The Days My Mother Was There
By: Emilio R. Joubert
Tags: Motherhood, Birthday, Loss, Death, Sadness

Today, my mother, Alicia Marie DeNisco, would have been 41 years old. If she was alive, she’d likely have already created the restaurant she always told me about, Mama D’s on the Beach. Maybe me, her 23-year-old son would have helped get the business off the floor, maybe her fiance would have run the operations. Maybe we’d have hosted family birthday parties there, or have celebrated the numerous graduations her children have had in the 9 years since she’s passed away.

When we used to sit together towards the end of her life, she would tell me the dreams that she had when she was going to get better. Her eyes gaunt, only one side of her face showing her expression, her hair gone, and a huge scar down her neck, I truly did believe that we were going to get the chance to make those dreams happen.

Beyond strength, my mother taught me to be limitlessly hopeful. She taught me that no matter how bad things may seem today, as long as you have a dream for tomorrow, there is a reason to continue moving forward. As a child, I truly did believe that she was going to get better when we used to have these talks. I believed in the Doctors that spent years earning their degrees, I trusted in the machines I would see strapped up to her — I assumed that the dreams she was sharing with me, she wanted us to achieve together.

I realize now that she was sharing those dreams with me because at 32, she knew that she wasn’t going to live to see those dreams come to fruition. She had resigned to sit with her son at the edge of her sunk-in couch and share whatever it was that came to her mind.

If I had one hundred wishes, I would use only one: to be able to sit on that couch with her just one last time. To hear her voice again, without the damage radiation and chemotherapy did to her vocal cords, to see her eyes move across the room as she thinks of what the future could be like, to hold her hand without it shaking from the nerve damage the cancer gave her. I would sit on that couch the same way I did back then and take in all of her dreams, all of her hopes for the future and hold them inside of myself. I would let her know that she is heard.

In the year since my graduation at Georgetown, I’ve found myself wondering if living out the dreams that she laid out for me. I’ve asked myself if I’m doing the kinds of things that she wished I would be doing, I don’t know if I’d have made her proud. I’ve felt lost for direction, in many ways, unhappy and anxious about the way my life is moving. I think back to those talks we had, where the simplest things seemed so grandiose; me graduating from high school was one, getting a good-paying job was another. I’m not sure she would have been able to give me a blueprint for the part of my life that she never got to live.

I’m reckoning with the fact that I’m now living my life without any plans that we both crafted together. I only planned a few years into the future with her because I thought she’d be there with me at 23. I thought she was going to be there with me at 30, I thought, like many of the older people I know, she was going to be there with me when I retired from my career. I have been shown many times, however, that life doesn’t work out the way we ever want it to. I can dwell on how badly I want her back, but I know that this is not what she’d have wanted for me. I can piece together from the talks that we used to have that she’d want me to keep moving forward. This gives me hope and inspires me to keep moving forward no matter how difficult things get.

I don’t have a flashy ending to this piece because I’m not sure where my life is going at this moment. For the first time, I’m doing things that we never planned on, and while I am happy to be defining my own path, I’m sad that it means leaving my mom in the past, stuck in our dreams that didn’t make it past 21-years-old. I will miss the days when my mother was there.