The First-Withouts
[a birthday remembrance]
[This essay was first published elsewhere on July 29, 2021, and I’m republishing it here almost exactly as it was published then, except without the cajoling subheads and the barrage of popup ads. So noting up front that today would have been my mother’s ninety-fifth birthday . . .]
Today would have been my mother’s ninety-second birthday.
You might think that a language bountiful enough to include words for 125th anniversary (quasquicentennial), to jump or to be pushed out a window (defenestrate) and the thing before the thing before the final thing (antepenultimate) would include a word for so momentous an occasion as a first posthumous birthday, but there is, so far as I know, no such animal in English.
My mother died on May 8, barely three days after coming home from what we had assured her would be her final sojourn in a hospital. (This stay was relatively minor, or at least as minor as a stay in a hospital can be for an old lady. Her blood numbers were off, and she needed, as we had taken to calling it, a fill-up. In the past, these transfusion trips had taken a few hours or perhaps gone on overnight; this one, by the time all the various numbers were where they were supposed to be, had stretched to five days.) From this point on, we—my sister, my nephew, and I—promised, she would not have to travel for medical assistance; medical assistance would come to her. The word “hospice” was unavoidable, but, we explained, it was just a word for the shift in her care, not a directive, much less an invitation.
Perhaps she thought otherwise. She had always made up her own mind about things. Why should this thing be any different? She came home from the hospital Wednesday night, she began to fade in earnest on Thursday, Friday she was largely silent, Saturday evening she was gone. I think she was simply worn out, not only in body but in spirit.
Much is made on social media of Mother’s Day, in honor of the living, in memory of the dead, particularly in regard to that first stinging Mother’s Day without one’s mother. Mother’s Day this year was May 9, the day after her death: Well, at least we got that one out of the way right away, I thought. Two days later was my birthday, and another one ticked off the list. (I was born on Mother’s Day. “You were quite a present” was my mother’s annual comment on the subject.)
I’ve taken to thinking of these landmarks as the first-withouts.
A bit out of left field, but June 12 is Anne Frank’s birthday. It had long been a habit of mine to point out to those who consider the Holocaust ancient history that Anne Frank was born in 1929, barely five weeks before my mother. Which would then lead me to point out that my mother, not by any means a figure of ancient history, was alive and well and living reasonably contentedly on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, reading her books, playing computer solitaire, minding (quite well) the family finances, making the occasional trip to Broadway or Lincoln Center to take in this play or that musical. This year, though, June 12 came and went and I had nothing much to say on the subject. Another first-without.
Somewhere in there was a noteworthy first-with: the first time after her death she visited me in a dream. We were FaceTime-ing, as I recall, and as we were wrapping up our call she asked me if I was coming to dinner that night. I can’t make it tonight, I explained. Of course I can’t make it tonight, I was thinking. You’re dead. The next morning I recounted the dream to my husband, who said, “Oh! Next time you absolutely must talk to her about her being dead! She might have a lot to tell you!” I haven’t had another chance since then, but I’ll be ready.
And today is her birthday, a particularly momentous first-without, and I will spend the day thinking about her, as I’ve spent a good bit of every day these past weeks. As time passes, I think less of her death (I’ve deleted from my phone the two photos I took, the one as she was dying, the one as she was in death, and filed them away where I can easily find them but won’t accidentally happen upon them), more of her absence, and even more, I’m relieved to note, of her life.
Her name was Diana, by the way. Perhaps you were wondering. In her youth, she had lettered in swimming. She married my father and navigated an often nettlesome relationship with him till he died last year. She was a capable and dutiful cook. She read incessantly, so it pleased her that I work in publishing because, among other things, it enabled me to feed her voracious book habit. And when, nearly three years ago, she read the bound galley of the book I had written, she gave it the best review I could have hoped for: “It sounds exactly like you.”
