She Taught Me The One Thing Left To Say

The grade school I attended outside Pittsburgh was located at the bottom of the hill where we lived. To get there, we had to walk down a long zigzag of wooden steps. I used to know exactly how many there were. More than 200, I’m sure. They were torn down years ago.

For a while after I started first grade, I’d rush outside every day when the bell rang for morning recess and stare up at the steps. About halfway down, sitting on a landing like the only person in an empty stadium, was my mother. It was part of a deal we’d made.

I didn’t like being in grade school or being away from our neighborhood, or being away from her, so my mother came up with a plan.

Each morning, only a few hours after I’d left for school, she’d stop whatever she was doing and walk from our house to the steps. She promised to be there, about halfway down, when I got out for recess.

”I’ll see you and you’ll see me and we’ll both feel better,” she said.

I’d shove my way onto the playground at the first chime of the recess bell and look up. And there she’d be.

At first, I spent most of the play period waving at her and watching her wave back. After a week or two, I’d wave only a few times before running off with friends, checking every once in a while to make sure she was still there. She always was.

Then one day, I didn’t look up.

I have no memory of that day. She couldn’t forget it. It’s what kids do, she said. They grow up. They move from one phase to the next. They make you happy and sad at the same time.

I didn’t understand it before I had children of my own. Now, I do.

My mother walked down to the steps once a week or so even after I no longer needed her to be there. She just wanted to make sure I was OK.

It was that way with all the steps that followed. High school. College. Jobs in towns far away. She was the same with my father and brother, nieces and nephews, aunts and uncles, grandchildren, friends, neighbors - strangers. And she was that way year after year.

You never stop being a mother, she said.

When she fell recently and wound up in the hospital, I called her from work. She was in Pennsylvania and I was in Arizona. It was late in the day, here, and she knew I was about to leave the office. My mother had cancer, pneumonia and a possible broken back, but she said to me, “Be careful driving home; I worry about you.”

During the time she was in the hospital, the doctors, nurses, therapists and social workers came to know her for three phrases:

I’m fine. Thank you. I love you.

It seemed at times as if she were the doctor and they were her patients. And those words - I’m fine. Thank you. I love you - were her medicine.

At the hospital, we laughed and talked, and looked at photographs. She worried I was spending too much time away from my children and my job. I learned that parents, like children, go from one phase to the next, making you happy and sad at the same time.

I’d sit in her room, watching her, trying to believe her when she talked of going home and making gnocchi and wine biscuits. She was glad my brother and I were there to be with our father, but she fretted over our long days in the hospital.

“You don’t have to come here every day,” she’d say. I’m just checking on you, I’d tell her. I’m walking halfway down the steps.

One day - it must have been at recess - she didn’t look up.

At her funeral service last week, a son’s limited capacity for writing proved to be no match for a mother’s genius at living. It was all I could do to barely, clumsily, pass on to her a brief three-part message:

I’m fine. Thank you. I love you.

She was there, of course. She heard me. There’s no need for me to repeat myself.

It’s just that, you know, she worries.

xxxx