Zibby Mag

By Jane L. Rosen

When I was eleven, my father died in a work accident. It was sudden and shocking and the second I heard the news, my constitution permanently shifted. I can still hear the man’s voice on the other end of the phone.

“Your father has been in an accident.”

I can still hear the voice of my older brother when he carried me home from my neighbor’s house that evening.

“When is daddy coming home?” I asked.

“Daddy’s not coming home,” he answered.

I flung myself out of his arms, kicking and screaming and crying out with a sound so piercing that lights switched on in the houses around us.

Years later, a cousin told me that I broke his heart at the funeral. I searched through my fuzzy recollection of that day, unable to remember my cousin’s description of me at the cemetery, throwing myself on the casket and screaming, “I want my daddy.” I still can’t remember it. The mind is funny that way.

What I’ve determined is that I was able to grieve with complete abandon. It was my first descent into the specific pain of loss. When it finally sunk in that my father was gone, I vowed never to be blindsided by death again. I would regularly run through every scenario of my mother dying in my head. I would not be unprepared.

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But death surprised me once more by skipping a generation and taking my sister.

My sister was diagnosed with breast cancer at thirty-six. I grieved from the day of her diagnosis until the day she died three years later. I didn’t know that it was possible to cry as many tears as I did. If my father’s death was equivalent to the Free Fall Tower — the amusement park ride that drops from hundreds of feet in the air without warning — my sister’s death was a roller coaster.

Three years of ups and downs, slim possibilities, and epic disappointments. I grieved for her before she died and I grieved for her afterward and I grieve for her still today. I took some time off from work to mourn and to marry and to take a honeymoon.

I went back and grieved heavily for nine months more until giving birth to my first child, whom I have no problem admitting I conceived to make me feel better. I needed a happy reason to wake up in the morning, and she gave me one. Joy is the opposite of grief, and somewhere in between the two, I found myself again.

And death stayed away — for a long, long while.

Ididn’t dwell on the fact that my mother’s death was inevitably coming closer. She’d had me at forty, around the time that she stopped dyeing her hair, and because of both these facts she always looked older than the other mothers. A former physical education teacher with an overabundance of spunk, she didn’t change much over the next forty years. It took me a long time to concede that she was indeed old.

In the last ten years of my mother’s life, she gave me plenty of occasions to brace myself for the worst. She beat breast cancer, got hit by a car and broke her leg, hitchhiked out of Hurricane Sandy (yes, you read that right), and broke her pelvis when her high heel got caught on a dance floor at a wedding. She survived it all, further proving her indestructibility.

Her heart, as it turned out, was not as stubborn as the rest of her. I often panicked on the phone with my brother when discussing the options until, one day, he laid it on the line for me.

“Jane, I can’t keep her alive forever. She’s going to die of something.”

And she did.

My nephew called one night and said in a small voice, “Your mother was found unresponsive.” My head went quickly to my children. How would I tell these three girls who had never experienced death like this that the absolute love of their lives, their “Momo,” as they called her, was gone?

I was consumed with worry for them. I certainly couldn’t quit on them, as I had quit my job when my sister died or fallen into hysterics when my dad died. My middle daughter asked the simplest of questions that summed up just what I’d been feeling.

“What are we going to do?”

“You mean without Momo?” I replied.

“Yes,” she said, really wanting to know how we would go on.

I wanted to say, “I have no idea.” My mother had been a force, both good and bad, with which I had lived my entire life. As independent as I had always been, I never made a brisket without first asking her how many pounds to buy. I waited for her to visit before cleaning out my closets so that she could sit on my bed and fold while we gossiped and listened to jazz music.

I realized that no one would ever be as proud of me again when holding one of my novels in their hands. Even so, I snapped into mom mode and stayed there throughout the funeral, the shiva period, and beyond.

