Love, refracted
By: Ursula Wolfe-Rocca
Tags: Multigenerational, Birthday, Love, Aging, Parents

September 23rd, 2019

Dear Mama,

It’s your birthday again. What can I possibly say that I haven’t said before? Well, I am realizing how even though my love for you is a constant, it looks and feels different at every age. At this moment, I am aware of how I am always experiencing you, as if in prism, refracting in multiple directions. There is the you in this moment — making tomato sauce in the kitchen, minding Augie’s violin practice, eating your salads, pencil in hand, crossword on your right. This love is the most familiar: it sits in awe of your bottomless energy; it envies your devotion to your daily rituals; it sees clearly — always — the paradox of you, at once so strong and certain and so very vulnerable and fragile. This love is an old love that feels fundamental.

But there is also the you who will at some point on the (near? far?) horizon be a different, older you who cannot carry out your daily rituals so easily or at all. I try to imagine what that will be like for you, and how I will provide comfort and care to that new version of you. My mind cooks up many scenarios that will likely never come to pass. I see myself making your tea, bringing it downstairs, and reading you puzzle clues aloud while you drink it. I see myself helping you in the bath, which would be truly full circle since I spent so many hours talking to you there as a kid. I see myself taking slow walks with you on my arm, like we did in the snow those times at the 72nd Street house. This love I do not know yet. I wonder if it will be similar to the year after Howie died, but I somehow doubt it. Then, your heart was broken, and your body followed suit. This next stage will be your body failing, with your heart and mind (I pray) fully intact. I imagine a lot of laughter as we navigate all the frustrating ridiculousness of a body that just won’t cooperate. I imagine getting a chance to be with you when neither one of us is multitasking, something rare and beautiful. Maybe we’ll read a novel together. Maybe we’ll read poetry. (I will read you Eve Ewing’s brilliant tribute to Zora Neale Hurston, “what I mean when I say I am sharpening my oyster knife”: I mean I never met a dish of horseradish I didn’t like./I mean you’re a twisted and ugly root/and I’m the pungent, stinging firmness inside./I mean I look so good in this hat/with a feather/and I’m a feather/and I’m the heaviest featherweight you know./I mean you can’t spell anything I talk about/with that sorry alphabet you have left over from yesterday.) Maybe I’ll scribe letters for you — to Morgan, Jan, Barbara. Maybe none of that will happen. But these are the things I think about as I watch you burst out of our backyard gate at 4:50 AM, full of determination to take your walk up to Mt. Tabor that you will not always be able to take.

And finally, there is the you I experience in relationship to our beautiful buglet. Augie, like me, has never known a world where you are not a fixture of reality. I am always now seeing you through their eyes. I am noticing what they experience and can articulate about you now: your intelligence (explaining politics, for example), generosity (“She reads to me and buys me stuff.”), skills (“She’s SUCH a great cook.”), friendship (“Nana let’s me talk to her the whole walk to Andrew’s.”); but I am also anticipating what they’ll realize later, perhaps after you are gone, about what you were to them. I wonder if they’ll realize how rare it is to be loved so richly, with such loyalty and devotion, every single day. I wonder if they will see how much you let them inject themself into your life and rejigger it in all sorts of ways, from all the books you read to them (and now they to you!) that you’d never read in a million years on your own, to movies at the Bagdad, to nightly violin practice, and how seldom people let us disrupt their worlds in those ways or to that degree. This love aches because though I once assured you I would be fine when you died (I will!), I now know Augie will not. Of course, they WILL be fine, in the existential sense. But in the short term, they will be so heartbroken by your loss. And their heartbreak will also be mine.

So the love I have for you at 81 is a bit of a hydra. There is the love I feel for the you-always-and-ever, the love I feel for you-needing-me-in-the-future, and the love I feel for you-to-Augie-now-and-as-a-loss-in-the-future. Though many-headed, it is attached to a single body and that body is love. Mama, I love you so much. Now and forever and beyond.

Happy birthday!

Your girl,

Ursula