Every Road Leads Back To You / For Good

Old friend, here we are, after all the years and tears and all that we’ve been through…

Somewhere inside, I had a feeling this day was coming. The Saturday right before the Fourth of July, I randomly said out loud that after years of no communication, I was going to soon hear from one of my siblings that our mother was either sick, in the hospital, on her death bed, or had died. Unbeknownst to me, two days later I would receive a text message from my brother-in-law saying Do you have some time to talk? Your mom came to Minneapolis to get some tests done at the Mayo Clinic. Things aren’t going so well.

From that moment on, life became a constant state of motion and emotion, and unfortunately, there has been no real opportunity to take a moment, breathe and check in with myself. I went from my mother being in the hospital to dying to her funeral and sitting Shiva (the week-long mourning period in Judaism for first-degree relatives) straight back to an understaffed office to prepare for the Jewish High Holy Days to working the actual High Holidays to the Jewish holiday of Sukkot to last week, which held both mine and her birthdays. Which brings us to now, the beginning of October.

I’m hoping that by writing out my feelings and sharing them with you today that I will be able to come to terms with everything that transpired over the last three months, as well as get the closure I deserved, but never had, while she was still alive. Please forgive me as I navigate this because I really don’t know what is and isn’t appropriate to share. But to give you a full picture, I need to take you back to that Monday evening in July when I received that initial text from my brother-in-law.

Shortly after a brief conversation where I made known how annoyed I was to be speaking with him about my mother and not one of my siblings, I found myself on a 4-way conference call with the family I hadn’t spoken to in 6/7 years. I came to learn that my mother had gone out to Minnesota to visit my sister after selling her house, and shortly after arriving, was admitted to the Mayo Clinic due to non-alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver and the onset of kidney failure. At the time, I was told that they still had no clue what contributed to her condition, but bottom line, without a liver transplant, my mom didn’t have a fighting chance.

I’m not going to lie: after years of no communication, family occasions I was deliberately left out of, and four children that I had no knowledge of, my initial reaction was why reach out to me now? What was it that they all wanted from me? I found myself having a déjà vu moment from when my father passed in 2009 and sitting at his funeral as the Rabbi proceeded to acknowledge my siblings as his three kids (he had four, with me being the oldest). And to make matters worse, having his family, who I had nothing to do with, cosign on it with me sitting there, but then telling me later that I had to pay for the funeral for the same man they didn’t want to admit was my father.

I made known that I had no intention of getting heavily involved without a conversation (or two) about how we got to where we were. As much as I articulated how important and needed that conversation was for me to move forward, I was told that the past was the past, which didn’t sit well with me.  So, if I remember correctly, I left the conversation agreeing to join a conference call the next day with our mother’s medical team and helping with any questions they had that my siblings were unable to answer. Being the oldest and at some point, the closest to her, the thinking was that I probably knew things about our mom that they didn’t.  Other than that, I wasn’t willing to promise anything more.

Without prompting, my husband, who had walked in from work and heard part of the call with my siblings, handed me a credit card and told me to buy myself a plane ticket and hotel room so that I could go and see my mother one last time and attempt to come to an understanding before she passed. It just so happened that I had finally taken some time off from work that week, so I was able to just pick up and go. I ended up booking a flight to Minnesota on the first day possible, which was that Wednesday morning, and planned to spend 24 hours there. As the saying goes: I will never regret (fill in the blank), but I will possibly regret NOT (fill in the blank).

I’m not even going to repeat what happened with my flights and the airports because I think I covered that in real-time on Facebook, but I will say that those 24 hours were very intense. When I finally got to the Mayo Clinic and saw my mother, she was still able to sit up, move about and speak. In fact, she was being transferred to another unit of the clinic which concentrated on kidneys because the doctors wanted to improve them with the intention of making her strong enough to be put on a donor list for a new liver.

Because of an ammonia build-up in her system that rendered her confused, my mother was not 100% lucid. At one point, while being transferred, she told the ambulance drivers that I was a boat driver who had lived in Minnesota for two years, that she was abdicating her throne, and asked me if the paparazzi were waiting outside for her. I also witnessed my 68-year-old mother urinate and soil herself, which NOBODY should ever see their parents do. I ended up leaving the room and breaking down into tears, and when I returned, they had given her something to help her sleep. Realizing that we were not going to have the opportunity to speak, I left for my hotel and headed home early the next morning. That would be the last time I were to see my mom.

