This month I am experiencing my first birthday without my mother, Mitzy. She took her final breaths on June 1st at the age of 92, surrounded by five of her nine children. She had been drifting away for several months, and we could no longer communicate over the phone. I haven’t been well enough to travel, so I relied on my siblings to communicate my love to her. I feel so grateful that she had such a long life, and a peaceful gentle death.

It is really quite amazing that I had 72 birthdays while she was alive. She would love to share with me the stories of my birth, her first born. How my dad didn’t make it because he was in the army and I came before my due date. He arrived a couple days later after driving through the night from his base down south. My mom was living with her mother while he was away, and my aunt Nancy and uncle Jim brought my mom to the hospital. In those days, it was common to sedate women giving birth, so even though I was born about 10 p.m., I didn’t really meet my mother face to face until the next morning. She would describe her astonishment at this “little Mitzy” in her arms. She was hoping for a girl, and decided to name me Mike, because she’d babysat a little girl named Mike, and thought it was a cute unusual name for a girl. (I changed the spelling later in life.) In those early days, before I could remember anything, I know that I was loved and cherished and welcomed into this life.

So now that I have reached my 73rd birthday, I suddenly realize that there is no longer anyone who was present on that day. That cloud of witnesses have all passed beyond this world. My aunt Nancy died only last November at the age of 100. My own siblings were not yet born. Such a strange feeling–to be the holder of these stories without the others who lived them and told them to me. And I know how lucky I am, that I had so many years to share the stories and the love held within them. I think that is why I needed to tell the stories to myself today here in writing, to remember.

I imagine that this moment comes to everyone who lives long enough say goodbye to their parents, and to be the oldest in the family. A kind of entry into another layer of elderhood. I am not a mother or grandmother, but I am an aunt, a great-aunt, and even a great-great aunt. And always, the oldest sister.

Here is another picture of my mother and me, from 2010. We certainly had our challenges over the years. There were many things about my life that took me far away from hers, both literally and figuratively. But there was always at the root, love. Here is a link to her obituary that describes more of her life as she understood and lived it. https://www.leavittfuneralhome.com/obituaries/Carol-Louise-Mitzy-Johnson

Thanks mom, for giving birth to me, for welcoming me into the world, and into your heart, for always keeping the doors of your heart open for me and so many others, too. You taught me hospitality, fairness, warmth, kindness, and always sticking up for the underdog.