STILL Miss her, with a prologue

When the memory conflicts with the recording

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An incongruous voice from the past

My dad is 84 and doesn’t know where his phone is half the time and even when he does know where it is, he often can’t answer it because he hasn’t figured out how to get his sausage fingers to interact with the screen.

I usually don’t bother leaving him a message because he never listens to them, I’m not even sure he knows how, and if I’m being totally honest, I don’t like his voicemail prompt.

I’d rather hang up then hear it.

It’s my mom’s voice, and it doesn’t sound anything like her.

As you’ll glean from reading the below (a reprint from last year), she had a unique, joyful, goofy, happy way of talking, especially on the phone.

My mom, who died on New Year’s Eve 2020, recorded the voicemail message for my dad many years ago, and for who knows what reason, she sounds like a kid playing grown-up. Like, to my ear at least, it sounds like she’s trying to sound serious, and she fails at it, because that’s just not her thing.

At all.

Sometimes when she left messages for me, she would adopt a teasing tone emulating MY voice mail message. (“Hello Matt Crossman from The Sporting News, this is Mom Crossman from …”)

I found THAT funny because she was in on the joke. The seriousness was the joke. This isn’t that.

I wish I had saved one of those.

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Miss her

I miss the sing-song way she said hello.

I miss phone calls on my birthday. She wouldn’t sing-song-say hello, she would just launch into a high-speed version of Happy Birthday. This continued when I was deep into my 40s. I knew the end was near when I had to call her on what turned out to be my last birthday with her in order to hear the silly song. I didn’t want that one to be the one she forgot.

One of the worst days was about two months after she died. We had taken my daughters ice skating. I wanted to call her to tell her about it. I temporarily forgot that I couldn’t. I took a step toward the answering machine to check if she had called before I called her. I took a second step, and when I realized there was going to be no message, it was like a sledgehammer to my chest.

That was the last time I wanted to talk to her, if I may put it that way. Now I simply wish I could.

I miss having someone in my life who showed up for my daughter’s performance in Seussical the Musical wearing the get-up that she did (picture above.)

If someone hooked me up to a lie detector and said the fate of the universe depends on me saying one true statement, I would say my mom loved me. I’m grateful for that.

I miss the way she talked to everybody everywhere all the time. I’m grateful that I’m the same way.

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One thing I wonder: When did she become a margarita fan? At the party we threw for her because she didn’t want a funeral (I’m grateful for that, too), her friends insisted on pitchers of margaritas in her honor. The only thing I remember her drinking is awful wine that tasted like Kool-Aid.

That party was great because so was its subject. I thought giving her eulogy there was going to be one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. It was, but it was also one of the most rewarding. I got to stand up in front of all her friends and family and talk about how awesome she was, and after that, they all came up to me to tell me how awesome she was.

I miss eavesdropping as she made up stories for the girls.

A couple of times, some jerkweed/bot has cloned her Facebook account, and I’ve gotten friend requests that appear to be from her, which created more sledgehammers to my chest.

My friends Chris and Andy both told me independently that after their moms died, they would hear a song, or see something in a movie, and immediately miss their moms, even though they could think of no connection between the song/movie and their mom. The same thing has happened to me, and I’d add “see a stranger” to that. This week I was at the grocery store and the cashier made me think of her and I have no idea why.

My older daughter was in a play. My wife kept saying how much she looked like my mom. She did great. She was hilarious and more than held her own even though she was the youngest in the cast. My mom would have lost it—just great, big, huge tears, enough to fill a bucket or six. Then again, she lost it at everything. Seriously we gave her a Brendan Shanahan jersey for Christmas years ago and she bawled.

My younger daughter played basketball for the first time this year and had a great time. I wish my mom could have seen her play. We all agree she would have lost it. But I repeat myself. My dad found my mom’s high school yearbook and was shocked to see her picture on the basketball team. He never knew.

I miss her laugh, especially the way my Aunt Liz made her laugh.

I miss the fact that when we visited her, everybody—neighbors, friends, grocery store clerks, strangers at the park—would tell me that all she talked about was how excited she was to see the girls (and to a much lesser extent, me).

I miss “jingle, jingle” as her Christmas morning greeting.

I miss the phone calls when I’d be driving home to St. Louis with the girls after visiting my parents at their house in Michigan. She always sounded like she needed to sleep for a week. The solution to that was easy—she could have played with the girls less—HAHAHAHAHA she would not have done that if she lived to be 11ty billion.

I miss being introduced as her favorite second son. I’m sure my brothers miss being called favorite first son, favorite third son, and favorite fourth son.

My dad is hanging in there, most days, after many months of not. “The nights are bullshit,” as he so eloquently put it.

More than three years later, we’re all doing fine, most of the time.

I should say, we are all a new version of fine, because we’re not the same as we were.