The Sadness
I made this plaque for my mom in 1977. It wasn’t a birthday or Christmas present. I made it because she seemed sad. Like someone had hollowed my mother out of her body, and filled the space with grief. I wanted to make her feel better. I wanted to comfort her somehow. This was the only way I knew. Words and woodworking. Go figure.
I was 13. She was 58— a year younger than I am now.
I didn’t understand exactly why she was sad, but I felt it coming off her the way the sun warps off steaming two lane after a summer monsoon. At age 13, I wasn’t thinking about her sisters Alice and Jane, who’d both died the year before. We didn’t talk about it when it happened. I don’t even remember being told directly that my aunts had died. I didn’t know them really. Met them only a few times when I was little. She didn’t go back east for either sister’s funeral, if there was one. That loss was not a spoken presence in our house. But it lived there.
I only saw her grieve them out loud once. She and I were alone. We’d just left the grocery store— she got in the car and buckled her seat belt. On the road behind us, as an ambulance siren wailed. I looked over at her and her head was down. Tears splashed against the bottom of the steering wheel.
My stomach rose up to my throat. I felt something like a 13 year old’s devastation. Why are you crying Mom? I could barely croak out the question.
She didn’t answer right away. She just wept into her hands, her shoulders heaving silently. Then she reached into her purse for a kleenex and said, “It’s nothing, honey. I’m fine. I just miss my sisters.”
Just writing that sentence now goes through me like a poison arrow. The thought of losing 2 of my sisters in the same year does not feel survivable.
We drove home and didn’t say any more about it. I was a kid. I didn’t understand the depth of her grief. I was upset that she was upset, not because I understood what she was going through.
I think about it now from 59, and I can’t imagine how lonely it must have been— carrying all that love and sorrow like a heap of scrap metal inside her. Not talking about it. She had to fix her face and soldier on. How clear her sadness is to me now.
Now, I wonder how much old grief was coming back to life inside her that day. For her sweet brother Paul, who died of meningitis when he was 11, and she was 5. She told me once much later that he was her best friend. She said he was a light and a joy, and that after he died, no one talked about him anymore.
When he died, it left a hole in me, she said.
Now, I wonder if that hole inside her opened up like a hellmouth— right there in her chest, in a car, in front of a Safeway and her 13 year old kid. Maybe in its spinning vortex she could see her dead parents, and her older brother Clement, who she never knew well. He was out of the house and in seminary by the time she came along. Clement had a brain tumor. They operated on him and it was successful. But he fell getting out of bed in the night, and hit his head. He bled to death before the nurses found him the next morning. He was 31.
When Clement died, it left a hole in my mother, she once said.
That’s how she felt to me at 13— like someone left a hole in my mother.
The Plaque
I’d gotten the wood burning set for my birthday. Found the scrap of wood in my dad’s tool shed. Heisted a brush and a small can of shellac, too. I snuck it all out when he was playing golf, but no good deed went undetected or unpunished under his roof, let me tell ya. A few days later, he bitched at me for ruining the brush. When he found it, it was suspended in amber, and stuck like a trophy to the top of the shellac can— right where I’d left it.
I got zero merit badges for having used it to do something nice for my mother, his sad wife. Instead I got scolded for ’not putting things back like I found them,’ and a stern admonishment to ‘not touch his tools’. (My payback would come years later when he lost most of his eyesight. I flew out and built him a railing so he could feel his way across the yard without falling. Brought my own tools. Told him not to touch ‘em. He laughed. We’re Irish. Sarcasm is our love language.)
Anyway, I worked really hard to make that plaque perfect for her. I missed a word or two here and there, but I didn’t screw it up too bad. I don’t remember how I found the poem. No Instagram memes in 1977. Maybe I saw it in one of her Readers Digest magazines, I don’t know. This was pre-poet Kate— it didn’t occur to me to write my own. But even at 13, I sensed the power of words to touch and to heal. Poet me was in there. She just needed some time to leech her own words from her marrow.
