[This was something that struck me a few months after the passing of my mom.]

I waited for my mom to call last night. I caught myself waiting for it. And she never did.

She used to call me every Sunday night, unless she was someplace that didn’t have a phone, or she got home late. I looked forward to that call, every week, every Sunday night. And I thought that I’d accepted that she was gone, until the call didn’t come last night. That was the first time I realized I was waiting for the phone to ring, like she was going to check in with me. Like she used to.

That was the first time that I really understood that she was gone. I think I kept expecting to pick up the phone and hear, “Well, hullo, Willie!” (It always came out “Wully” the way she said it.)

I have some of her ashes. I’m going to bury them someplace in the backyard.  It’s an inside joke. When I was very young, I got in trouble frequently for leaving the yard, and going around the block.

“Stay in the yard, Billy,” she’d say, and pop back in the house. And I guess I’d just walk away, and go for a walk around the block. (Even now, I’m not very good at doing as I’m told; ask anyone.) Anyway, I got grounded a lot to the backyard. “Stay in the yard, Billy,” she’d say, and away I’d go. When she found me–she always found me–she’d put me in the backyard and tell me I was not to leave, that I’d been grounded. I got grounded so often that I once told her, “When you die, I’m going to bury you in the backyard.” When she asked why, I apparently informed her that I’d be able to see her all the time because I was grounded back there so often.

So I have some of her ashes. (There’s a little of my dad in there, too, and I can just hear him: “How the Hell did I get involved in this?”) Sometime in the next few months, I’m going to find a place for her–for them–in the yard of this house from which I’m never going to move.

My mom was so accepting of me, and took me as I am. Even if I said the wrong thing, or the right thing in the wrong way, she still smiled at me, and made me feel like I was perfect just the way I was. I’m sure I disappointed her at times, but the only real displeasure she ever expressed to me was that I worried her. I think I worried her more than the other kids. It took me so long to grow up, and there were such dark moments along the way, and I’m afraid I provided more than one sleepless night.

But she always had a smile for me.

Even if I were occasionally raunchy–my sense of humor is a lot like my dad’s, which is to say it tends toward the off-color or the irreverent–my mom would just sort of roll her eyes and groan, smiling all the while. (I remember watching some old home movie once, and it was Thanksgiving. My mom was leaning on the arm of my dad’s chair, and he, devilish gleam in his eye, reached up and tweaked her breast. Of course she slapped his hand away, but she was smiling all the while. Not to say she approved of it, only that she loved him, regardless or perhaps even because of his impish sense of humor.) Like my dad, I often cross that line between what’s acceptable socially and what is decidedly not, but my mom never made me feel like I was bad or wrong. Pushing the boundaries, maybe, or misbehaving, but never wrong…or bad. She laughed a lot at me, and that’s something that, even now, fills me with love and the longing to see her again.

You hear a lot of people talk about how someone “was a saint,” but I really don’t think they’re all that serious. I am. My mom was a saint. Ask anyone. Ask Mr. Ragland, my sixth grade teacher…he’ll tell you. Ask any of her students: many of them have told me how much they liked my mom. She couldn’t tell a joke to save her life, but she would give you the shirt off her back, and she was filled with an irrepressible goodness you’d be hard-pressed to find as consistently anywhere else. She was delivering Meals on Wheels almost right up until the day that she went into the hospital a little over a year ago, when she probably should have been receiving a few. But not my mom; she’d never ask for help, even if she really needed it.

The only help I ever really remember her asking for was something to read; she ripped through every book I had in the house, and was always willing to give something a chance. I don’t recall her not finishing one of them, either, even if they might be a little graphic or vulgar, as John Irving can sometimes be. We’d trade books, something we’d read that we thought the other might like, and watched movies together, and talk about what we thought happened after the book had ended. Did Conrad Jarrett’s father get back together with his mother? Mom didn’t think so. (I don’t think so, either, but I hadn’t read the book yet, at that point.)

I really think–and I don’t know because I wasn’t there, but I think–that it was the loss of the ability to read that really sounded the end for my mom. When the last joy of her life was no longer possible, I don’t think her day-to-day life was all that enjoyable anymore. Sure, she’d miss all the kids and grandkids and the dogs and even the cats…but without a book to read? Well, that was really no life at all.

Oh, I can’t do her justice. I can try, but you can’t describe the twinkle in her eye when I did my famous “Superman” impression, rapidly followed by the conversation at the door with an unseen person offstage, who would continue to interrupt my conversation with my mother until that offstage person physically throttled me and removed me from the ‘stage.’ It was just a goofy act, but it tickled my mom, and that was all that mattered. Or the Christmas when I couldn’t afford to buy presents because I’m a selfish bastard, and so I did a reading of Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” for whomever was willing to sit there and listen. My mom did. My niece and my nephew did. My dad did the dishes. But my mom…she listened to the whole thing. She always, always encouraged me, us, in whatever we did.

My mom always looked so tired at Christmas. It was her favorite holiday, I think, and she did it better than anyone. I don’t mean decorating the house better than anyone else did; she loved to “go look at the lights,” but was fairly simple in her own decorations. But she loved to bake cookies, and trim the tree (more on that in a minute), and sing, and she and I loved to watch “It’s A Wonderful Life” each year, before they showed it fifteen-gazillion times each season–colorized, no less, thanks to Ted Turner. But I don’t know anyone who kept and celebrated Christmas like my mom. Stockings for everyone, and I mean everyone–even the cats got stockings. I depended on the deodorant in mine each year, and giggled at the silly gifts we would always find: air freshener for the car, batteries, a comb, and always an orange or an apple, without fail. That was my mom: without fail.

Oh, she had her faults, though you’d really have to look for them. One was the Christmas tree. Every year, Mom didn’t want to “put it up too soon.” Everyone else was slapping theirs up as soon as the turkey leftovers were bagged up, but not Mom. No way. We were not allowed to put ours up until December 22nd at the earliest. (I’m not lying–ask anyone in my family.) We’d keep it up until January 5th or 6th, but that baby went up no earlier than the 22nd of December. (Maybe the 21st, if it was a Sunday.) And we always had a real tree–something I miss–and we didn’t buy it the first week of December and then hold onto it for a few weeks. We waited until it was time to put it up, and most often got it from the corner lot on Van Born and Campbell. (And if you wonder if my mom was hot, let me tell you, she was beautiful. I remember the dude who ran the Christmas tree lot on the corner across from K-Mart, and him asking Mom if she wanted to “go into the trailer for a drink.” With me standing right there. Yeah, that’s some serious balls, but it also tells you that my mom was pretty attractive. Anyway, I digress.)

At any rate, one year, we waited too long. She finally sent me and my brother Alex (we call him ‘Sandy’) out for a tree, and I swear to God that there was nothing left. We take heat about that tree until this day, but I swear to you now that the tree we got was the best one left. We went to two places at least, possibly three, and nothing was as good as the one we brought home.

It looked like it had lost a fight with a shark.

Sandy and I still get ribbed about that tree because no one would dare accuse my mother of waiting too long. Because, simply put, she never thought about herself. She did things for others, and went without herself, more often than not. That was her job, as she saw it, to do for others.

And she did it until she couldn’t anymore.

God, do I ever miss her.