MARILYN AND JERRY...

Monday was the 38th anniversary of the death of a woman whom I have come to realize I hardly knew. My mother. It really just hit me. Obviously not the fact that it's been a long time since I looked in her eyes and had a conversation. Or that it wasn't her death, but her getting sick ten years earlier, that was the REAL game changer for me. It was simply looking at facts...circumstances...in a new way. Not emotionally, as much as simply from a "it's just the facts, Jack" perspective. The realization, from a different angle, that Mom was physically well for such a short time in my life, and that her unexpurgated, as my mother, was so fleeting. I don't remember what she was like, unburdened, whether by the anxiety of sickness, the frustrations of life, the fearofdeath at a time when no one talked about it. It simply struck me, as I was riding on the subway, that this force in my life, this person whose presence, as limited, powerful, loving and dark as it sometimes was/is, is someone whom I not only hardly remember, but really have no idea who she was. At her core. At her most open and/or whatever might be the opposite of that for a woman whose life, and that of her only kid, was inexorably jettisoned into an unexpected place on a Spring morning in 1962. When people really didn't talk about this kind of shit. So, in an attempt to connect with the only other person who lived in that house with us, I woke and called my father, to simply connect, to open up the possibility of calling up the memory of a woman about whom he never speaks, at least in an offering. In an attempt to give his son something, from the inside.

"Good morning, Dad, just wanted to connect with you on the anniversary of Mom's death."

"I don't know when it was, Jon, I'm not sure."

BREATH.

"No, Dad, it's today. The same day as JFK. I just felt like talking about her a bit."

"Yeah, I remember it was around Thanksgiving."

BIG PAUSINGSPACE.

"OK, Dad, enjoy the day, I will speak to you during the week."

"OK, Jon. Feel good."

"Love you."

"Love you"

And, I let go. Not in the dramatic tears flooding out of my eyes kindofway...they simply trickled all day. Simply, in a realization that my 91-year old Dad can't give it to me - the perspective, the grounding, the bridge that might provide some granular connective tissue to a place inside that always is longing for that. And while it's easy to say that "he's 91" as a reason for this shallow, yet kindly-intentioned well, the fact, the truth, is that it was, he was, no different at 81 or 71 or whenever. The difference for me, on Monday, as sad as it may be, is that I was able to simply let this/him be. To have it be what it is. Not get caught up in (T)HIStory, or this disappointment. To accept it. To tell the/my truth. To be able to hold the facts and my father in a true place, and not become angry or (re)burdened. To love him and love her, in any ways that I can. Whether I remember or not.