Yeah, I haven’t updated here in a disgracefully long time. I know. 2025 has been absolute hell, and I just haven’t wanted to write much of anything. There have been things I could talk about but didn’t want to, and things I kind of wanted to talk about but can’t. 

But one of the worst subplots of 2025 came to its end in December: My mother died. 

This was not a shock. She was 88, and in recent years it was clear she was declining. Relatives in contact with her would send me delicate emails: Is your mother OK? Her eyesight and her hearing were going. She had a back injury that left her in constant pain. She had to stop driving, and with no public transportation options where she lived, her world got very small. She hated her loss of independence.

She had caregivers who cleaned her home and helped her shop and run errands. My cousin, who lived nearby, took her to doctor appointments, made sure she was eating enough and keeping up with her medications, and checked in with her regularly. My cousin is a rock star; both Mom and I would have been completely screwed if it weren’t for everything she and her husband have done for both of us over the past several years. 

In May, she had a spell of confusion that alarmed one of her caregivers and landed her in the emergency room. But she recovered so quickly that she wasn’t even admitted to the hospital, and I thought Whew. Some day, it won’t be a false alarm. But at least today isn’t that day.

A few weeks later in June, Mom developed a severe internal bleeding problem that landed her in the ICU in critical condition. She was rarely conscious, and when she was, she didn’t seem to know who was around her or what was happening. I left the ICU one afternoon feeling certain I’d said goodbye to her for the last time. 

And yet somehow, incredibly, she got better. She was sent to a rehab facility, and then to another rehab facility when her insurance decided to stop covering the first one. 

(About the whole Luigi situation: When a CEO of your industry is shot dead in public in cold blood and a shocking percentage of the country sides with the shooter? Maybe you should think about things your industry could do differently beyond hiding the identities of your other CEOs.)

Mom completed rehab on her 88th birthday, and we brought her back to her house and hired more aides to come in more regularly. We knew this wasn’t ideal, but it seemed like the best of several not-great options.  

But in mid-November she had a massive stroke, and that was the beginning of the end. We thought for a bit that she might somehow recover even from this, but it wasn’t to be. She’d been fighting a long time. I think she was just worn out.

When I woke up on the first day of December, a dismal voice in my head said very clearly “At the end of this month, you will not be the same person you are now.” I was pretty sure I knew exactly what the dismal voice was talking about. Mom, now in a dedicated hospice facility, slipped away a little more each day. And on December 9, she finally let go. 

These days I really see the appeal of believing in Heaven, because if it exists, Mom is there right now. And all the friends and family who left Earth way before her are telling her “It took you long enough.” Maybe all the pets she loved and lost are there for her too. Really, how is it Heaven if they aren’t?

My mother was smart and artistic and hard-working and lovely, and she made it from a post-Depression childhood in a small town in Pennsylvania to working at ABC-TV in Manhattan in the 60s, where she met my father. To the end of her life, she’d drop fascinating little tidbits about her life in Manhattan: Did you ever hear of an actor called Joe Don Baker? He and I were friends when I hung out in the Village. He always looked so shocked when I swore.

She loved traveling. She loved antiquing. She loved figure skating. She loved sailing.

And above everything else, she was kind. Always. One of my nieces reminded me of the baby birds we had in the house when I was a kid. My childhood home had a breezeway with beams that birds couldn’t resist. They were forever building nests up there, and at least once a summer Mom would find a fallen baby bird on our front walkway. You weren’t supposed to bother them, we knew, but it was never in my mother’s nature to leave a tiny, helpless being lying alone and defenseless on the gravel. She’d bring them inside and do her best to nurse them back to health before turning them over to a wildlife rehab facility. This ended in tears as often as it ended in triumph, but she never stopped trying to help them. 

That unfailing kindness extended to people too. She was the type of person who could walk into a room full of strangers, strike up a chat with someone, and leave with at least one new friend. People loved her. She radiated warmth. She was my father’s second wife, a situation that can sometimes cause tension and hard feelings, but his family embraced her and never let her go, not even after my dad died in 1987. Her stepdaughters and their families adored her. She got along great with my mother-in-law and father-in-law, and she thought the world of my husband. 

I could say She was a great mom, but what does that even mean? Well, one day in my high school years, she found a sheaf of typewritten pages while cleaning my room. It was a short story I’d abandoned. She told me my story was so good she thought a professional author had written it and I should keep writing. And then she reassured me she wasn’t just saying that because she was my mother.

Another time, she signed me out of school early so we could go have lunch at Hamburger Hamlet and see a matinee of Amadeus. No special reason; it wasn’t anyone’s birthday or anything like that. It was just because. She taught me education was very important, but so were experiences that had nothing to do with a classroom. 

I’ve mentioned before that I was obsessed with Van Halen as a teenager, and whenever they came to town, I was determined to see them. But my friends didn’t like Van Halen, I didn’t drive, and I had nobody to go with. So my mom, God love her, bought us both tickets and sat through two Van Halen concerts with me. She must have been ready to buy a bottle of champagne when I found someone from school to go with for my third Van Halen show.

And she had to navigate me through my emotionally turbulent college years on her own, because my dad died during my freshman year. But she did it without complaint. I’m sure there were days she wanted to stab her eardrums with a pen rather than listen to me carry on about my latest romantic turmoil during one of my endless collect calls home, but she listened anyhow. Did I ever think to ask her how she was getting along without my father? Probably not. But she didn’t hold it against me. 

Although she had fairly conservative taste in a lot of things and was decidedly not a Van Halen fan, she loved David Lynch. When I rented Eraserhead from a video store, she was as fascinated by it—and Lynch—as I was. And we were both addicted to Twin Peaks. She bought the soundtrack cassette and played it in the car constantly while driving me back from college for the last time. 

In my adult years, my aunt and I worked at the same company. One year, my mom wanted to enter the Betty Crocker cooking contest. She had my aunt bring me samples of whatever recipes she tried, so I’d be eating chicken and wild rice with grapes for lunch while my co-workers were eating microwave meals that smelled like the cardboard they came in. My mom was an amazing cook. I don’t think she got into the Betty Crocker contest, though. Screw Betty. 

Because of Mom’s early support of my writing, I’m thankful she lived long enough to see me publish a couple of books. I never had, and never will have, a bigger fan. She’d send me happy feedback about every single one of the stories I published on Medium. A couple of years ago I was with her before she had surgery to implant a pacemaker, and the last thing I heard her tell the nurse as she was being wheeled to the operating room was My daughter writes books. 

Many times over the past year, she made a point of telling me that she’d had a wonderful life, full of terrific adventures and love. And I know what she was trying to tell me: It’s OK if I go soon. I’m ready. Please don’t be sad.

But grief doesn’t work that way, Mom.

As I write this, it’s only been two days since she died, and I’m nowhere near being able to consider what the world will be like without her here anymore. I’ve already caught myself doing the “Oh, ha, I have to remember to tell Mom that—oh, right” thing dozens of times. 

I was lucky to have her as long as I did. I don’t know what I’m going to do without her.