Mother’s Day

I miss my mother. She died when I was twenty-one in the middle of my two year tour of active duty in the US Naval Reserve. I was in Charleston when I got the call the morning after she passed. I’m not sure I ever got over it although I wouldn’t know how to tell. I left the base for most of thirty days, and when I came back I picked up where I left off.

There was no grief counseling. Of course, the Tet Offensive was still big news and I guess at a time when mother’s were losing their sons it felt merely logical that a son should lose his mother because that was normal in the course of human events. Still, it might have been nice to have someone ask how I was doing and give me a heads up on what I might expect.

Now I’m in a situation where my three children have lost their mother. Of course, it wasn’t a sudden death, and they had time to say goodbye. But it was their mother and now she’s gone. It’s especially poignant today when my daughter is mother to a new born, and I know she’s crying to talk to her mother about it, and this is when a girl could really use her mother. But all she has is me, her mother’s sister, and all the ya-ya’s. We’re filling in as best we can , but I know there’s a little hole in her heart that she’d love to have her mother fill.