Moms are supposed to die before their children, so a child's first Mother's Day without their mother feels less like an absolute tragedy than a tragic rite of passage. And on my Norwegian side, Sunday is the first Mother's Day when all the moms will be gone.
My grandmother (mor mor in Norwegian, “mother's mother”) died in 2014 due to a chronic illness. Her daughter, my mother, died last year after a brief, catastrophic illness. My great-aunt, the last surviving member of our family who uprooted herself from Norway and came to California, died peacefully in February.
For a family made up of immigrants, a Mother's Day without matriarchs adds a new dimension to the occasion. It compounds the pain felt by the loss of extraordinary people.
And these women were extraordinary. This time of year I used to tell my mom that her motherhood wasn't the most interesting thing about her.
She was a nurse at Los Angeles General Medical Center and commanded the respect and deference of doctors. On a flight we took 15 years ago, when a doctor or nurse was called on board, the only doctor stepped aside when he realized that my mother was the most capable caregiver for the affected passenger.
He took needy patients home after work, much to the concern of his bosses. When homeless people asked for change, she would hand them a $20 bill, if that was what she had on her. A devout Lutheran, she was the kind of person who saw Jesus in everyone, even if she had to look very carefully.
I shared these memories with her a year ago as she lay in a hospital bed with lymphoma in her brain. That Sunday was her last Mother's Day.
After my mother died in August, the first person I wanted to see was my great aunt Margot. Mom was, well, my mom, and she will always be that irreplaceable presence on Mother's Day, but Margot was he undisputed family matriarch.
He emigrated from Norway to the United States in the 1950s, around the same time as my grandmother, his younger sister. They both lived through six years of Nazi occupation and I learned a lot simply listening to them talk.
Margot outlived all of her siblings, and when I saw her that August day last year, she was 99 years old, almost completely confined to her home in Glendale, saddened by her niece's death and worried that I hadn't eaten enough. enough.
Because if there was something my so much Margot could solve it, it was hunger or feeling lost.
If you were at their house, even on a Tuesday night, you could expect to be fed a protein, a starch, and something green; Whatever it was, you would return home with at least a thousand calories. Norwegians passing through town had to be only distant relatives, if anything, to expect an offer of lodging and food. Due solely to her indefatigable hospitality, in some parts of the old country she may well have been Glendale's most famous resident.
When I saw her the day after my mother died, all she could offer me was a drink and a conversation, so I enjoyed both with her. (An aside: if you have the opportunity to talk to someone who has seen a century of history, take it.) Although she rarely left her house anymore, she promised to attend my mother's memorial service.
And she did it. That hunched, hesitant walk of a 99-year-old woman toward the church was the most heroic act of love toward my mother that I saw that afternoon, and it might have been her final act as matriarch of the family.
Is this a final, unforeseen stage of assimilation, in which direct ties to the old country are virtually severed and accents fade as the first and second generations die? I'm seriously resisting this and finally trying to strike up a conversation in Norwegian, but conversations are difficult to achieve without more native speakers around.
At least, and finally, I have learned to say “Happy Mother's Day” in Norwegian: Gratulerer med morsdagen. Too bad there's no one left who understands it.
