My mother, Barbara Rider, died at almost 92 on April 15.
Now it’s Mother’s Day, and for the first time in my 65 years, I have no Mom to send a card to.
I was not an easy child, and mine was not an easy childhood. My father died at 59 of too much alcohol and too little hope.
I became what Al-Anon calls the Family Hero, the one sent into the world to overachieve to hide the shame of home.
But Mom was a real hero.
Somehow she found enough money to keep us going, for lunch at school and for sweaters against the cold.
Mom always took my side, gently guiding me, and I still remember her laughter.
Mom was and is now forever close to God. People say they pray and read the Bible, but she really did. She taught me the Shorter Catechism when I was 6 or 7: "What is the chief end of Man?" was the first question in this little booklet. "To glorify God and enjoy Him forever." Mom did that.
She was not great with cooking and sewing: My Boy Scout merit badges, all 17 of them, hung loosely from few threads.
But she taught me tolerance and to keep my word and that the main lesson of Jesus was that we should be of service "to the least of these," the hungry and thirsty and people needing clothes.
From Micah in the Old Testament she taught and believed: "What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God."
My sister is also a real hero. She and her husband took in our mother when senility came for her.
My sister and her husband did the heavy lifting these past years, dealing with the medical paperwork and doctors and others who can confuse even the undemented.
Barbara Bold Rider was taught for the first several years by one of the first Montessori teachers in America, her mother, Elizabeth, who had gone to Syracuse University at age 16. Barbara attended Friends School in Brooklyn from about the fifth grade until college. She graduated from Adelphi College on Long Island in 1938, a week after marrying my father.
On scholarship, Barbara was one of the Adelphi seniors who paid visits to wealthy New Yorkers to raise money to keep the college open during the Great Depression. She studied economics.
In Richmond, Va., where I was born, she was a leader in the PTA and the League of Women Voters. With one of those groups, she had tea in the Rose Garden with President Truman.
She found great churches for us to attend, to be close to sacred things and to understand the basis of our faith: "Leave self behind and take up your cross and follow Me." God’s tough love.
Mom loved being the matriarch of lots and lots of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She saw herself as the bedrock of the family, the steady one who could be counted on always.
I have grieved before and will again. But not like this. Wherever I was in the wider world, Mom was in my heart and mind, accepting and encouraging me to be strong and kind and loving.
She taught us that "Nothing can separate us from the love of God." Her passing makes it true.
Mother’s Day 2008 will be a day of both gratitude and sadness. The first one ever without Mom.