The next three weeks I think were best described by me and my siblings as a “mental mind-fuck.” Nothing that the doctors tried worked and my mother’s entire body began to shut down. There were brief moments where they would see a sliver of improvement, and the doctors kept going back and forth regarding her prognosis and life expectancy. At one point, we even had Rabbis involved letting us know what our options were from a religious standpoint. My brothers went to Minnesota the week after I did, and my sister basically lived at the Mayo Clinic the entire time. With my sister in the room, and me and my brothers on speaker phone, my mother took her last breath the morning of July 28, 2021.

With the help of a man named Ed Weinstein, who we later found out was once married to our Great Grandmother’s sister, we were able to make my mother’s final wish of being buried next to her father a reality. Luckily for us, our mother also managed to put together a power of attorney while in a brief lucid state, and we were given access to her funds to cover any funeral expenses. Looking back at those three and a half weeks leading up to her death, I wholeheartedly believe that not a single stone was left unturned in trying to help our mom, and we did right by her in the end. I hope my siblings feel similarly, and none hold any regrets or guilt when it comes to our mother’s care.

I always knew my mother’s death would somehow find me in the very uncomfortable position of confronting my past and put me smack dab back within a community and people who rejected me most of my life.  I even joked that there should be a drinking game for every time I was called by my birth name, which, at that point, had been legally changed for nine years. But nothing prepared me for what was to come in the days following her passing, beginning with the funeral itself.

While we were playing the limbo game and her prognosis kept changing, I mentioned to my siblings that we should probably start thinking about who should speak at our mother’s funeral. In the name of full disclosure, I knew that day would be tough on them, and I figured that my baby brother, Hymie, and sister, Shari, would not be able to speak at all, leaving the daunting task of eulogizing our mother to either myself or my brother, Harrison. I mentioned in passing that I had started putting together some thoughts while our mom was still in the hospital, only to be told that it would be more appropriate for Harrison to speak because the eulogy was usually religious in tone. I honestly felt sucker punched in that moment, but I kept my mouth shut.

The truth was that writing had been the only passion of mine that my mother encouraged, so I felt that coming up with something to say about her would probably be one of the most important things I ever did. I spent hours upon hours writing and then rewriting what I planned to say, all in an impossible attempt to get it just perfect, and I knew that my mother was somewhere loving every minute I spent agonizing over what to say about her.

The night before the funeral, Harrison told us in a group chat that he had no intention of speaking, and I really believed that with a website and a few published pieces out there, I would be the natural next choice to speak. The following morning, I learned that my brother-in-law was going to eulogize my mother, which left me fuming. In my sibling’s defense, I never specifically said that I wanted to speak, so they assumed I didn’t want to.

I did speak to my brother Hymie that morning about how I was feeling, and he encouraged me to read my eulogy.  But still stuck in my feelings, I had no desire to do that anymore. Believing I wasn’t going to speak at the funeral and being the good guy that he is, Hymie asked me to send him a copy of what I had written with the intent of reading it aloud at the funeral on my behalf. When the time came to read my eulogy, it made no sense for him to speak for me while I was standing there, so I ended up stopping him and saying a few words to my siblings instead of reading the eulogy I had written. But knowing how he had my back really spoke volumes to how far we had come in the short period of time since reconnecting. As for what I had originally planned to say, there are portions of the eulogy sprinkled throughout this blog.

The funeral itself was extremely uncomfortable for me, and that was BEFORE the rabbis overlooked me when asking the immediate family to step up and say good-bye to our mother, and me opening my big mouth to say UMM HI, I’M HER SON TOO as I waved my arms in the air. For one thing, this was the first time since Hymie’s 2014 wedding that me and my siblings were all in the same place at the same time. On top of that, it was also the first time most of them were meeting my husband (Harrison met him briefly in Coney Island the week before our wedding). And if that wasn’t enough, we were also burying our mother less than a foot away from our grandfather, whom I have always considered the most important person ever in my life. It had been twenty years since his passing, but for religious reasons, I had never been allowed to visit his grave.

