She Never Liked Pink: My Mother’s Perfection

Daily writing prompt

Which aspects do you think makes a person unique?

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This was my mother in 1938. The picture was taken at Niagara Falls. She was on her honeymoon, delayed several months while she and my dad gathered their resources. They kept track of their expenses in a small black notebook, noting every gas purchase, every sandwich. I know this because I’ve seen the notebook though I don’t know where it is now. There is a diaspora of family things sometimes that one can’t control. It is one of many things to regret.

This was my mother’s style. Her distinctiveness was in her dress and manner. She was gentle and unassuming but so perfectly put together that everyone around her felt undone. My mother’s seams were always straight, her slip never showed, her nail polish never chipped. If she ever had a run in a stocking, I never saw it. The worry about one’s looks, something so common with people, with women everywhere, never affected her. She would never ask, “How do I look?” She knew.

When I was 12 and she was 42, my mother had a double mastectomy. She did not have cancer but did have recurring cysts which frightened her into near paralysis, exacerbating her chronic depression, and so, to be more safe than sorry or so the story went, her doctor recommended this drastic surgery. It was a long time ago and diagnostic tools weren’t what they are now, so it makes sense in a tragic and sad way.

After the mastectomy, my mother wore prosthetic breasts. These were very substantial foam rubber pads inserted into a special bra. I saw her only once without her special bra. She was standing in her bedroom looking in the mirror when I accidentally opened the door to put folded laundry on her bed. On her chest were two half-moons. She said something at the time, it was a grieving thing, but I don’t remember it and don’t want to make it up even though I remember the gist of it. She was profoundly, irrevocably sad. I shut the door and left, and we never spoke of it.

Forty years later, the day after she died from complications of dementia, my father and I went to her dresser to pick out the clothes she would be buried in. He picked up one of her special bras and said, “She won’t need this, I guess.” Oh no, I told him, she would want to be wearing her special bra, she wouldn’t want to be seen without it, and so we put it in the bag to take to the funeral home along with a silk blouse and black pants. The whole effect was less put together than my mother would have liked but it was alright, better to have it done with, you know, for the living. So hard handling her clothes in this imperfect way.

At the visitation, my mother lay in her imperfect clothes in a burnished pink casket my father and I had picked out together after much worry and discussion about what she would like. She never liked pink, I wanted to tell him, but it didn’t matter anymore. We could never do any of this the way she would have. We had done the best we could.