There are only a few more noteworthy first-withouts to come: The High Holidays, and reciting, on Yom Kippur, kaddish, the God-hailing prayer for the dead that we are regularly reminded makes no mention of death, will be, to put it mildly, resonant. Thanksgiving, I predict, won’t carry much weight. In the past we ate and told family stories. This year we’ll eat and tell family stories; she just won’t be there. Eventually May 8 will come around again, that momentous first-without, and it will have been a year. Not only a year from the day of her death but also Mother’s Day, all in one succinct package. And perhaps a heavy door that has been ajar will, on that day, close somewhat firmly—though not, never, entirely.
In the meantime, as a wise friend noted, “Your mother would not want you to be in pain over her death, but your grief honors her.” And so I continue to grieve, as is my right and responsibility.
And this, I must point out, is its own first-without: the first bit of writing I’ve ever written that she will not have read.
2024 addendum:
In my Twitter days I’d occasionally recount some exploit of my mother’s, or a bit of her pleasingly brusque wisdom, and in doing so I took to referring to her as Mother Dreyer (something no one on earth would ever dare or even think to call her to her face), and it amused her to know that she had a semi-independent online persona and a devoted fanbase.
Perhaps her most notable claim to fame concerns an addictively good side dish she regularly prepared when my sister and I were growing up and continued to prepare until she finally stopped cooking, not all that long before her death: little potatoes, nicely oranged with paprika, and heated up in the oven. In my early twenties, as I was beginning to teach myself to cook, I tried any number of times to re-create the dish, but no matter how many times I bought a dozen or so new potatoes, peeled them, parboiled them first, didn’t parboil them first, etc., I couldn’t ever, in any way, reproduce the dish properly. I mean, not even close.
Eventually, of course, it occurred to me to ask my mother how it’s done.
“Well, you take two cans of white potatoes . . .” she began.
“What?”
Without further ado:
Mother Dreyer’s Small Potatoes1
Toss 1 or 2 cans small white potatoes2 in a Pyrex dish with oil,3 garlic salt,4 and paprika,5 then bake for an hour, uncovered, at 350°, turning them occasionally.6
They’re very good with roast chicken or pot roast, which you’ve probably already figured out.
Dept. of The Usual Boilerplate
Thank you for being here, thank you for following, thank you for subscribing. All of this substackery of mine is free and will remain that way. Which means that if you have chosen to contribute to its and my upkeep,7 in larger or smaller ways, you are doing something you don’t have to do, which makes your generosity that much more resonant, and I am profoundly grateful. If you’re not yet part of that contributing crew and there’s a part of you that’s thinking “You know what? I like this guy” and you choose to join the crew, I will be eternally (or at least monthly or annually) in your debt.
Thank you, happy Monday, and have a lovely week.
Benjamin
P.S. I’ve been toggling around with my settings here in an attempt to cut off the Johnstown flood of spammy emails I get in my in-box every time I post anything, and my toggling seems to have worked! [Poo poo kinehora.] I offer my apologies if this has frustrated anyone’s legitimate attempts to communicate with me. Needs must when the Devil drives, and all that. Of course, replies are still open below, and I’m always happy to hear what people have to say.
Seriously, they’re famous, you can even google them.
“I’ve never heard of canned potatoes” is an inevitable response to this recipe, whenever I mention it. Well, now you have.
What sort of oil? Something unnoticeable, like canola.
Mild uncertainty persists as to whether she in fact told me garlic salt or garlic pepper. To be honest, I’ve tried both (separately, that is), and I can’t say that it seems to make much difference.
What kind of paprika? The kind that comes in a little tin that you buy in the supermarket or, preferably, bought decades ago and lost behind all the other spices on your spice shelf.
“Well, you know, instead, you should . . .” No, instead, you shouldn’t. Just make them the way they are. They don’t need any assistance.
To say nothing of the dog, as they say.
Just discovered your writing thanks to Connie Schultz on Facebook. What a beautiful piece. My mother Anne is gone just three months now - I’d like to think she put your essay in my path. First-withouts, indeed. The emptiness is measured in them.
I like to read this every time. And one day I will make the potatoes. 💜
Also - look at your curls, omg!