Jane Heller

New York Times and USA Today Bestselling Author

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Mother’s Day Is Coming Up and I Had Some Thoughts….

May 5, 2017

(Posted on Medium.com)

A Mother’s Day Card for Daughters Without Mothers

                        My mother and I on my wedding day

If, like me, you’re in your 60s (give or take a decade), it hasn’t escaped you that our mothers are dropping like flies — or are about to. We’re losing them at an alarming rate because they are on the front lines, the elders, the longest sufferers of dementia and heart disease and cancer, the ones whose bodies have given out, and it is their time to go.

As a result, we have become the motherless generation, and, although we appear normal to outsiders, showing up for work and tending to our families and friends and soldiering on with our lives, we are the walking wounded. We have been de-mothered, as in decapitated — a violent analogy, yes, but it’s as if we’ve had a piece of ourselves chopped off. Ask a woman whose mother has died; she’ll tell you how much she hurts.

If you fall into the de-mothered category, May 14th will be a complicated day for you. There will be no gifts for Mom this year, no flowers, no cards, no phone calls, no visits during which kisses, hugs and “I love you’s” figure prominently. We are all orphans now.

My mother died in November at 99. Our family was fully expecting her to make it to 100 in January. When you live that long, we reasoned, why not live forever? Besides, she was declining but stable, slowing down but hanging in. We were so confident that she’d be around for 100 that we were planning her annual birthday celebration at the Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle Hotel, where she needed little urging to get up and belt out “I Could Have Danced All Night” with the piano player. She no longer remembered how old she was or whether she’d been married or where she put her handbag, but she remembered every lyric to the song. Then, seemingly out of the blue, her health took a downward turn. She had always feared death, and she lingered for days in that nebulous zone, afraid to let go no matter how often we told her it was okay and at the same time calling out names of relatives who’d passed on, as if she could see them. She was our touchstone, the matriarch whose family meant everything to her, and she worried about us, worried we wouldn’t be able to manage without her. It was no surprise, according to the hospice nurse, that she finally slipped away in the wee hours of the morning when none of us was there to watch her go.

At first, I didn’t have time to grieve. I was arranging the funeral, planning the memorial luncheon, interviewing real estate agents to sell her house, hiring a stager to render the furnishings more contemporary and, after we found a buyer, to conduct a tag sale to liquidate the contents.

It was once every last trace of Mom was carted off that I allowed myself to feel the intense loss of her. I kept a few of her sweaters and didn’t dry clean them, so I could hang them in my closet and smell her scent. I kept one of her favorite coats, and whenever I wear it I imagine her cloaked in it alongside me. I have a shopping bag full of old pictures of her and I look at each photo and ask, “Who were you when that one was taken, Mom? What were you thinking? Were you happy?”

But it’s the scrapbook filled with clippings of the essays she wrote for The New York Times that make me feel her loss most keenly — essays about domestic life in the suburbs. One of her pieces was about a period in our relationship that pained her, a period during which I was less than a devoted daughter. I was busy with my career in book publishing, busy with a new marriage, busy with my friends. I either didn’t make time for her or was dismissive when I did, stingy with my affection, and she felt stung when I rebuffed each overture. Part of my big chill stemmed from my belief that we had little in common and that she couldn’t relate to my career, my interests or my romantic entanglements. The other part was pure rebellion; I had left the nest, and what I did and with whom was none of her business.

Her essays had happy endings, though, and this one was no exception. I had a crisis and she was there for me without hesitation, thrilled to be needed at last, thrilled that I had let her back into my life, thrilled that we were close again. I cry every time I read that essay. I wish she knew how sorry I am for having shut her out. I wish she knew that she shouldn’t have had to make do with my crumbs. I wish she could hear me say, “You were the best mother. I love you.”