While my siblings and I watched from a distance as our mother was lowered into the ground, I decided that there was no way I wasn’t going to walk over the five feet to see my grandfather. So, after the funeral service ended and almost everyone had left, I did walk up to their graves and spoke to them for a little bit. I let them know that no two people had a greater impact on my life, that I did love my mom despite it all, and asked my grandfather to take care of her. Knowing how important this was for me, my siblings stayed behind to wait and make sure I was alright. I don’t think they will ever truly understand how much their waiting meant to me.

As surreal as the funeral experience was, the week of Shiva was next level for me, and I may or may not have lost my shit by the last full day. People would come over to me and ask if I remembered who they were or would tell me how they heard things like I had moved to Arizona, got married and had children, or better yet, died. There was one relative who kept saying that they were like a mom to us, and I ended up speaking to her about it. I understood that the intent behind her statement was solid, but I didn’t think the week we buried our mother was the most appropriate time to be articulating something like that. With all the eye-rolling I did that week, I’m surprised I didn’t walk away with some form of optical injury.

Of course, even after a death announcement that listed me as Sebastian was sent out and people were corrected, I was still called Jack multiple times. One woman, who I probably could not pick out of a line-up if my life depended on it, even had the nerve to argue with me about my name. After asking if my name was really Jack and being told that it was really Sebastian, she looked me straight in the face and said that she didn’t know Sebastian, so she refused to call me that. I also sat there and watched as people pointed at me while asking my siblings who I was and hearing my siblings either say Sebastian and then whisper Jack, or say that I was their brother, to be met with I didn’t know you had another brother.

But honestly, I would rather have dealt with all that nonsense over what happened on the first full day of Shiva. I wanted to reach out to some of our mother’s friends to let them know of her passing and asked Hymie for her cell phone. While I was looking, I noticed that I wasn’t in her contacts under either of my names, which I found odd. I then looked through her text messages because every year on my birthday, she would send me a text saying HBD and I would respond with TY, and I knew my mother usually kept every text of mine just in case she needed “receipts” during one of our arguments. I found text messages going back to 2015, but no text messages associated with my name or phone number. I then decided to look in her Facebook Messenger because I knew we spoke a month or two prior to my wedding about our family tree, and it ended with her wishing me luck on my upcoming marriage. But again, she had conversations going back years, but none with me. After doing a deep dive, I realized that apart from three Facebook pictures that my Aunt Della tagged us both in, there was not a trace of me in her phone. And if I’m going to be perfectly honest here, I’m pretty sure that the Facebook pictures were still there only because she couldn’t figure out how to un-tag me.

I really want to give it up to my siblings for trying to make me feel better about the situation by saying that my mother had problems with her phone and recently got a new one, but the fact that everyone else was there and she had messages going back to 2015 tells me that my exclusion was most likely intentional, and that my mother really wanted nothing to do with me in those last few years. I knew we had a complicated relationship, but I never thought it was THAT bad. I mean no matter what happened between us, she was always in my phone contacts (she still is now), and there were still pictures of her and my siblings throughout my social media platforms.

Let me tell you from experience that there is nothing worse than feeling like neither of your parents cared for you, and I already came to terms years earlier with the fact that my father hated me and wished I was never born. What made this different was that my dad told me to my face how he felt, and with my mother, I honestly had no clue that things were so bad between us that she felt the need to act as if I never existed.

A lot of the negative feelings I experienced growing up began to resurface, especially the ones of being a terrible son and brother. I also was taken back to that feeling of being unaccepted and seen as less than because I was Gay, which had always been a major point of contention between me and my family. And as hard as I tried not to dwell on what I learned, I just couldn’t help it. I found myself heading in a downward spiral as the Shiva week continued.

