Aug 20, 2021
Your Time to Shine
On having my heart in two places
When Mama fell ill, I became preoccupied with death and thoughts of losing her. The world stood ready to collapse, not only the person, because it was the person who kept the world together. She was an ad-hoc mom, a friend, a structural beam of support.
I didn’t know how we could go on without her.
I was one-year old when my father died in a car accident. Apparently, I cried a lot that day. Every story comes with details of my crying, a way to emphasize the magnitude of our loss. Even the baby cried.
My memories around that time are nonexistent, of course. Reactions and movements were reflections of what was going on around me — a devastated family crying.
My first memory is of a winter day, trudging through a life I knew nothing about, my hand in Mama’s warm hand. Then memories of Mama placing a cold compress on my forehead, her soothing voice guiding the pain away. Memories of her teaching me how to chop an onion without crying: use a frozen onion and a tight grip on the knife’s handle.
Later on, lessons were about my grip on life. When to loosen it and when to hold tight.
She was my guide through missed steps and successes. A guide to whoever needed a word of support, her house a revolving door of family members in need of propping up after a fall.
Fate had paired the two of us, my mother told me years later.
Mama was my father’s older sister, who took me in for a short period to give my mother time without a wailing baby, time to look after two other daughters. Months then years later, neither Mama nor I could let go.
I spent summers with my mother and sisters — the girl with her heart in two places — and always returned to my strength-giver, story-teller, soft-talker Mama.
We talked a lot while she was undergoing treatment. Or I talked, filling the time with banalities, with my work stories. The big question came up eventually, eliciting a shrug from Mama.
She didn’t want to talk about her cancer.
She wanted to talk about my thirty-fifth birthday, coming up. About our multitude of family members. She wanted to tell stories of her elders, now gone. Stories about Aunt Chiva — the first to leave their small Romanian town for the city. Aunt Chiva had inspired Mama and her siblings to take the journey themselves.
She wanted to tell stories about her father who built houses that sat empty in case his kids returned home. They were her elders. Her comfort and support.
I grew up in an intertwined web of a tied-knit Romanian family, with more aunts and uncles and cousins any of us could count. Except for Mama. She kept track of everyone and anyone who needed a hand — whether care during an illness, or help welcoming a baby. She helped carry life’s loads, heavy or light, like she did with me at age one.
When she passed away I became disoriented, drowning in the noise of my own thoughts. Her death put a hole in my heart that housed unthinkable sadness.
Mama was more than a mother. She was the mechanism that wrapped around integral parts of our family’s engine, keeping our world together. When that mechanism crumbled everything fell apart, with no one knowing how to move forward.
As always, we let her lessons guide us: how to make cabbage rolls, how to plant a garden, how to tell stories. Never-ending tales she insisted on telling. Her stories were lessons passed on through generations with one overriding theme: find peace of mind.
After the first disorienting weeks, after everyone went home, I walked down her favorite paseo, where we’d sometimes walk together. Me, Mama, and her stories. Instruction she’d once followed and was passing along, as if to say: Your time to shine, child. Be at peace.
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