Dina Aronson
I was twenty-one years old and standing in the Publix Danish Bakery in Gainesville, Florida, the first time I learned my mother had cancer. I can still remember the sweet scent of all those pastries juxtaposed with the sour sound of those three little words she reluctantly uttered. Never one to steal the spotlight, she hadn’t planned to tell me until after my college graduation that weekend. But from the moment she and my father arrived, I could tell something was off.
That’s how it always was with us. Deep, instinctive knowing.
She probably thought she could wing it and maybe even forget about her new reality for a day or two while she celebrated her only daughter, the one who was rewriting the story, the one who took it to heart when she said repeatedly over the years, “You must always be able to take care of yourself; you must always be independent.” As the daughter of an Italian immigrant mother, higher education was not part of her cultural lexicon, but she made damn sure it was part of mine.
We made it through that first dinner, my parents borrowing from the Freaky Friday script. Dad, usually reserved in social situations, was downright animated, while Mom was uncharacteristically quiet, participating in conversations but not fully there. Comic relief came in the form of an overwhelmed waiter who was sweating profusely and kept returning to the table without our food to tell us the delay was due to nonspecific “problems in the kitchen,” which left us all speculating wildly as to what was happening back there, and half expecting a disgruntled line cook to bound out swinging a butcher’s knife. I’m pretty sure she laughed with us, but she was not herself, and after some end-of-night badgering from me, she went off to the hotel, her secret still intact.
Being the future litigator and pain in the ass I was at twenty-one (a trait my husband would argue has stuck), I continued my direct examination the next day. “Why are you acting so weird?” “What’s going on?” “Something is wrong, why aren’t you telling me?” G*d, I was annoying. This went on for a while as we went about preparing for the day, which is how we found ourselves standing in the bakery, picking up goodies to enjoy over the weekend. It was there that I broke the witness. “I have cancer,” she blurted out, there among the rows of freshly baked breads and colorful cookies and all manner of pastry. The words fell out of her mouth and into my ears, and though quietly spoken, the sound of them was deafening. I have no recollection of what was said next. I just remember feeling scared, and as I was wont to do at the time, catapulting myself to the worst-case scenario—life without my mom. It was unimaginable to me at twenty-one.
It remained unimaginable until it actually happened, thirtythree years later.
I am on a plane, flying motherless at the age of fifty-six on what is the second anniversary of her passing. As I look out the window and into the clouds, I’m transported to my brother’s bedroom in my childhood home, the one with the window that looked out onto our circular driveway. It was there I would watch for her to come home from work, and in some ways, looking out this tiny airplane window, I’m watching for her still.
She was fifty-one when first diagnosed with breast cancer in 1990, a time when there was no internet and no easy access to research or answers; luckily, one of my brothers was dating a health reporter on our local NBC affiliate, and through her network we were able to find an excellent oncology team. I remember sitting in the surgeon’s office after her lumpectomy/ lymph node resection, classical music playing, listening to him describe the procedure. “The tumor was larger than we thought; I wouldn’t be surprised if the cancer has spread.” There it was, that worst case scenario, the one I would live with for the next ten-plus days, the amount of time it took to get pathology results back then. When the call finally came telling us the lymph nodes were clear, I saw my father cry for the first and only time in my life.
We didn’t really talk about death and dying when I was growing up, although I sensed that my mom, present and mindful before the advent of meditation apps and self-help gurus, was not afraid in the same way that I was then, and in the way I remained through much of my adult life. In the first grade, Sister Christine, for reasons I have never figured out, talked to a class of six-year-olds about what happens when we die. “The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out,” she said, describing our eventual return to the earth. I remember coming home and asking my mom if I could be buried with her, my six-year-old brain not grasping the absurdity of this question. I couldn’t imagine being without her while those worms did their thing.
It wasn’t the worms I was afraid of at twenty-one, but I still feared death (and so many other things), and the idea of losing my mom terrified me. She had been my person. My rock. A source of pure, unconditional love, a love that powered me and provided the fuel I needed to believe in myself. She was also my co-conspirator as we worked around my father and his well-intended but overprotective tendencies. She was a lover of life and wanted me to experience it fully and freely. She pushed me to go, to see, and to do. I often wonder how different my life would have been had she left me back then. Despite my maturity and old-soul status, I don’t think I would have been emotionally equipped to process or manage the loss.