As Mother’s Day approaches, I’m determined not to dread the occasion. I still have a mother to honor; she’s just not here physically. Where is she exactly? Beats me. I don’t pretend to know where people go when they die. Maybe she’s in that pretty cashmere outfit she wore to her funeral, floating among us kids, observing us, nudging us to be decent, caring human beings. Or maybe she’s in heaven cavorting with other dead people, leading a book group the way she used to on earth, playing a little bridge, a little golf, getting reacquainted with the two men she married and outlived. It heartens me to try to figure out what she’s up to or whether she’s simply enjoying a well-earned, eternal sleep.

Since she’s not around, this year’s Mother’s Day card is going out to all the other daughters without mothers — to you who are feeling a sense of abandonment you can’t always express, you who wake up in the middle of the night disoriented because the natural order of things has been irrevocably altered, you who regret those moments when you took her for granted or overreacted to a perceived slight or resented her for mothering too much or too little, you who no longer have a buffer, you who could use a boost. I get it, get what you’re going through, get what we’re all going through, and I’m here for you. This year I’m bypassing the cards that say, “Dear Mom, I’m thinking of you on your special day.” Instead, I’m sending you a custom card that says, “Dear Friend, I’m thinking of you on this especially tough day. I’m cheering you on as you step up to the front lines. We’re in this together.”

Filed Under: Mainly Jane Tagged With: death, grief, Mother's Day, mothers and daughters

It’s Been a Long Time – and a Long Winter

March 31, 2017

I haven’t written a Mainly Jane post for months, and I can’t blame the snow. But Northwest Connecticut sure did get a lot of the white stuff and after living in California for many years I wasn’t thrilled about it. But spring is here (except it’s supposed to snow again today – ugh) and I decided to jump back on the blog.

The real reason I haven’t written a new post is because my mother died in November and I’ve not only been grieving the loss of her but handling her affairs – from the sale of her house to the giant tag sale there a couple of weeks ago. She and I were very close and I miss her everyday. Here we are at my wedding almost 25 years ago.

She was a writer herself, having had her essays about domestic life published in the Westchester section of The New York Times. An avid reader too, she ran her book group for many years. But it was her steadfast championing of my writing career that meant the most to me. Whenever I had a new book published, she was first in line at her local bookstore buying copies for herself and all her friends. She also had a great sense of humor. If I got a bad review, she’d curl her lip and say, “I’ll break their kneecaps.”  The threat always made me laugh because she was tiny and gracious and decidedly not prone to violence. But she had my back – always.

It’s no wonder that my latest novel, the second draft of which I’ve just finished, focuses on a mother and daughter. It’s about grief too, but I hope I’ve handled the subject with humor and heart. I’m waiting for my editor to weigh in on this latest draft and then we’ll see where it goes.

In other news, one of my older novels, Name Dropping, about two women with the same name whose identities get mixed up, is being shopped in Hollywood again.

When it was first published, it was optioned for a feature film by Miramax and the screenwriters of “Legally Blonde” were hired to write the script. But as with so many book options, this one never went anywhere. Now, two new producers are hoping for a TV movie adaptation. Fingers crossed.

More to come now that I’ve emerged from hibernation!

Filed Under: Mainly Jane Tagged With: Connecticut, grief, Mainly Jane, mothers and daughters, Name Dropping, winter snow

My Friend Died, and It Sucks

August 4, 2015

Laurie & Peter in SB

Michael and I were living in Florida, about to move to LA, when I got an email from a woman named Laurie Burrows Grad. She said she was chairing a Penn Women Author Event to commemorate 100 years of women at the University of Pennsylvania, where I attended the Annenberg School of Communications. She asked if I’d be willing to participate. I wrote back thanking her for thinking of me but explained that I was overwhelmed with my imminent move to Los Angeles. She wrote back that she lived in LA and that if I needed anything when I got there, I shouldn’t hesitate to call her. “And you’ll come for dinner and meet my husband Peter,” she added.

“How nice is that?” I said to Michael. “They don’t even know us.”

