The first anniversary of my mother’s death is about a week from now. She died on Ash Wednesday last year, February 18, 2015. Ash Wednesday came earlier this year, yesterday, so I suppose that’s what’s brought this to the surface now, rather than later.

You’ve heard of the “phantom leg syndrome”? When someone who has had a leg amputated awakens in the hospital, and for some weeks or months afterwards still feels like his leg is still there? It is due, of course, to the rewiring your brain is forced to do now that your leg is gone. It takes a while, but until it does, it sure feels real, like it never left.

Birth, and now, I discover, death are like that. The birth one first.

I remember when I was big pregnant with my first child, Leigh, knowing birth was near, that I would “miss” her after she was born. What? That makes no sense, right? Sure it does. If you’ve ever been a pregnant woman you know exactly what I’m talking about: before birth, my beloved little baby was always with me. Warm, safe, and I was exquisitely attuned to her every little move, even “dancing” to music, or hiccuping after a meal! And she did, too! I would play music really, really loud on the studio monitors at work, and she would perk up! She did! It was so cool! And she would hiccup sometimes, and though I know she didn’t “eat” what I ate, there did seem to be some correlation between my finishing a meal and her hiccuping shortly thereafter. Leigh is now a beautiful young woman, with smokey blonde hair and smokey blue eyes. I’ve kidded her all her life that the reason is during my pregnancy with her I craved lemonade and blueberry muffins like I never had before or since. Some years ago she told me she believed it, literally, for a long time when she was little, which, I guess, was sort of the point, right? I mean, if you can’t mess with your kids’ reality, what’s the point of having them, right?

Anyway, I remember exactly where I was when this idea of missing her after birth hit me. I was at a little maternity shop along Montgomery Avenue on the Main Line of Philadelphia. It was just a few miles from our house in Narberth. I don’t remember the exact town, but in my mind’s eye, I can see it clearly. The small square room, walled on three sides with big plate glass windows for a front wall, the small little driveway in front with room for maybe 8 cars. The racks of clothes were all low with circular tables on top with displays of one kind or another, and the walls had white plastic covered “grids” with hangers of blouses and whatnot hanging on them. I remember, too, I didn’t buy anything.  I saw a thing or two I liked, and I remember I had some kind of thing coming up with the radio station I needed an outfit for, but I just couldn’t bring myself to spend the money on something I was going to wear once. I remember thinking I could pull something decent together with what I already had. Good thing, too, since I never made it to whatever that event was, as Leigh came 3 weeks early, so I was busying first-time mothering.

And the feeling of longing, of embrace, has never left me. Of course, she’s here, and it’s wonderful, and it’s been one hell of a ride raising this little force of nature, but sometimes I have missed having her “with” me. I never, ever, ever, ever, ever, forgot, even for a SECOND, what a MIRACLE it was to be pregnant. I treasured it. Tried to be consciously aware and grateful for it every single day even though I really sucked at pregnancy. I’ve told my girls that their pregnancies would have killed either them or me if this were Little House on the Prairie days. And that’s not hyperbole. Leigh wouldn’t have made it, and the twins would have killed me. Maybe I’ll write more on that someday, but not now. I digress. As usual.

So now, death.

Watching my mother die was like a slow amputation, and the phantom pain remains. But, like with birth, just the good stuff haunts me! What a weird phrase “good stuff haunts” huh? What a weird thought. But it’s true. I still feel like she’s “with” me. In the way Leigh was before birth, that feeling of gratitude and grace and humility and awe at the magnitude of life, of her life, so too do I feel about my mother after death, how she echoes, whispers, and walks with me. I swear to you I can hear her with me sometimes. Not like, for real, but like a message in my head, of her words. Does that make sense? Mostly it happens when I’m out shopping. I’ll see something or someone and it hits me that were Mom with me, I’d say something awful and she’d laugh. “Awful” meaning, saying out loud what she dared not, but was thinking, which is sort how we did things and got along so well! I could always make her laugh, and oh, how i miss the sound of it.

I can conjure them up, both of them, as mine, as only they could be mine, when they were their most tender and fragile, most vibrant and alive. And ephemeral. The missing, the gone, we moms and daughters, daughters and moms, completing the circle, birth, death, and what remains.

The phantoms.