Towards the end of the Shiva week, I was finally able to get in contact with, and separately speak to, two of my mother’s closest friends, and I began to get a better understanding of my mother’s relationship with me. We reminisced about the time my mother wanted me to reserve a pew for her at (her favorite singer) Luther Vandross’ funeral, the Madonna concert where a man really thought she was my older sister, and my “surprise” 40th birthday party that one of my exes threw and she attended. We laughed about a scheme my mother came up with to get her out of money trouble (Protect A Mom), and about the time she came to a Gay club for my birthday and danced the night away with a bunch of half-naked men, not realizing until a picture of her ended up in a publication that they all believed she was a drag queen. I was reminded of how often she would steal my clothes when she lost a lot of weight, the giant Kipling bag that held all the bills she would have sent to a PO Box so that my dad never saw them, and the clothing store she had after her best friend, Michael, died due to complications from AIDS.

They kept talking about how close my mother and I once were, and as nice as it was to go down memory lane with them, I could not reconcile what they were telling me with what I had learned earlier that week. I told them about the phone and how I was feeling, and they both basically said that my mother’s issues with me was less about me being Gay, and had more to do with how an unaccepting community viewed her for having a Gay son. And because of a need to be accepted by them, she pushed me away. Both friends apparently had conversations with her over the years about it because they didn’t agree with her treatment of me, and because at the end of the day, the community still didn’t really accept her, so it never made any sense. What was more interesting to me was that these two friends were from different circles in her life, and pretty much told me the exact same thing.

As I sat and listened to them speak, I began to think about the Thanksgiving after I met my first boyfriend and asked my mother if a boyfriend of mine would be welcome in her home for a holiday, and her saying of course. And all the different times she spent with me and somebody I was seeing. I even thought about the one Thanksgiving night that me and my first husband slept at her place, along with my brother Harrison, his family and our other brother Hymie.

But then, I also flashed back to the time I was told that my first husband couldn’t come to the Bris of one of my nephews because I needed to understand the community, or when she told people at a function that I was adopting my then step-daughter but would leave out the part about me being married to her father, or the number of times she said to an ex of mine that this was the community we lived in. I even remembered the first time I made my hair blonde and my mother being worried because people were gonna talk, and asking her what she was so afraid they would say, because “people” were saying I was Gay since I was about 7 or 8.

So, if I really thought about it, what they were telling me seemed plausible. But it still didn’t explain the whole thing with her phone, and left me with unanswered questions.

In a separate talk with one of those friends, I asked about some of the things my mother had said or accused me of over the years. I brought up how she had told multiple people, including three of my exes, that I had a constant need to be the center of attention and never allowed anyone else to be in the spotlight, and how I ruined my brother, Harrison’s, June 2000 wedding by showing up with blonde hair, even though the photos from that day proved my hair was dark (her explanation for that was that my brother paid to have my hair retouched). I also mentioned when she told me that she would never accept Sebastian Kern, and told my siblings that I changed my name because I wanted nothing to do with them and to hurt her (although I still don’t understand how changing my last name to HER MAIDEN NAME would be considered hurtful). I even talked about how she told my Aunt Della ON MY WEDDING DAY that I was a terrible human being and a horrible son for not reaching out to her when she had her Thyroid removed (which I still have the texts from) and never telling my family I was getting married (although she liked the photos of my engagement ring on Facebook and wished me well on my upcoming wedding in a Facebook message). None of the accusations were true, so why the need to publicly vilify me?

Her friend believed it was all part of my mother’s concern of how others saw her, and by making me look like the bad son, brother and person, it validated her treatment of me, as opposed to having to say she wasn’t talking to me because of who I chose to spend my life with. She also thought my mother deleted me from her phone because if she had kept the texts and conversations between us, they would prove that what was being said about me wasn’t necessarily the truth. Unfortunately, these are both just theories, and without the ability to ask my mother directly, I will never really know the reasons why. The only thing that could be confirmed for me was that my hair was 100% NOT blonde at Harrison’s wedding.

After the week of Shiva ended, and my siblings and I took care of some loose ends like cleaning out her storage unit, it was time to return to everyday life. I was looking forward to the distraction of work and preparing for the upcoming High Holidays to keep my mind off things. Still reeling from all these new discoveries, unanswered questions, and thoughts that I had yet to completely process, I was in no frame of mind to talk about anything or for any kind of coddling. Contrary to what my mother believed, I truly detest when people make a fuss over me. I respectfully asked for some privacy, and promised to speak about everything if, and when, I was comfortable and ready. I will say that for the most part, people respected my wishes.

