My mother Elizabeth was born on August 12, 1925, the first pancake of what they called “The Greatest Generation.”
She died 21 years ago on December 29, 2004. I was 46.
My mother’s death prompted me to start a blog.1 Who knew?
She wouldn’t have know what “a blog” was, and she wouldn’t have read it. She was a New Yorker and Sunday Times crossword loyalist.
Nevertheless, my first blogging week, I made a virtual photo album of my Mama memories. I’ve returned many times since to stare at these pictures, as I start to approach her final years myself. I keep seeing Elizabeth differently.
I never knew my mother as a “friend” or someone I would talk to, woman-to-woman, eye-to-eye. I was her little girl, always, whether beloved or scorned.
Especially after her death, I would hear from her library patrons, students from her high school classrooms, young people she mentored, who raved how wonderful she was to them, how supportive, how they could “tell her anything.”
What? I was bewildered. It wa…