I bought my dead mother a Mother's Day card.

It first hit me during a random stop at Duane Reade to pick up toilet paper, saline solution, toothpaste, and dish liquid. I wasn’t thinking about much of anything save for the items on my mental list, one of which I knew I’d inevitably forget until after I paid and was back out on the sidewalk. Cart in hand I started to make my way to the back of the store where I knew each item was located. Upon turning a corner there it was, bright and big before me, a long wall of white and pink squares that stopped me in my tracks - the Mother’s Day greeting card section.

I knew deep down it was coming, the inevitable holiday sitting there at the five month mark of the year, always the second Sunday in May, just a month before my mother’s birthday. This year she would have been sixty-one. And yet for some reason it still surprised me, as though I had forgotten that other people don’t look at the holiday with as much trepidation as I do, or feel now as I feel like an outsider to a club that I used to belong to but am no longer allowed to be a part of.

People With Mothers Only.

I think about Mother’s Days past, of having gone to Duane Reade or somesuch specifically to get her a card, while now I find I try desperately to avoid the section altogether. It has been six years since I’ve had to search through cards adorned with ribbons, and glitter, and heartfelt messages about how much a mother means. What the cards don’t tell you, of course, is that you can’t really know just how much a mother means until you no longer have one. Like anything else, the absence of something invariably makes you feel it more. The absence of water causes your body to break down, the absence of food makes your stomach hurt, and the absence of my mother has made me feel like a piece of my heart has been missing since the day she died. 

And there’s no denying that she absolutely loved being a mom, and was great at it. From the moment she married my dad in a small ceremony in upstate New York in 1973, the only thing she wanted was children. When my sister came along in 1981, and then two years later me, her life, as she used to say, was complete. I never really understood what she meant by that until I got a bit older, and heard the story of how difficult it had been for her to finally have children. 

Before she had me and my sister, my mother was tragically saddled with a series of miscarriages. Five to be exact. She rarely talked about them, but when she did, even after twenty years had passed, she would still cry. She cried especially about Lisa, who for all intents and purposes is my older sister. Lisa was born in 1977 and lived for only three days. Today she would have been thirty-six. My mother is buried next to her, a sister I’ll never know and a daughter who now, I like to believe, is finally with her mother.

I looked on with envy at the handful of people who were hovering over the greeting card section. Some old, some young, men and women both, all picking up cards, reading a few lines, shrugging or smiling before putting it back and selecting another. They’re looking for just the right message, just the right tone to encapsulate all that their mother is, to them, her child.  I miss being able to do that, to buy a card for the person who has meant so much to me in the twenty-three years I was fortunate enough to have her. I realize now that Mother’s Day, like so many other things, isn’t to me what it is to other people whose mother’s are alive, and standing there I started to worry that might never change. 

Perhaps not until I have children of my own, and someday, maybe, become a mother myself?

It didn’t seem fair. 

So I approached a woman who looked to be in her mid-forties, sidled up next to her slowly like I knew I was somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be. I hesitantly followed her lead of reaching out and picking up a card, reading the front, opening it, putting it back. I thought safety in numbers, that if I wasn’t standing there by myself looking at cards for a mother I didn’t have it wouldn’t seem as strange. 

But what is strange? What is normal? Yes I may not have a mother but I had a mother, and what began to creep up on me as I stood there was the question you ultimately have to deal with when someone close to you dies: after death just how without them are you? Once someone is physically gone are you meant to act as though they never existed? My mother is dead but does that mean she’s not still my mother? In all the years without Lisa I know my mother always felt she had three daughters, not two.

I can’t hug her, or sit and have coffee with her, or call her up on the phone to ask her advice about my love life, but I do know that little parts of her are still living on in other people across this great country. Surely that ought to count for something. And I bet the woman who has her liver, or maybe even the woman who has one of her kidneys is a mother. I think about how my mom dying allowed some other person somewhere out there to have a mother to buy a card for on Mother’s Day. And maybe that’s enough.

So I decided to buy my mother a card. I stood there for a long time, going through almost the whole section until I found just the right one. I left the store, forgetting about all the other items on my list, and went home. I wrote in that card what I wanted my mother to know. I told her how much I love her, how much she means to me, how much everything she did for me, every sacrifice, every word of encouragement, everything she taught me over the whole course of my life has helped me get to where I am today. And then I thanked her, and told her I missed her, and said Mom, I’m thirty now, can you even believe it?

I bet she can’t.

Then I wrote her name on the front of the pink envelope along with the address of the place where I grew up, the address she made me memorize on my first day of Kindergarten, and sealed it.

The card sits now in my desk drawer, signed and dated where it will remain. I did it because she deserves a card, as all mothers do, and I think every Mother’s Day from now on I’ll do the same, buy her a card, sign it, seal it, and file it away. Because what I realized is that when it comes to this amazing woman who brought me into the world, no matter what happens, even long after we become disintegrated bodies in disintegrated boxes under people’s boot soles there’s one thing that will always be true - I am her daughter, she is my mother. And that will never change.