governs with an unusual combination of whimsy and steel. When we met ten years ago, we both still had mothers walking the earth, and when she told me her mother had lung cancer, my mother was four years gone the same way. She had hesitated to tell me and she was right: I burst into tears. Not because our mothers were so alike, but because they were our mothers, and they were gone. Gradually, then suddenly, then completely.
A few years after her mother’s death, my boss came out of her office to receive a young woman who had an appointment to discuss our program. Then stopped in her tracks. Her visitor looked as if she were already very disappointed about something, and the little girl she’d brought along seemed no happier. My boss continued straight down the hall to the ladies’ room to collect herself. When she looked in the wide mirror over the sinks, her mother was there. If you have lost a parent, you probably know: that physical sense of their presence, not as a separate entity or a ghost, but as a sort of layer under your own skin. In your facial muscles, or your shoulders, or your hands. Something you would never imagine in the anguished days of your early grief; such a comfort as time goes on.
My boss’s mother had worked all her life in the Baltimore schools, first teaching kindergarten and first grade and later, after earning a PhD in her spare time, as a champion of early childhood education. Before she was done, kindergarten—the true basis of social justice!—was mandatory in Baltimore. Another part of her job was to meet with various disgruntled people: parents, principals, teachers, all taken aback to see the lady with the big smile coming down the hall in her bright red suit, so happy to meet them and hear their concerns.
And so my boss left the bathroom that day, accompanied by her mother. They made a beeline for the visitors. What did she say to them? She doesn’t even know. Sometimes, you just have to let them take over.