It had been a hard year for my mother. In August, she buried her younger sister whose cancer returned after a 30-year hiatus in a swift and devastating sucker punch.
Less than three months later, she lost her best friend, a woman I knew as “Aunt Ginny.” They had spoken weekly — sometimes daily — since kindergarten. A widow, Aunt Ginny died alone in her apartment after suffering a fall in her bathroom, a turn of events she would have found pitiably commonplace. She was a Bronx-born raconteur and was the first of a tightly knit circle of five to pass. Her wake was held on my mother’s 75th birthday.
When Aunt Ginny’s adult children asked my mother if she would be willing to help clean out her apartment, my mother, selfless and strong, agreed. I worried it would be too much for her physically and emotionally. So much sadness, so short a window. Of course, she had lost friends before, but none this close.
The home of her sister, my actual aunt, remained untouched. My aunt’s daughter, my cousin, chose to wait. She was asking herself the same question I did: Can you dismantle a life, break it down into boxes, watch it divided, stored or hauled away, and then carry on with your evening? Your weekend? Your life? Her answer was a firm “no.”
On her way back from a day of sorting through Aunt Ginny’s clothing, china and photographs, my mother stopped at my home bearing a bag filled with scarves.
“How did it go?” I asked tentatively.
“She always complained about the parking. There were plenty of spots.” Her exasperation had nothing to do with the lot. She was angry with her friend for leaving without saying goodbye.
Moving as deftly as a Manhattan street vendor, my mother arranged the scarves across my kitchen table. We stood, admiring them: florals, plaids, paisley, a kaleidoscope of color, as bold and vibrant as my aunt herself.
“What are you going to do with them all?” I asked, fearing that my mother, with a penchant for small-scale hoarding, would allow all this silk to rest in the corner of a couch for months. Waiting.
I thought of Joan Didion’s account, in “The Year of Magical Thinking,” of her reluctance to give away her husband’s shoes because she believed he’d need them when he returned.
I wondered if my mother was thinking that way too. But she chose the opposite.
“I’m going to mail them to Eileen, Mary, Pat, Jean,” she said. “I thought we should all have one.”
It is fitting. For decades they had been each other’s go-to accessory, together through hope and disappointment, love and loss, births and, now, death.
“I think she’d like the idea of her scarves venturing back out into the world, having new adventures,” I wanted to say but didn’t. I was a writer grappling for words. For the past 47 years, it had been my mother comforting me — broken bone, bruised ego, recurrent miscarriage, career setbacks.
I wanted to be there for her in the way she had always been for me, with a ready ear, a sturdy shoulder and a wide-open heart.
“This is the one she got in Paris, and remember this? I think she wore it to Nancy’s baby shower,” my mother smiled at her recollection.
The way clothing evokes memory, and its innate ability to comfort, wasn’t new to me. When my husband lost his job after 18 years at the same company, he sought solace inside a fleece cocoon. For days, as depression took hold, he wore a black pullover, the top half of a sweatsuit given to him by his uncle, half in jest, as a nod to our New Jersey roots. “You’ll look just like Tony Soprano,” his uncle teased.
This garment telegraphed his mood, his need for warmth and protection in a cold, harsh world. When I see it now, it takes me straight back to some of our darkest days. I want to burn it, or donate it to charity. Perhaps someone else needs it. At the same time, I wonder: Should we keep it and let it serve as a reminder to be grateful we’re in a better place?
In my kitchen my mother surveyed the scarves. “Pick one,” she said. “She’d want you to have one too.”
I pictured my aunt, tall and trim, an ever-present hint of mischief in her twinkling chestnut eyes, the stem of a wine glass held between her long, manicured fingers. I thought about the friendship she, my mother and their mutual friends shared. They knew and celebrated one another’s birthdays and wedding anniversaries without the help of Facebook reminders. I can hear their endless calls, long, curling cords of rotary phones stretched across avocado kitchens, my mother throwing her head back laughing while making dinner with one hand.
“This one looks like Eileen. I could see Pat in this,” my mother said.
As we decided who should receive which one, my mother turned them over in her hands, the knuckles of her once-delicate fingers now curved and bulging in odd directions. She was lost in thought and I wanted to ask what she was remembering. She had the ability to vividly recall the past. I was in a place where I could only look forward.
I offered her some puffy mailer envelopes, a paper and pen. “We can package them now, send them out in the morning,” I volunteered.
But she wanted to go home and wrap them properly, with tissue paper and personal notes. She is always doing more while I consistently trade thoughtfulness for expediency.
Amid a constant swirl of work and family obligations, I have lost track of friends in my own town. I respond to a text with an emoji, hoping it is enough in that moment, knowing it isn’t. I realized my mother was providing a master class in caring and friendship.
My mother mailed my Aunt Ginny’s scarves. Within days, the thank-you calls began. Together, she and her friends laughed, cried and remembered.
I like to picture them. From Boston to the Bronx, North Carolina to New Jersey, each woman, myself included, going about her day, wearing one of my aunt’s scarves, not as a mourning shawl, but as a wrap woven with memory. Not as protective armor steeling us against whatever comes next, but as the best kind of tourniquets, bright flags helping us survive.
Elizabeth Alterman is a freelance writer.