The Sparkly Handprint
Mother’s Day…My sweet mom, Patty, is no longer on this earthly plane, but I see her everywhere. She molded me into the woman I am. Looking back at my mom’s fingerprints on my life, her vibrant, vital influence endures…even if the recollections snag me a little some days.
*
I’ll begin in 2024, when the eclipse’s path of totality went through Cleveland. Millions watched the eclipse in awe. But the slight dimness that shadowed New York City left me quiet, feeling too tender. After my husband went to bed, I sat in the living room and cried.
*
A year earlier, in 2023, almost to the day, we’d left Cleveland for the final time, did one last 500-mile drive back to New York. We had just sold the house that we’d bought so I could take care of my sweet mom who’d been battling cancer like a gladiator. This beautiful home we were fortunate to get was only three miles from my mom’s house (my childhood home), and 1.5 miles from The Cleveland Clinic where she got treatment. Instead of driving back and forth from New York regularly, my husband, our pup, and I relocated to Cleveland. I figured we’d have years there with my mom.
It’s amazing what your brain will let you believe.
*
It’s taken time to be able to write about my mom. Maybe because she battled a greedy disease for so long that I feared if I wrote about her, actually committed anything to paper, she would falter in that life-or-death fight. It made no sense. These things rarely do.
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My mom loved playing in dirt, yardwork of any kind. Seven months before she fell into her final sleep, we were weeding a narrow bed near the back of the garage at our house. It was one of those rare early spring days in Northeast Ohio, the kind that tricks you into thinking warmer weather is here when actually, it’s a tease before one last snow squall dumps eight inches on you overnight. But that morning we worked in the yard…it was gorgeous, the sun, bright and optimistic, warmed the crowns of our heads. A freshness hung in the breeze, like a new season was right behind it. We worked our hand trowels into the ground to loosen up what had been packed down over winter. The dirt’s loamy scent wafted up with each shovelful. My mom steadied herself on the house and left a handprint on the pristine white of the painted siding. Her gloved hand, a partial print in soil. Partial, because she only steadied herself for a moment. There was so much more to do. Time was nipping at her heels.
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In the summers of the 1980s, my mom routinely hung out a second-story window to swat down basketball-sized hornet’s nests herself. I can do this, she’d mutter, walking upstairs, pulling a sweatshirt over her head so her arms would be protected.
Come winter, massive icicles shellacked the edges of the roof, weighed down the gutters. They bent the wood and connective joints underneath to their icy will, allowing the elements to muscle their way in and blossom into ceiling leaks. My mom swung at the icicles like a minor league baseball player until they were nubs lacking any muscle at all.
In the spring and summer, my mom did every bit of the yardwork herself. Lawn mowing, trimming of bushes, planting of daffodils and geraniums, digging of weeds, spreading of mulch, edging of beds. She was at perpetual war with squirrels—every squirrel—because they stole birdseed from her feeders. She hated to cook but made hummingbird food with clockwork regularity. Her yard was but another room in her house. Did the animals know they had a human mother looking after them? I think they did. It’s little wonder a groundhog made a home for herself under the front steps and had a baby. My mom fed them both.
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Years before the urgency of my mom’s care prompted us to move to Cleveland, she and I spent an afternoon working in her backyard. It was late fall. The vibrant color had seeped from the leaves, turning them brown and brittle. A sweet vegetal decay hung in the air the way it did that time of year. My pup roamed nearby, sniffing all the woodsy delights he never caught wind of in the city. All summer long we’d dumped grass cuttings into the compost area, along with weeds pulled from flower beds, vegetable peels, and fruit that had gone soft and brown too quickly. I watered the compost bed during those hot steamy days, urging the mass to deteriorate, for the magic to happen. That fall day, my mom and I turned over the compost with pitchforks. We dug through the fluffy weed layer on top that hadn’t decomposed much to the muckier layer beneath. We forked even lower and finally got to the deep, dark black of fresh, inky soil. My mom, giddy, grabbed a spade and levered up a shovelful, beaming with pride. Anyone can make a standing rib roast, she said. I can make dirt.
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My sister and I played with dolls and trucks when we were little because my mom firmly believed girls should play with both. We weren’t allowed to watch Three’s Company—Mom didn’t like the example set by the ditzy blonde character. She believed girls should play sports, not cheer for boys on the field or the court. My sister—second child, headstrong—was a cheerleader. As the elder sister—and, it should be said, not popular in the least—I played sports. Not well, but I played them.
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My mom gave my sister and me a love of books, of words, of nature and birds, a love of the park near our house, a love of puzzles, and snow. She instilled in us curiosity and set a moral example. She showed us what character, dignity, and hard work looked like and how important both were to a life of integrity. At the end of her life, she gave a master class in grace.
