On Saturday, May 9th, as I walked through Irvington with my friend, I saw a sign or T-shirt in a shop window. I did not turn to examine it more closely, but the message was “Call Your Mom.” It resonated with me because of a conversation with my sister on the previous day.
When I logged onto a social media site, I saw that my sister had changed her profile picture to a picture that I had taken of her and our mother. I immediately sent her a text, and she called me soon after. My sister misses our mother, misses her in ways that I cannot begin to understand. She once told me that she believed that the house she moved into in Maryland was to be the house the two of them would occupy, forever.
Early in my working career, I had a job that required me to spend a lot of time on the phone. One of the drawbacks of that was that I developed a reluctance to spend much time on personal discussions on the phone. And with me, my mother was an awkward telephone conversationalist. In the early years of my first marriage, most of the calls I made to her were the result of prodding from my bride. My mother and I eventually developed a greater ease on the phone, and over the years, I lost some of my reluctance to call. But our conversations were still brief, though always punctuated with an awkward “I love you,” ending.
J.K. Simmons, upon winning an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in the movie “Whiplash,” gave a speech where he said, “… call your mom. If you’re lucky enough to have parents or two alive on this planet … Don’t text, don’t email. Call them on the phone; tell them you love them. Talk to them for as long as they want to hear you.”
“Call Your Mom” as an anthem of devotion is wonderful, but I wonder about those who can no longer answer that “call to action.” I have a good friend in St. Louis who was about 20 years old when she lost her mother; she lost her father last year. I never had the pleasure of meeting her mother, though I did meet her father, but I remember her references to her mother, and heard in them longing and suppressed pain. I am certain that my friend would love to “Call Mom.”
I did not call my mother often, but I made an effort to keep her in my life, and the lives of my three children. She spent weeks with me as I recovered from stomach surgery, and I spent months at her bedside as she lay dying; I listened to her in those days, and learned more about the quality of her character and the weight of her life than I did in all the years we shared before then. Perhaps I should, but I don’t regret not having called my mother more often than I did. I knew that she loved me, and she knew that I loved her. And my sister loved her without pause. When she brought our mother from Pittsburgh to Maryland, she could not imagine that diabetes would destroy her kidneys, take the toes of her right foot and her left leg to mid-shin, then her will to live. She died on June 6th, 2010.
On the anniversary of her death, I think of “Call Your Mom,” and know that my friend in St. Louis and my sister would love to make that call.
Me too.