She was due to leave in March, so in the following months I broke all my own rules. Soph could see me twice a week, then three times, then four. Soph can meet my friends. Soph can come to Trivia on Tuesday. We could be exclusive, but only until she left.
In getting to know Soph, I also got to know her mother. Here was her mother’s favorite cocktail bar, her favorite French bistro, her childhood neighborhood. Soph not only knew New York at least as well as I did, but she knew it through her mother’s eyes. I envied the way she casually engaged her mother in everyday conversation, including and in her honor, as if it cost nothing.
“It’s different,” I said. “Your mother was sick.”
“Your mother is here too sick though,” she told me.
I wondered what it would be like to honor my mother in the same way: to honor her with the kind of absolution we usually reserve for the dead. To mourn not for who she had become, but for who she once was – and not worry if it was a grace she deserved.
And so I did just that: I tried to learn to talk about my mother again. How do you say she was a professional chef by profession who had served powerful people in cities across the country, including New York. That at the same time she’d been the kind of mom who paid her taxes, blanched her broccoli with good kosher salt, texted Bitmojis saying, “I’m So Proud of U!”
I started pointing out things that reminded me of her. Work clogs worn with dresses. Joan Osborne and Joni Mitchell. Any storefront that used to be a Dean & Deluca. I wish I knew even more – like where, so many years ago, our mothers could pass each other on the street.
Only then, as things go, did my mother go to the hospital in Arizona for advanced liver disease. At first, the doctors suspected she had two or three more years. This became a month. I booked a flight for a week away. And then, finally, when I took the subway to Queens to meet Soph’s grandmother, days passed.