*
Despite the disappointments my mom lived with, for there were many, and the disease that ravaged her, she always turned toward the happy. It’s easy to say you should do that. It’s quite another thing to actually do it. To bear witness to such. My mom savored every day, sucked the marrow right out of it from morning until night, and then the next day, delighted in doing it all again.
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At our house, my mom always sat in a comfy chair near a bay window to watch the birds at the feeders we’d put up together. Two full hydrangea bushes bloomed pink and purple pompoms below the feeders. We spent so much time there in the last months and weeks of her life enjoying the birds, watching the bossy goldfinches, the impish chickadees, the little downy woodpeckers that would dart in for a bite. We’d marvel at how calm and nonplussed the cardinals were by everything, and how bullying blue jays could be. When I’d bring her home from treatment or an extended hospital stay, this was where my mom wanted to be: in her seat by the hydrangeas and bird feeders.
*
More than a month after my mom passed, well after the first snow when all of nature was a slumber and cold had descended upon Cleveland, a single white pompom bloom blossomed on that hydrangea where my mom used to sit.
*
For the next year and a half, I wrestled with grief. I slobbered with it. I cocooned into myself as grief digested me, sucked the air from my lungs, wrenched my innards into a soupy mess under my skin. None of this was of me, of the woman who was in charge of my sweet mother’s care and happiness, who was strong and capable and above all else, unflinching in the face of hardship. It certainly was not of my mom, who didn’t devolve into a tear-stained mess on the bathroom floor despite everything she faced in her life. This was foreign, this profound and devastating experience. Grief comes with a forceful churn, the kind you fear you’ll never pull out of. The centrifugal yank into watery depths will drown you. This is how you’re going down. This is how you’ll die, by never catching your breath from sobbing, lungs hitched so high in your chest cavity you choke. The sobbing is endless. It exhausts on a cellular level. And it comes to define in a way you never wanted to be defined.
*
After my mom was gone, I would sit in her chair and watch the birds, stare at the handprint she left on the house. Before we moved out, I photographed her handprint in every angle of morning light to capture the sunlit sparkle. In those final days, I lingered in the room she loved most, felt her there.
*
Our home was a sanctuary for my mom, for all of us, in her final seasons and especially her final days. The happy memories we made there, ones that are more precious than gold to me, the way it cradled us through the grief, the quiet where I swear, I felt my mom in her favorite room, on her favorite chair…it all carries so much weight. A profound serenity enveloped our home after my mom passed away. Abiding love and deep meaning had bricked themselves high, became indelible parts of its foundation. I cherished this tether to the last place I spent with my mom, to the memories we made there, to her cheeriness filling every room. But we couldn’t keep it.
*
On the last day, when we were locking up our home for the final time, my husband asked me if I wanted a moment by myself, to walk the rooms alone. He was being gracious, as understanding as possible. I told him if I had a moment to myself, I wouldn’t leave. I would squat in the empty living room, call the real estate agent and break our contract, summon the storage company to haul everything back and move it all in again as fast as possible. I would’ve stayed forever. Leaving Cleveland was difficult beyond measure. It was leaving my mom all over again, leaving my childhood with her, leaving my adulthood with her…it was surrendering that one last precious tether. Which is why after the eclipse in 2024 that swept Cleveland in its path of totality, I sat in our New York City apartment staring out at Second Avenue, crying. Crying like I never stopped. Like the wound hasn’t healed one bit. Bits of me falling all over the place. Pouring out. Flooding the room.
This is how it happens. This is how it sneaks up on you. The churn of grief, the one that pulls you low, keeps you beneath the surface long past the point you think is possible. Past the point you think is normal. This is history coming back to you again and again.
*
Did the eclipse loosen all those emotions? The ones I thought I was doing better with, not succumbing to as often…was it something celestial that cracked my blown-glass spine anew? Did the lunar and solar paths overlap and unearth something, like a trowel digging deep into soil that’s still cold and waiting to be turned over, chopped up, and mixed in with the rest of me? Was it my mom’s history being folded back into me? Or was it merely grief’s long tail whiplashing me out of the blue, leaving a fresh handprint? The handprints…they are everywhere.
*
That was two years ago. The days are much better of late…I’m able to summon a measure of grace, and I see the handprints all over my life in a different light, golden and shiny. They have a bit of sparkle. And it does give me comfort. But…it’s not every day.
I usually plant something in honor of my mom on Mother’s Day, but today…today landed in a way that tripped me up. So I took a walk through Central Park. The morning was cloudy and moody—my mom’s favorite kinds of days. It rained yesterday so the layers of green carried an ethereal feel. I walked on the path where we used to stroll, by the daffodils and the boulders she loved. The daffodils are gone now, their season has passed. But the giant rocks, as always, remain.
And as I walked, it hit me again, how grief can shift like quicksilver and carrying it suddenly feels more difficult. It all takes work. Some days are tougher than others. Time helps, people say, and it does. I’m reminded so often of the time this all takes.
But even on the days that snag me, I see my mom’s handprint everywhere.