I quickly learned that grief was a funny thing to navigate for everyone, not just the person suffering the loss, and came to find that some people, including friends, coworkers, and even my husband at times, didn’t know what to say or how to act around me. I was already overly conscious of myself, only to have some people start to say something or ask a question and then stop themselves mid-sentence, creating this awkward tension between us. I cannot tell you how many times I wanted to just say something like Yes, I’ve been through something, but I’m not this fragile doll about to crack. You can speak to me.

I found that some people would show concern by asking how I was doing or feeling, and as soon as I would open my mouth to respond, they would quickly change the subject or just try to exit the conversation. Like I get I probably wasn’t the most fun person to be around during this time, but why bother engaging in a conversation with me if you aren’t really interested in hearing what I have to say? It doesn’t make me think that you care. It does the opposite quite frankly, and I honestly would respect you more had you just kept your mouth shut. I just don’t get it.

But I have to say that my overall two favorite things to have experienced during this time were the pity stares when I walk into a room, and the feeling that people were judging me. There would be moments when I would be smiling or laughing, and people would look at me as if they were thinking oh, how can he be joking at a time like this or what’s wrong with him, his mom just died. But at the same time, if I was keeping to myself or seemed sad, it became oh, he’s falling apart or maybe he should seek professional help.

I guess you would have to have gone through a similar situation to understand that grief is a one day at a time process, and that being at work or out and about is no more or less difficult than being at home or looking at old pictures and reminiscing. Anything and everything can be a trigger, from seeing a specific color or flower at the corner bodega to overhearing a conversation on the ferry. Even walking into a bagel store where a certain song is playing can change a mood. Grief is with you every single day, no matter what you happen to be doing at that very moment. There are going to be both good and bad days, and within those, both terrific and terrible moments. You just hope that things will get better with time, even if that feeling of loss never completely goes away.

For me, it became very important to be transparent with the fact that I wasn’t alright when people ask me how I was doing. I think that without having the down time to really deal with everything, a lot started festering within me, which ended up manifesting itself in the form of anxiety and panic attacks, a wanting to isolate, a very short temper and even shorter lack of patience. Normally, when my nerves are shot, I bite my lip or I laugh nervously, but in recent months, I have gotten into the habit of ripping at my cuticles until they bleed. I’m also pretty sure I have lashed out, snapped at and pushed people away. I know I’m doing it, but for reasons I cannot explain, I just can’t stop myself. I hope those that really know me get how unintentional it is and that they will be able to forgive me.

Speaking of forgiveness, I have to say that the one positive thing to come out of this awful situation has been speaking with my siblings again. As I mentioned earlier, I was apprehensive about having them back in my life without first having a conversation about how things got to the point of not speaking for all those years. Not so much to harp on the situation or put blame somewhere, but more so, to avoid just putting a Band-Aid over things until something similar happened again, leaving us right back at the point of not speaking.

I’m happy to say that we were able to start that dialogue while our mother was in the hospital, and I believe grievances were aired by all parties involved. In the example of that last Thanksgiving that I spent with them (which I wrote about in Justify My Love), while I walked out of that house believing that I just had a conversation about Gay rights in America with my brother’s in-laws and that everything was fine, the following day, my mother expressed to my siblings how upset she was with my rudeness and disrespect the night before. Without knowing how my mother and siblings felt, I just thought I was being given the silent treatment for talking about Gay rights and being seen as an equal, and without speaking to me, they didn’t give me the opportunity to either apologize for something said or get my side of what happened. And so, with them only communicating with my mother and my lack of knowledge for their side of the situation, we ended up not speaking for almost seven years.

It may have been because of everything that was happening, but I think we all agreed that the lost time between us was so unnecessary, and it should never have been that way. I don’t want to say that my siblings and I are working on fixing things because none of us can change the past, but I do believe, and I’ve said this publicly, that we are attempting to be better versions of ourselves. One of those ways of moving forward was agreeing to speaking directly with one another should feelings ever get hurt or something happens. My hope is that even if we cannot come to a resolution, with direct communication, we will cut out some of the unnecessary drama.

