Mother’s Day Tribute to a Beautiful Rose

When I was five and my brother Stuart two, we lived in a top floor apartment in Newark, New Jersey. Later that year, we moved to a development in the suburbs.

Our new house sat on a quarter acre plot with plenty of room for aluminum lawn chairs, a chaise lounge, rose bushes around the pink cement patio…..and the clothesline planted in the middle of the back yard.

It wasn’t a long rope-line like my grandmother had used for her family, but a modern structure on an aluminum pole with four rods splayed out like an upside-down umbrella. Four or five thin ropes descended horizontally in each section from longest to shortest.

Most everything hanging on it was white back then — sheets, pillowcases, towels, my mother’s slips and blouses, my dad’s shirts, my brother’s diapers.

I picture my mom, in a skirt and blouse held together fashionably by a cinch belt, fastening the water-logged contents from the wicker basket with stationery wood clothespins. A few years later, the newly designed model with the metal springs appeared.

She would have been in her early thirties, a vision of stunning beauty, her auburn hair glinting in the sun. She was tall enough to gracefully reach her slim arms to the top lines, then spin the structure to the next empty section.

Drying during the sunny day, the cotton materials floated on the breezes, attached securely but forming shadows on the ground and billowing shapes in the air. When I played with the little girls next door, we skipped through the different rows, round and round, the closest feeling to clouds I’d ever known.

But if we started to spin it around, mom would call from the kitchen window, “Don’t let the sheets fall on the grass!”

My mom Rose, standing on the freshly cut green lawn, surrounded by flowing white linens under the clear blue summer sky, the most beautiful sight in the whole wide world.

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I was seventy years old when my mother passed away at nearly age ninety-nine.

Up until her ninety-fifth birthday, Rose lived independently in a senior citizens apartment building overlooking Revere Beach. She watched the flight patterns of arrivals and departures from Logan Airport over the Atlantic, close enough to see the names of airlines flying into Boston from all over the world.

Mom made a new friend down the hallway, Pearl, a petite and cheerful lady from Pittsburgh just a few years younger. If I came to visit and mom wasn’t in, I knew to search for her at Pearl’s place. If Pearl’s daughter Beverly came to visit and couldn’t find her mother, she knew to check Rose’s apartment. 

If they weren’t anywhere to be found, then uh-oh, the two ladies in their early nineties were strolling along the beach promenade in the direction of Lynn or Boston, for us to figure out. 

Mom was fortunate to have no physical impairments or chronic health conditions. I’d bring her home most weekends and we’d hang out together, leafing through family photo albums, watching documentaries on PBS, doing laundry, cooking meals, and reminiscing, together.

Rose was one of seven children of Eastern European immigrants, my grandparents Regina and Marcus Zausmer. She had to leave community college to help support the family during the Great Depression. She fulfilled her lifelong dream of becoming a teacher by enrolling in college at age fifty, receiving credits for life experience as her old school records were long gone. After retirement in 1992, she moved up here from New Jersey, twelve years after my father died.

Soon after, she met a tall gentleman, Eli, in the coffee shop. These two extroverts who thrived on spontaneous connection decided — on the day they first met — to get married. After three dynamic years together, Eli passed away.

Just after her ninety-fifth birthday, Rose fell down in her bedroom. I didn’t find her until the next day. It was then that I learned how a fall can dramatically change the life of an older person.

Mom was a good candidate for orthopedic surgery even at her advanced age but the anesthesia took her cognitive health down a big notch. She could no longer live in her apartment alone and watch the jet planes take off into the clouds.

In the second half of her nineties, my mom finally became “elderly” — fragile, vaguely confused about her surroundings, disconnected from the self she had been and the life history that defined her. Yet she retained her essential sweetness, pleasant disposition, and elegant features.

It was then that I became her caregiver, shepherding her gently through the last four years of her life as she had taken me lovingly through the first four of mine. Out of her many years on this earth — nearly a century! —it was my privilege to care for her for this tiny fraction of her life.

My children were grown. My husband was gone. This was our time, together again as mother and daughter, her prelude to the paradise she deserved.

I confided to my son, a Rabbi, that his Grandma Rose was having a hard time expressing herself and how much this distressed me. He told me that by now his grandmother’s soul was so elevated that she did not need to communicate or even understand things in the same way as the average person. His insight carried me through the most difficult days as her life’s journey drew to its close.

I remembered my mother’s words from years ago when she let me know with certitude that she felt completely satisfied with the many blessings of her life. And that she had enjoyed an unexpected bonus in Eli, her partner in the late love affair that she referred to as ”the whipped cream of my life.”

Yes, I had my mom for a very long time, but you who know love understand that it was nevertheless so sad and hard and painful to lose her.

I had a chance to celebrate Mother’s Day as a daughter for most of my life. Now it is my time to take center stage as the “senior mother” in the family. And to celebrate my own daughter as a mother who loves her children so dearly that she is changed forever, leaving her former identity behind — just as I did — to become their first line of defense in our troubled world. 

And from that vantage point, I pay tribute to all of you, women who have nurtured others in big and small ways, all of it important.