Laurie and I continued to email and we discovered we’d soon be neighbors, that the Beverly Hills duplex Michael and I had rented was only blocks away from her house. She offered yet again to have us over for dinner and we looked forward to it.

On our first night in our Beverly Hills rental, friendless and furniture-less, since our stuff was on a Mayflower van making its way across the country, Michael and I were surprised by a knock on the door. It was Laurie and Peter with shopping bags containing goodies to eat and drink and little battery-operated lights we could put on the floor by our air mattress until our lamps arrived.

“How nice is that?” I repeated to Michael.

Laurie was beautiful inside and out, I discovered, and Peter was hilarious with the ability to mock you in such an endearing way that you didn’t mind being mocked. (The first time he saw me, he nicknamed me “Bones.” Normally, when people joke that I’m skinny or scrawny or bony, it makes me mad, but Peter? I loved that he had a special name for me, just like he had special names for all his close pals, because he said it with such affection.)  Both he and Laurie had huge hearts, and the word “generous” didn’t begin to describe them. (And I’m not just talking about the fact that they’d raised millions of dollars for the Alzheimer’s Association as a result of their “A Night at Sardi’s” benefits.) Oh and one more thing: they adored each other. You could see it in their eyes, in the way they treated each other, in the way they touched each other. When you were around Laurie and Peter, you were thrilled to be in their orbit.

And we were definitely in their orbit. Laurie and I would talk on the phone forever and then email right after. Michael, who doesn’t make friends easily or often, couldn’t get enough of Peter. While Laurie and I would be in her kitchen kibbitzing, he and Peter would be downstairs watching porn channels on TV and laughing like idiot boys waiting for their mothers to scold them. We’d go out for dinner. We’d go to the movies. We’d spend New Year’s Eves together and Oscar night and all the rest. And when they said, “We’re staying at a friend’s on the beach in Santa Barbara for the weekend. Want to come?” we not only said yes but became so enamored of Santa Barbara that we moved there.

I was emailing and texting with Laurie this past weekend while she and Peter were on their annual trip to Vail. She was telling me what a good time they were having and I was telling her the latest about CT, where Michael and I had bought a house in April to spend more time with my mother. I missed the Grads now that I was on the East Coast again, but we’d recently had lunch with them when they came to NYC and we pledged to spend more time together when we flew back to CA over the winter.

Then came a terrible phone call on Sunday morning: Peter had died.

Just like that. While I was sleeping. While I was completely in the dark.

I woke up assuming they were enjoying their last day in Vail and instead Laurie was dealing with the loss of her beloved Petey. How could this be true? How could someone who’d been so alive, so vital, be here one minute and gone the next? I couldn’t fathom it. With one big exception, I’d been remarkably lucky in the friend department when it came to good health. Yes, I had just turned Medicare age, but all my buddies were fine, a few aches, pains and prescription drugs aside.

Not Peter, apparently.

No one didn’t love Peter Grad. No one. He could walk into a room and charm even the crabbiest person. He could play a round a golf with Joe Schmo and the President of the United States and put them both at ease. He could elicit a laugh even on your gloomiest day and then order you a pizza or grill you a steak. (No one made eating as much fun as Peter. With him, food was entertainment.)

Laurie is bereft, naturally, and I feel helpless that I can’t take her pain away. I wish my mother didn’t have dementia so I could ask her what her friends did or said that most comforted her after my father died.

I only hope that the outpouring Laurie’s getting from people will ease her grief a little. She did have the good fortune to be married to the love of her life for a very long time. May the gift of that sustain her.

RIP, Petey.

 

Filed Under: Food, Humor, Lifestyle, Mainly Jane, Movies, Television, Wellness Tagged With: A Night at Sardi's, Abe Burrows, Alzheimer's Association, friendship, grief, James Burrows, Laurie Burrows Grad, Peter Grad

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About Jane Heller

Jane Heller is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author. Her fourteen breezy, witty novels of romantic comedy and suspense are now entertaining millions of readers around the world, along with her two books of nonfiction.

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