At fifty-six, it’s still a struggle.
I was home for Thanksgiving, sitting on a hotel lounge chair with my mom when the call came. The irritation on her breast, the one she thought might have been caused by her new bra, turned out to be something else. The cancer was back, twenty-two years later, or perhaps it never left, instead slowly and quietly growing, evading the biannual mammograms and ultrasounds, until it found its way out. Sitting there with her, taking in the news, was like traveling back in time to that bakery—I was twenty-one all over again, feeling scared and powerless.
But I had also lived a lot since then, and my (forty-year-old) instincts ultimately kicked in. I didn’t yet grasp or accept that I have very little control over most of what happens in life, and I sprang into action, determined to fix it. My mother would not die on my watch.
Truthfully, despite my hard wiring for rational thought, when it came to my mom I was fully subscribed to some serious magical thinking. Not only would she not die on my watch, she would not die. Period. I held on to this crazy fantasy until about seventy-two hours before she actually did just that, passing peacefully into the night, ready and on her own terms, eleven years after that second call came.
There were many ups and downs through those years, but the one constant was gratitude—gratitude that she had lived and was healthy for decades after the first diagnosis, and gratitude that she was able to manage well through the next round. No matter what was going on in her life, she was always able to find a way to it, and when she died, it was gratitude that kept me afloat when I thought I might drown in sorrow. I continue to hold on to it like my life depends on it, and in many ways, I think it does.
In some ironic sense, facing the thing I was most afraid of helped me to let go of fear. When the worst happens, the world as you know it may change, but it continues to spin; you may feel dizzy and completely disoriented, but you begin to understand in a very meaningful way that “life goes on” is more than just a trite saying. And ultimately, if you let yourself feel, if you can access that gratitude, for all that was, and for all that remains, in time you begin to find your footing again.
One of the unexpected residual effects of losing my mom has been a heightened sense of presence. It’s like a deeper awareness of self in the sense of where I am and what I’m doing at any given moment, and a newfound need to truly experience it. Without thinking about the list of things to do. Without worrying about what’s next. And without fear, which is actually a place I’ve been trying to get to for most of my life. It’s a new kind of mindfulness that has opened me and has enabled me to see and feel things I might have missed before.
So even on hard, clunky days, this gift born of loss means that I can still find joy, even in the smallest of everyday things—a beautiful blooming flower, a cuddle with my kitty (whom I sadly lost as we were finalizing this book), a call from one of my stepsons, a found rock in the shape of a heart—all little ordinary bits of happiness there for the taking when my eyes and heart are open. I know now that it is possible to hold both joy and sorrow, that the two can peacefully coexist, when we allow ourselves to just be exactly where we are.
There is no getting around loss. If we are lucky enough to get older, it’s an inevitability. But I’ve learned that it is possible to adapt and find new ways forward. To hold on to the contours of love that will always remain, but use the space left open to honor and to create. To find light through the darkness, and to continue to fly, even motherless, into worlds of new possibility
Dina Aronson is passionate about shining a light on midlife women and reframing the cultural conversation around aging. She began her career as an attorney, later founding a legal search firm, but pivoted as she approached midlife and couldn’t find relevant content that reflected her experience. She began freelancing for start-ups aimed at the forty and above woman, and founded the Patina blog, now a Substack newsletter called Patina with Dina Aronson, where she explores topics in and around aging through her midlife lens. She is the coeditor of the anthology Midlife Private Parts: Revealing Essays that Will Change the Way You Think About Age. She has two grown stepsons, and currently resides between New York City and Miami with her husband.
Flying Motherless has been reposted with permission. The original essay can be found in Midlife Private Parts, a soulful and revealing collection of essays that explore the many facets of this transformative time in life. Each story sheds light, with humanity and good humor, on what it really feels like to move through the world as a midlife woman and beyond. To learn more about the book visit www.midlifeprivateparts.com.