I remember going slow with the wood burning pen, making sure I didn’t misspell anything. I don’t remember much beyond that. I don’t remember giving it to her. I don’t remember how she reacted. The feelings that override everything are her palpable sadness, and my deep need to comfort her.
Which in turn, would comfort me— a kid whose mother’s sadness had left a hole in her.
~
Perspective
I don’t know for sure why she was sad, but she was sad a lot. Maybe for all the reasons I wrote above, which are reason enough. But for as long as I can remember, I sensed a tempest in her — an unlived, unspoken life. One that got swallowed up by a marriage to a man who was hard hard hard to love. Followed by nine children who always needed something or other from her— love, undivided attention, emotional protection from their father, their back scratched, their wounds bandaged, their diapers changed, laundry done, and meals cooked. All of this— x’s 9.
From my 59 year old perspective, a quiet corner to fold her hands and sit wasn’t gonna cut it. She needed a good therapist, several girls-only weekends in the mountains, a long, long yoga retreat. Possibly a divorce.
From my 59 year old perspective, her sorrow makes perfect sense.
On the Back
She kept the plaque ‘til she died. I took it back 31 years ago, the day we were going through all her things. I found cards and letters I’d sent her. And I found the plaque.
It felt like being kicked in the solar plexus, taking it back. I was irrationally hurt and pissed she didn’t take it with her. Crazy, I know. It was just that I didn’t want the stuff I’d given her back. I wanted her back. I wanted her to keep the love I’d given her forever, and this taking back didn’t feel like that. It felt like some weird betrayal.
Now, I’m glad I have it.
I took it off the bookcase shelf in my living room this morning, and noticed the yellow felt on the back was starting to pull away. I don’t recall putting felt on the back, but how else would it have gotten there. I picked at the spot that was peeling, and could see I’d burned some words on the back, too. Don’t recall doing that either.
I got some tools (from my own shed, Dad) and started scraping away the old yellow felt and adhesive with a putty knife. It took me about 30 minutes to strip it bare. Underneath, there was a note to my mom:
I LOVE YOU MOM
KATY
‘77
~
Seeing Clearly
Today is her birthday. My most favorite Libra ever. I’ve gotten older, and she’s remained 73. I see her world now like I’m looking through a microscope. I see the sharp detail in the bumpy terrain, and I’m continually stunned by the similarities in my own emotional landscape — a life so different from hers, and yet not.
I see the heavy footprints she left from all she was asked to carry alone in this life.
I see the love she gave and made and left. It is a blazing star in my sky— this woman I called mother, who died too long ago. Thank god her light still reaches my naked eye, when I remember to look up to find it.
I see a woman who for 26 earth years, I loved more than anything in my life.
And I see the way my love for her has fossilized against the stone of her death— a geology of how I’ve been loving her ever since. Quietly and with my hands folded over the hole her absence left in me.
Happy birthday, Mom. I miss you.
Are you very weary? Rest a little bit.
In some quiet corner, fold your hands and sit.
Do not let the trials that have grieved you all the day
Haunt this quiet corner; drive them all away!
Let your heart grow empty of every thought unkind
That peace may hover round you, and joy may fill your mind.
Count up all your blessings, I'm sure they are not few,
That the dear Lord daily just bestows on you.
Soon you'll feel so rested, glad you stopped a bit,
In this quiet corner, to fold your hands and sit.
Anonymous
Dammit Kate. I’m sobbing in seat 19C and there’s not a thing I can do about it. This was gutting and beautiful and totally did me in. The thought of you trying to comfort your mom. And also, I know what it’s like to be a mom with teenage kids and the struggle it is to keep it together when you’re grieving. You captured everything so beautifully, but most of all the love. Happy Birthday to your mom. She made an incredible daughter. Love you.
Thank you for sharing your moving story. It was a privilege to read about your dear mum. She treasured the plaque you made her.