Molly (age 14 mos) and Grandma Shirley
In memoriam of Shirley Zive.
“Mom passed away today,” my ex-husband said over the phone.
“What?” I sank to the closest available chair. “I was supposed to go up there this weekend. I was going to sit with her and Herb…I was supposed to–”
“Don’t worry about one day,” Bill said. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is how much you meant to her. Over the last seven months, we spoke a lot about all the good times and memories of you and our, our, time together. Molly and Kelly. She loved you.”
Lymphoma. Fuck cancer. Shirley Zive, the woman who hadn’t taken an aspirin or nap in the twenty-eight years I’d known her, had been beaten by cancer. The woman who sewed tiny American Doll clothes for her five oldest granddaughters and made a feast for a party of twenty at a moment’s notice and then cleaned up the mess as if it never had happened (unlike my days and months of finding flour on counters, grease left on stove burners, and left opened cans in the refrigerator from cooking a family dinner) had passed away after seven months of battling lymphoma. Shirl, who went to the gym four days a week, had gotten down to ninety pounds and was confined to bed during her last month of life. Fuck cancer.
Shirley was my second mom. I met Bill at eighteen at San Diego State, and followed him to L.A. when he got a job. We lived with his parents for a number of months before I found a place to live. Over the next three years, I moved in and out of Shirley and Herb’s house. What I remember most is Shirley. After working all day at B of A, a job she disliked immensely, she would make dinner for the four of us every night with a smile. She was funny like Edith Bunker. She was Gracie Allen to Bill’s George Burns. She was the straight (wo)man but she was no dummy. She was as smart as a whip.
During the last month of her life, she slept in the TV room in a hospital bed which was next door to the bedroom she’d shared with Herb for 54 years. One night, when it was Marianne’s, the younger sister’s, night to stay with her parents, she and Herb lay on the bed in the master bedroom.
“I never noticed how comfortable this bed is,” Marianne said.
“Yeah, it is comfortable,” Herb said.
From the next room, Shirl said, “Hey, don’t go all John and McKenzie Phillips on me.”
I’ve never been good with endings. This became more evident when Molly went off to Sacramento State a couple of years ago. For the year surrounding Molly’s departure, I mourned what we’d been. We’d been a mother and daughter so close she’d called me her best friend. Molly had been a daughter who rarely slept anywhere else but home because it was her favorite place to be. How could I accept a new relationship, an irrevocably changed relationship, now that she was six hundred miles away from me?
I was wrecked. But even at the time, I realized how over the top I was about Molly leaving for college, a natural transition for most healthy teenagers. I started to write my memoir, HOLDING ON AND LETTING GO: A MOTHER’S STORY to figure it out. And by page two I had my answer. Thanks Dad! I’m nine years old. Dad has taken a job in Oakland, six hundred miles away from where Mom, Marcia, Mark and I live in Pacific Beach. This is dad’s fifth career in almost as many years. On Sunday, the day he always leaves back to Oakland, I sit in the back of the Christ the King Catholic Church. While everyone is singing and shouting amens, I have a stomach ache because I don’t want to cry. Why does Dad have to go away? Will I ever see him again? Each goodbye feels final. I learned the feeling of abandonment early. My dad was an alcoholic throughout my childhood. It always felt like he was saying goodbye.
Admittedly my sensor is off. I can’t tell the difference between until next time and never again. Death is surely the latter. But I know plenty of people who see this as a transition, like an adult child going off to college. Over Molly’s two years away in Sacramento, I’ve learned to embrace–no, that’s not the right word–I’ve learned to accept our changed relationship. I’ve learned to appreciate our time together and our relationship which is built on the past and looks to the future.
But how can I accept Shirley’s death? I can’t sew to save my life. I won’t bake cookies from the “Mrs. Fields Best Cookie Cookbook Ever!” that Kelly has inherited from Shirley. I’m sure I will continue to make family dinners and find the remnants months later. But to honor Shirley, I will remember how precious this all is. I will take more time talking with my kids. I will linger. I won’t get stuck in the past but instead remember our good times and live in the moment. I will count myself lucky for being one of Shirley Zive’s daughters.
And oh, yeah, fuck cancer!