When asked where things stand today, I’m more than happy to report that my siblings and I try to speak to each other AT LEAST once a day, either individually or in a group chat. As the oldest and now “patriarch” of the family, I feel a deep responsibility to make sure everyone is doing alright, and I love that they each check in on me as well. I’ve met and been welcomed into each of their families, and they have all met my husband. There have been a handful of moments where they speak about something that happened in the last few years where I feel left out of, but never once have I felt the need to remind anyone that my mother died too. I think they understand that I had a very different relationship with our mother than they did, so although we are mourning the loss of the same person, our grieving processes are different, and they have never made me feel bad or treated me as a separate entity.

At the end of the day, as much as they can get on my last nerve, I truly enjoy talking to my siblings, and it just feels right to have them back in my life. During the funeral, I shared how our mom and I had spoken about the adults they had become, and how proud she was of each of them. I cannot even begin to express how both honored and humbled I am to be called their big brother, and no matter what, I will always have their backs.

My birthday marked two months since my mom’s death, and in that period, I have read old blogs and Facebook statuses, looked at old pictures and documents that were retrieved from her storage unit, played music or movies that she loved and reminisced with friends and family. I had heard once that it’s good to visit the past to know where you are now, and with 47 years of history to look back on, there’s much for me to unpack.

In that time, I came to realize that while my siblings miss the everyday of having their mother around and have moments where something will happen where they want to call her, and begin to miss her again, I tend to focus more on the memories I have of the woman I called Mah. I find myself often watching my Bar Mitzvah DVD just to hear her voice, as my greatest fear, much like after my grandfather’s passing, is that I would one day forget what she sounded like. But if I were to be honest, it’s not lost on me that had she not passed away, the two of us would still not be speaking. Knowing that, I can’t miss her the same way my brothers and sister do.

Some people have expressed that I should maybe have some form of guilt for how I feel, and trust me, I have had a moment or two wondering the same thing myself. Granted, I probably did not make life easy at times and even contributed to the rift between us, but at the end of the day, I can’t help but feel that, despite everything, she was the parent, and I was the child in the relationship. From my perspective, it was her job to love and protect me unconditionally, but for reasons I will never understand, was just not capable of doing. Unfortunately, without her here to give any kind of explanation, I find myself in this precarious position of just having to come to terms with all the revelations learnt over the last few months.

One thing I never realized before now was how much my mother’s insinuations really effected me. The other week, while out celebrating my birthday with my two college friends, one mentioned to me how I used to be the life of the party and much more of a free spirit. She laughed at how I used to just do fun stuff like getting a body piercing and removing it a week later, or coloring my hair, or even wearing a pair of platform shoes. But over time, she noticed that I began to dim my shine and chose to stay in the background. It wasn’t the first time I heard this from one of my friends, especially after my grandfather’s passing, but for some reason, this time it just resonated.

It dawned on me that my grandfather passed away around the same time that my mother’s accusation of me always needing to do things to take the spotlight away from people began. So, part of me now wonders if my current inability to accept public praise or be fussed over stems from those seeds my mother planted years ago about my constant need to be the center of attention.

I’ve also found myself in this odd place of having to reprogram my brain when it comes to being around my siblings. For so many years, I had drilled in my head all these terrible things I had done, and how I was such a bad son and brother, that I started to believe them myself. And from my point of view, always feeling like I was walking into a place where everyone expected me to do something wrong before I even walked through the door, to the point that I was always second guessing my actions, including something as simple as saying hello.

I remember telling exes of mine how we needed to dress, what we were allowed to speak about or we couldn’t show each other affection in front of my family at the risk of offending someone or causing trouble. Even at the funeral, I stopped my husband from consoling me out of fear that something would be said. But with everything I have come to learn, I now find myself looking back and questioning how much of the drama stemmed from actual events, or from stuff my mother said happened, which were not necessarily the same thing.

As I sit here and type, I think I’m beginning to understand that my mother was flawed and probably had her own personal demons that she was battling which somehow contributed to her pushing me away. Unfortunately, her actions hurt me in the end, but deep down, I truly believe my mother loved me the best she could. And, as easy as it would be to condemn and hate her for all that she’s done, I can’t help but have love for her. After all, she was my mother.

