“Mom, I love you so much,” I said. “You’re the best mom in the world.”
I kissed her forehead a dozen times and raised her hand to my cheek. Her eyelids fluttered; I like to think she felt both my touch and my love.
My heart hurt as the girls and I walked out the front door—the door I’d flown through to run and catch the bus, that I opened to greet Emily’s date as he stood nervously on the front steps or to flirt with the paperboy Ralph Janafska, whom I had a crush on at the age of 7. The door I opened so quietly when I’d stayed out past my curfew; the same door my dad swung open when I was kissing Ernie Sanders in the driveway a little too long. The door I carried Ellie and then Carrie through on their first visits to their grandparents, that I’d stumbled through as a toddler. The gateway to my future that always welcomed me back and made me feel safe like nothing else. The door where my parents stood and waved goodbye, watching me drive away time and time again.
This time would be the last. I’d never see my mom standing in that doorway, or anywhere else, again.
My mother died on Labor Day, which somehow seemed fitting, given the four labors she’d endured and what a tireless worker she’d been throughout her life. It weighs on me that I wasn’t there—that I wasn’t there with my dad or Emily either. Death frightened me too much. Maybe it had something to do with being the baby and knowing everyone I loved most in the world might well die before me.
I thought back to a time my mom was driving me to my piano lesson, and I told her I wished people didn’t have to die.
“Well,” she replied, “if they didn’t, it would get pretty crowded down here.”
True, although by now I was feeling numb from all the loss, thinking that maybe the Courics had experienced more than their share. Yes, our parents reached ripe old ages. But Jay and Emily hadn’t—and neither had Johnny’s first wife, Marilyn, who went into septic shock, her organs shutting down in a matter of hours. She was just 54, the same age as Emily. As Kiki sadly noted soon after, among us four kids, she and her wonderful husband, Jim, were the only couple still intact. For the other three, our marriages ended when death did us part.
My mom once told me, “There are worse things than dying.” I think she meant suffering. In her case, at 91, perhaps death meant deliverance. For me it meant devastation. My minister reached out when he heard the news and offered this thought: “Those who love deeply, grieve deeply.” At least for a minute, I was filled with gratitude to have known that kind of love.
I called the reporter at the Washington Post who’d edited my father’s obituary. “I wanted to let you know my mom died, and I’d love to have an obituary for her,” I said.
“Well, what did she do?” he asked. “Tell me about her.”
The question caught me by surprise.
“She did everything,” I replied. “Raised four kids, who all went on to be very successful people. She was the heart and soul of our family. She was ahead of her time, volunteering at Planned Parenthood. She worked at Lord and Taylor in the gift department; she arranged flowers for weddings.”
I’ll never forget the sound of silence on the other end.
That’s when it really hit me, how undervalued mothers are in our society, especially the full-time kind. I was incensed that somehow my mom’s accomplishments, her amazing life, were deemed not worth writing about.
86
#Ladydouchebag
A NURSE HANDED ME two blue latex gloves filled with ice and tied at the wrist—frozen, hand-shaped water balloons with which to cradle my new, smaller breasts.
I’d always wanted to have them reduced. They were heavy and fibrocystic （the surgeon told me it was like cutting through concrete）， not to mention saggy, causing deep bra-strap grooves in the flesh on my shoulders. So despite my fear of needles, scalpels, and anesthesia, I decided to take the plunge.
I came home groggy and bandaged and settled into bed.
John approached solicitously. So sweet. Then he brought his lips close to my ear and said softly, “There’s a problem with the documentary.”
“Why are you telling me this now?” I snapped.
“There’s a problem with the way it was edited. The gun group in Virginia is saying there’s a pause in the movie that never happened.”
UNDER THE GUN was my second documentary with director Stephanie Soechtig. Our first, Fed Up, focused on childhood obesity—I was proud of the way it reframed the root causes of the epidemic （in a word: sugar. In everything）。 After Sandy Hook, I told Stephanie I thought we should zero in on guns and explore why, despite overwhelming public support, stricter laws were never enacted. We profiled a number of families whom I’d gotten to know, all shattered by gun violence, among them the Bardens; Lonnie and Sandy Phillips, whose daughter Jessie was killed in the movie-theater massacre in Aurora, Colorado; astronaut （and, later, senator） Mark Kelly and his wife, Gabby Giffords, after her near-fatal shooting. I was grateful they trusted me to share their experiences. But I also wanted to hear from gun owners to understand why they were so hell-bent on preventing any safety measures.