Elegy for a much-loved mother

As I write this, it's been 25 years to the day, almost to the hour, that my mother left this world. There has not been a day since that I have not thought about her or missed her. This is a little of her story.

My mother was born in a snowstorm on Dec. 19, 1919, in New York City. Although both her parents loved her, there was a dark cloud over her childhood. Her beloved father was an alcoholic. The marriage broke up when she was a teenager. Her father died when she was 19. She was crushed.

She married my father in St. Patrick's Cathedral on Aug. 5, 1944. My father, home on leave from the war, wore his Navy uniform. The temperature that day was a torrid 105 degrees, but my mother said she was so nervous, she didn't even notice the heat.

My parents tried to have a baby for the first six years of their marriage. When it looked like nothing was going to happen, they adopted me. My sister, Susan, came along several years later, followed by my brother, John, and sister Mary, who came the natural way, after, as my mother put it "your father and I relaxed."

I was 3 when I was told I was adopted. I had many of the fears that often plague adopted children.

But my mother was prepared. She bought "The Chosen Baby," a book popular in the 1950s, that she often read to me.

But what stands out more is the four-line snippet of a poem she clipped from a magazinewhen I was a child. I found it when I was going through her papers after she died.

"Not flesh of my flesh, not bone of my bone,

But still miraculously my own. Never forget for a single minute

You didn't grow under my heart but in it."

Although I still have mixed feelings about being adopted, there was never any doubt who my real mother was, blood or no blood. It was Marjorie Miller.

She was the woman who sang me to sleep at night with "Mr. Moon" and other songs she remembered from her camping days in the Adirondacks in the 1930s.

She was she who hugged me even if I came in grimy and smudged from playing. There were no play dates back in the 1950s. We played outside, with our friends. I was a tomboy who would rather play stickball, flip baseball cards or climb trees than play with dolls.

"With all thy dirt, I love thee still," she would say.

I was mortified as a teenager when she would strike up a conversation with someone in the checkout line or the cashier at the supermarket. Today I do the same thing. She would be proud.

My mother inherited her father's problem with alcohol. It gradually seeped into her life when I was a teenager and began to rob her of her health. Her skin turned yellow. She bruised easily. She got sick almost every morning.

Her illness was the clichéd elephant in the living room. We kids and my father tried not to notice. We were a family in denial.

She was sweet and sad when she'd had too much to drink. Never angry.

Her health crisis came in January 1973. She called down to my father, who was getting ready for work, and told him she had a headache. He found her unconscious on the bathroom floor.

She'd had a cerebral hemorrhage and was in liver failure. The doctors in the intensive care unit told us to pray she died, because she'd be a vegetable if she lived.

They were wrong. My mother pulled through. She never drank again. She wouldn't even take cough syrup.

"I'm so grateful for a second chance," she said many times.

She was a terrific grandmother, spoiling her grandchildren unmercifully. My son always left her house with some goodies, cookies

or an ice cream cone.

She also was a terrific wife. My father lost 25 pounds suddenly in the fall of 1979. By January 1980, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He refused treatment and managed to live almost another two years. She took good care of him.

When he died, my mother penciled in the words "Dad died today" on the calendar thumb-tacked to a kitchen cabinet door.

She missed my father terribly but forged ahead and tried to build a life for herself. But she didn't have much time left either.

My mother called me in the summer of 1983. She had a lump in her neck. The doctor had given her an antibiotic and told her it was probably a swollen gland. It wasn't. My mother had throat cancer.

She went through chemotherapy, surgery and radiation. Her bravery during her illness still astounds me.

About three weeks before my mother died, I took her for an appointment with her oncologist. Although she could barely talk, they sang a song together and laughed and joked.

On the way home, I asked her if she had been scared when she found out she had cancer.

"Yes," she replied. "But I wanted to be strong for my kids."

I asked her if she was still scared.

"I'll miss you all," she said. "But I want to see Daddy."

My mother went to see my father and her God late in the afternoon on August 10, 1984. I'm sure all the people she loved here on earth were waiting for her.

I was devastated and angry when she died at 64. I didn't pray for six months. Then one night I had a dream.

The doorbell rang in our Basking Ridge home. I went to answer it and found my mother standing on the front step.

"Mom, I can't believe this. What are you doing here? This is wonderful," I said.

My mother came inside. A brilliant, crystalline white light surrounded her. That light followed her into every room.

"I just came back for one day," she said. "I wanted to let you know that I'm fine. I'm in a beautiful place."

My anger drained from me after the dream. I slept soundly for the first time in a half year.

Wait for me too, Mom