I also realize that as much as I could dissect every aspect of our lives together in order to justify my side of the situation to everyone, the reality is that only my mother and I will ever truly know what really happened between us. I can choose to dwell on all the negative that happened, but when push comes to shove, there were also a lot of great times that we had. For me, those good memories far outweigh the bad. So, at the end of the day, that is how I would prefer to remember my mother.

In the past, I had heard my mom say that her greatest accomplishment in life were her children, although I think my siblings and I will all agree that we took a back seat once the grandkids started to be born. Growing up, she was always the nucleus of our family, often taking on the roles of both mom and dad. She was a strict disciplinarian, and it was beyond difficult to pull one over on her. She was always there to help with some crisis, and if there was something we needed or wanted, she almost always made it happen. She would work, sometimes two or three jobs at a time, to provide for us, which could not have been easy for her. I know my siblings and I have said it to each other, but I hope she knew how much we appreciated everything she did for us.

I hope to never forget how beautiful she was, how infectious her laugh had been or that high-pitched scream she would make when she was excited about something. Thanksgiving will always be remembered as her favorite holiday to overcook for, and every time I stuff a fridge to capacity, I will always be reminded that it was an art-form I mastered thanks to her. I will tell generations to come about her love of shoes and her belief that feet were the only part of the body not to grow as an adult, and forever miss how she always texted in all caps, not because she was yelling, but because she was blind as a bat and couldn’t see the screen. And there will never be a time where I hear a song by Luther Vandross, Hall & Oates, Kenny Loggins, Taylor Dayne, Rick Astley, Anita Baker, Natalie Cole or anything Motown or watch Dirty Dancing, Shining Through, For the Boys, Designing Women, Born Yesterday, What’s Up Doc, Mannequin, or The Wizard of Oz, which was her favorite movie, that I won’t think of her.

I may have mentioned earlier that when my mother was in the hospital, I started to write out some of my thoughts for her eulogy, which are now sprinkled throughout this blog. To put myself in the right frame of mind, I would listen to a lot of my mother’s favorite songs that were in my music library. Occasionally, a song would play that was not directly associated with her, but for some reason, just worked. One such song was For Good from the Broadway show Wicked.

Opening in 2003, Wicked tells the story of what happened before Dorothy stepped foot into Oz and gives us the origins of The Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good. It’s about two witches who meet in school and learn an awful truth about the Wizard, which takes them down two different paths. As the story unfolds, you realize that everything you thought you knew about The Wizard of Oz was not necessarily the truth, and you learn how words and public perceptions play a big role in someone being deemed good or “Wicked.” 

I’m sure I don’t need to point out the parallels between the story of Wicked and the relationship between my mother and myself, or the irony in the fact that the song I connected to throughout this process comes from the show that flips the script on my mother’s favorite movie. So, let’s just leave it at there being a life imitating art moment happening here. But I digress!

To help finally bring closure to this chapter of my life, and as an homage to my mother, my husband took me to see Wicked for my birthday. If I may, I would like to close out this blog with the lines that the “Wicked” Elphaba sings to Glinda in the song For Good because they really do best express how I feel towards my mother today:

It well may be that we will never meet again in this lifetime.

So let me say before we part:

So much of me is made of what I learned from you.

You'll be with me, like a handprint on my heart… 

…Who can say if I've been changed for the better?

But because I knew you, I have been changed for good.

_________________

Before I hop on my broomstick and fly off towards the western sky, I would like to take this opportunity to really thank my siblings for welcoming me back into their lives so openly, my husband for everything he has done, and to everyone who reached out and sent their love, condolences, and support during the last three months. I would also love to express my sincere gratitude to everyone who showed up for Shiva and paid their respects, with a special nod to Rachel and my sister-in-law, Stacey, for everything they did for both me and my siblings throughout that entire week. They say that hard times will reveal true friends, and that has certainly been the case here. There were people whom I never thought would be there for me who just showed up, and then there were people who swore up and down that they would be by my side who weren’t. I have run the gamut of emotions from the time my mom went into the hospital until now, and I know I haven’t been myself for a good chunk of it. So, from the bottom of my heart, I love and appreciate you all. I never could have made it through without any of you, and it will never be forgotten.