As a preschooler, I once told a group of mothers who were describing the elaborate meals they prepared for their kids that my mom made the best Rice Krispies. In her later years, she boasted to her caregivers that her son made the best (instant) Cream of Wheat. Recently, the sight of the familiar box on a supermarket shelf sent me running for the refuge of my car.
I’ve had a similar reaction to a kiwi, a pair of pink Skechers, an episode of Shark Tank, and an old Valentine’s Day card. For the first time in my life, when I hear Joan Baez on the radio, I change the station. Anyone who has lost a parent knows where this is leading.
Sophie’s Choice left me stone-faced and dry-eyed as a Vulcan. But this year, I’ve made up for a lifetime of emotional detachment, breaking down over encounters with inanimate objects and familiar sounds.
The dam first burst as I pulled into the independent living community where my mother had lived for 13 years. I had just returned from the ER, where the word “hospice” was first mentioned. Still in a fog, I didn’t recognize the driver of a gray Tesla approaching me. Her apartment was directly below my mom’s. “Could you please ask visitors to walk a little more quietly?” she asked cheerfully. “My mother is dying,” I blurted out. “I know,” she responded, “but if you could just ask them to take their shoes off….”
My mom and I would’ve laughed about that line for years. I wondered how she would’ve advised me about other experiences that came with her loss. Do I tell the woman who assured me my mom was in a better place that she dismissed religion as “magical thinking”?
Knowing my mother, a social worker, believed motivation is what matters, I’m guessing she would’ve excused a few well-intentioned, tone-deaf platitudes. Her own clients paid her visits and sent her birthday cards years after she retired. When I found them, I realized how many people I shared her with as my closest confidante.
Even when she was a teenager, other girls gravitated to her for advice. Yet, becoming a therapist was never a given. My grandparents sent their son to MIT and their daughter to secretarial school — an inequity repeated often in my mother’s life that prompted her to ask why men were allowed to differ in their aspirations while women were presumed to have the same ambitions.
At 40, my mom enrolled in college. By the time she completed graduate school and began practicing, most social workers were halfway through their careers. She made up for lost time, extending hers into her 80s.
Imagine someone as engaging as Gloria Steinem and winsome as Betty White, and you’d have a sense of Elena Levinsky. “Mom” always seemed too generic for what she was to me. I called her “Ms.,” a reference to the feminist worldview she gifted me with. Her mantra was to question everything. For me, I question the notion that a parent can’t also be a best friend — or that the survivor of a parent who lived to be 94 should be grateful, not greedy; that we should be celebrating, not grieving. My reaction was close to the opposite.
I thought of this while watching a conversation between Whoopi Goldberg and Anderson Cooper on his podcast about grief, All There Is. “It took a while to settle in on me that my mom’s death has been the most devastating experience of my life,” Goldberg said. “It was an acute trauma. I still think about her every single day.”
Valentine’s Day used to be the one “holiday” I celebrated because it was my mom’s birthday. It’s months away, but I’m already dreading it. I grieve the loss of my mom, but the person I miss the most is my best friend.
Andy Levinsky is a frequent contributor to Globe Magazine. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.
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