Mom.

I'll start, and we'll see if I have it in me to write about Mom.

She died two years ago next week.

She was a college drop-out, the daughter of an over-educated and privileged family. She lived in Europe and hooked up with my future father, a coke dealer in Munich. They travelled and did drugs until they wound their way back to California. I was born there in 1971. By 1975 they were back on the East Coast and divorced. I lived with her as she got her nurse's certification. She worked and worked at her education until she had a post-master's degree in 1993. My step-father and she married when I was nine; they divorced when I was 22. I never really saw her date, but from her journal I learned that she had an affair while she was married, and then after her divorce, a two-year affair with another married man. Finally she reunited with a high school classmate at their 40th reunion. They were together for two years; he was at her bedside with me when she died.

Our last weekend together was for Mother's Day. She was struggling with radiation and chemotherapy, so we were down for the long weekend. I ran out on Saturday and bought a bouquet of peonies; hers hadn't bloomed yet. She cried when we were preparing to leave; we stayed an extra day. She and I went to the nurseries and bought petunias and geraniums for her windowboxes. We spent the afternoon planting. The last photo ever taken of her is in the garden with the plants at her feet. The following week she went to her chemo appointment complaining of difficulty breathing. They admitted her to the hospital; she never returned home.

My husband, son, and I had a picnic outside the night she had exploratory surgery. The doctor called me that night and said that it was more cancer, for sure. We raced to her, four hours away. She wasn't yet awake. I said, as I drove, "This is going to kill her." My husband said I didn't know that. I said yes, I did.

I had four days to spend with her, rubbing her feet, feeding her crackers, laughing. We didn't know then how quickly death would descend. She simply needed more sedatives to breathe. We talked and talked and talked to her as she lost consciousness. The greatest gift she gave me was that as she lay dying, I knew that we had spoken everything to each other already. Our lives were spent loving each other. There was nothing left unsaid.

I stroked her hair and held her hand for what I knew would be the last time. I wept. We sang to her and played Vivaldi or Mozart, I can't remember. And when she died, the moment was sterling, as precious as any we had shared during our life together. She was 59.

We spread some of her ashes, with my grandfather's, in the water at the family home; we buried the rest on the seaside bluff.

I can't describe to those of you who haven't been through it what it means to live without a mother's love. She was the golden gem in the bank vault that is my heart. Now I have to fill that space. We were partners from the very start of my life. There was no one I trusted more. Wherever she was, that was home.

She knew my son, but he will never remember her. There are people I love who will never meet her, and that feels cruel. And I want her back. I've sometimes thought of suicide just to be with her again, truth be told. But then I snap back to reality, to my life, to my son.

I wish you had known her.