I could not abandon myself to my grief because I was a mother, and mothering trumps all. If I didn’t hold it together, I thought, everyone else might fall apart. I soon realized that mourning while simultaneously caring for others who are mourning is tricky. Helping them to process their grief left me ignoring — or postponing — mine. But I learned a new lesson about grief: you can’t escape it. If you ignore it, it will find you. And by the summer, it did.

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My husband and I moved to Fire Island for the season. My girls were doing ok, but suddenly I was not.

I became short-tempered, as if I had skipped the stage of expressing (and releasing) emotion and jumped right to anger. My ability to make small talk was so diminished that I couldn’t step into the little market in our town, too consumed by how transparent I felt when I did.

The usual custom of friends and neighbors stopping at each other’s chairs or blankets on the beach to chat filled me with panic. I was outwardly rude, going as far as pulling out a book and sticking my nose in it whenever someone approached. I was void of social graces.

A friend who thought she was doing me a favor told me that a mutual acquaintance had questioned the palpable depth of my mourning. “Her mother was ninety-three and it’s now been a couple of months.” I walked away feeling awful. Had I missed my window to grieve? Had my Get Out of Jail Free card expired?

I realized that I had work to do.

Every night I stood at the ocean, my mother’s favorite spot, said the Kaddish (the Jewish mourning prayer), and gave myself time for quiet introspection. I found myself embodying my mother in weird ways that comforted me — standing with my hands in my pockets and swaying my hips from side to side or lifting my heels up and down in place as she had.

I played back the phone messages that I had been saving for years for this very occasion. I placed an old black-and-white photo of my mother next to my bed, talking to it every day and recounting events just as I had in our daily phone calls.

When I was cold, I would reach for her white Lacoste cardigan, a staple in her rotation that I can date back to visiting day at Camp Lokanda circa 1975. I rolled the tissue still folded into its sleeve back and forth between my fingers like a rosary.

And then she reached out to me in my dreams.

It was short but clear as day: an image of her at a party standing in a doorway with my dad, his arm draped over her shoulder, her face younger and happier than I had seen it in years. She yelled to my sister, “Say hello to Jane,’’ and my healthy, beautiful sister peeked her head out and waved before running off. It looked like some party. Whether it was really her reaching out or my mind letting her go, it didn’t really matter. The result was the same. I got the message.

“I’m ok. And you’re ok too.”

The selfish act of giving myself time to grieve wasn’t selfish at all. It was necessary.

There is no steward of grief announcing, “Mothers put on your own oxygen mask first before assisting your children.” You must be your own steward.

If I were to do it over again, I would be more present in my grief from the start. I would have attended her funeral as the daughter of the deceased instead of a mother, sister, and aunt to the other mourners. I would have grieved along with them and given myself the time and attention that my grief required.

I would have substituted, “I’m ok,” the words that I repeated to my husband during those first few months, with the simple words of truth and release that I have learned to put in their place: “I miss my mom.”

The last memory I have of my mother on the beach was of us chasing dolphins during the summer before she died. We never reached them because I again forgot how old she was, surprised when I turned around and saw that my 92-year-old mother wasn’t keeping up.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I’m old,” she answered.

“Sorry, I forgot again,” I said. “Let’s head back. It’s ok.”

“I’m sorry you missed the dolphins,” she said later.

“There will be more dolphins,” I promised.

And there were. On a warm morning in July, about three months after she had passed, she sent me six dolphins dancing in the waves in one of those vivid, early morning dreams. I threw on shorts and ran to the beach. And wouldn’t you know it? There were six dolphins dancing in the waves.

My mother was still with me. I just needed to pay attention. I just needed to give myself the time to grieve.

In honor of Reuven Tzvi Holtz and Liron Ezra Holtz who we will hold in our hearts forever. 7/7/21

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Jane Rosen is the author of several books including Eliza Starts a Rumor, and Nine Women, One Dress. Jane is also a screenwriter and a Huffington Post contributor. She lives in New York City and Fire Island with her husband and three daughters.