When I find the notes, tucked in a drawer or hiding on a shelf where I’m looking for a book, I feel a little thrill. I might set one aside to savor later, hoping the words will once again bring her close.
The notes, dozens and dozens of them, including cards and letters, are from my mother, who died in February 2017 at the age of 91. They have become part of her legacy, I realize now, a gift she slowly built for me over nearly four decades.
For my mother, our family — my dad, my brother and me — was life. And in her world, family stayed together. She never lived in a different county from her parents, her sister or my brother until she was in her 80s and had to enter a nursing home.
I was the one who left — first for college, then for graduate school and eventually for jobs on the East Coast, leaving Ohio and my parents behind for good.
I was a member of the first generation on either side of my family to attend college, and I went because I was good in school. It was a practical decision — I would become a teacher, a job my mother thought of as recession proof (“they’ll always need teachers”).
But at a tiny Mennonite school in rural western Ohio, I met a brilliant professor who nurtured my intellect and opened my imagination to the worlds of art history and serious literature and, as a bonus, to the promises that a city like New York might hold. I was eager to believe.
A doctorate, not a teaching certificate, would be my goal, and I would not stay in the Midwest to earn it.
My mother and I, though very different, had always been close, and I still cannot fully appreciate how hard it was for her to see me go. But it was not something I took into account at the time; I was ready to expand my world, and that meant heading East.
She bridged the distance with calls and with those letters, writing almost daily. Sometimes three letters would reach me at one time. I called, too, and wrote back, not as often, but faithfully. Our correspondence continued well into her 80s when her fingers, the joints swollen and gnarled, made it too hard for her to do much more than sign her name.
Her letters did not always make me happy. She was slow to anger, but not above putting a stamp on her feelings and winging them my way. Days after a conversation or confrontation, I would learn that something I had said had hurt her. She told me, via the Postal Service, when she was unhappy with me if I was not getting along with my brother. At other times she offered unwelcome advice on sensitive topics like my diet. Her accompanying admonition — “don’t be mad” — had the opposite effect.
Sometimes I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of letters. They seemed like a barrage, a way to chide me for leaving and the paper and pen equivalent of hands that held me too tightly, trying to pull me away from a life I yearned to create. Why couldn’t she let me go?
But that was not what she wrote about. Mostly she recounted the details of the day, family life, how much my father was worrying (good to know where I got that), news of the grandchildren. In rare moments, she confided something, as she did after a 1978 dinner celebrating my parents’ 30th wedding anniversary.
“Wish I could get a job somewhere, keep up with the world,” she wrote then. I was taken aback. Was it possible that her life as a stay-at-home mom, never working after her children were born, never knowing financial independence or living by herself until she was widowed at 69, was not perfect? It might have been the only time she shared that longing with me.
As my mother and I grew older, and in many ways closer, especially after the death of my father, the messages changed. The notes were shorter. She always sent “love and prayers,” and, coming from a lifelong Catholic who attended Mass at least once a week, that meant something. Together we suffered through painful arthritis and eventual joint replacements; she comforted me when I felt stressed to my limits.
On a card to cheer me up, she wrote: “I wish I could make your days happier and pain free”; on another, “Don’t let the pain be your boss.” Nearly universal wishes of a mother, perhaps, but it still helped to see them on paper.
When it came to my life, at least, she could be relentlessly encouraging. Go to the party, she would write when I complained that I was tired. Get yourself flowers at the supermarket. And, best of all, buy something to cheer yourself up. That “something” was always small — a magazine, maybe a bright blouse that was on sale, a slice of chocolate cream pie. There wasn’t the budget for extravagance, and she was far from flashy, but she believed in a little pampering.
I think my mother knew that I would keep her notes, just as she had kept the letters I sent home from the Catholic sleepaway camp I attended two summers (I was gone an entire week and it was all of an hour away).
Rediscovering her letters now is a bit of a crapshoot. Digging through folders of old taxes and piles of medical statements I need to shred, I will come across one of her manila mailers, invariably loaded with far more postage stamps than required. And sometimes all I find inside is a shower of expired coupons and a clipped article about the benefits of eating almonds.
In other excavations, I hit the jackpot. Just recently, scanning my bookshelves for volumes to purge, I came across a stack of greeting cards, mostly from friends. Among them was an envelope in my mother’s handwriting, a doodled heart with “love you” on the back flap. It contained a birthday card from who knows when, and while the cash still inside — a $20 and a $5 — was a nice surprise, her messages were better. “Love, Mom. OXOX always.” “I hope the coming year will be lots better. Love always.”
I wonder if it was.
Would there have been notes had I not left? I don’t think so. Would there have been so many if I had had a family of my own? I think not. Maybe birthday cards for grandchildren and family recipes, but not these often-intimate messages that now fill a void every child feels with the loss of a parent.
She left me a gift, one that somehow she knew I would need, long before I did.
Arlene Schneider is a senior staff editor at The New York Times.
