She was necessary at first. I needed her hugs that Dad had no capability to give.

Mom was my comfort zone when I ran home crying after the two bullies next door threw me into a swimming pool before I knew how to swim, and she was my rock when I nearly lost my right eye in an accident while playing a baseball game.

Mom knew something about me long before I did. She bragged to my uncles and aunts that I was “college material,” and would be the first in our family to go on to a higher education. When I finished earning my degree at Rutgers University, I had fulfilled her prophecy.

When Dad lost his job and then got seriously ill, I lost Mom’s comfort zone to laundry baskets piled high with wealthy people’s clothing that she washed and ironed in our basement to add a little more income to our welfare and food stamps.

She’d come upstairs at the end of the day and cover her arthritic hands with braces. She’d cook dinner and then drink beer until bedtime. That was her routine for five years until Dad died. The empty beer bottles multiplied and the drinking began after lunch instead of after dinner.

After I graduated from college, Mom lived alone and couldn’t get out of the house much after she wouldn’t let me teach her how to drive a car. When I came to visit or took her to the store or to church, she had that glaze in her eyes from all the beer. She smiled and laughed no more. When I told her about my teaching and coaching accomplishments, I could tell that she wasn’t listening and her mind was somewhere else

One night, I tried calling her from my apartment, and for over an hour, there was no dial tone. I became worried and drove to her house. The back screen door was unlocked. The kitchen light was on. I walked in and hung up the phone that was dangling on the floor, hanging from the cord.

“Mom!” I shouted. The TV volume was at 10, blasting from her bedroom. With a bolt of fear shooting into my brain, I walked down the hallway expecting to see her collapsed on the floor. She was not in her bed. The closet door was open. Inside, there she stood with a blue plastic cup in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other.

“Mom?” I said, not wanting to startle her. She looked up at me like I had been with her all along.

“It’s time for my nightcap,” she said in a slur of words. The next day I tried to tell her she had a drinking problem, which she denied. I called the liquor store to stop her deliveries. It didn’t stop her from asking my nephew to bring her the booze.

So, Mom drank her beer, smoked her cigarettes and swallowed her nightcaps until her health failed so badly we had to put her into a nursing home. At that time, I was a Eucharistic minister in the Catholic Church, and one Sunday morning, I wanted to surprise her by administering Holy Communion in her room.

When I arrived, the chaos in the nursing home was everywhere. She was upset that her hair appointment was postponed. A woman in the hall, whom the nurses called Hail Mary, was mumbling that prayer out loud over and over again. The bedridden woman who shared a room with Mom was groaning in obvious discomfort.

I opened my Bible and read a passage to Mom, who sat in her wheelchair. Suddenly, Hail Mary stopped praying out loud. No nurses came by the room and the bedridden woman stopped groaning. After we finished Communion, Hail Mary started praying out loud again, the nurses scuttled by the room, and the bedridden woman restarted her groaning. I thanked God for giving Mom and me a special miracle that day.

After one particular visit to the nursing home in July of 1997, I got up to leave and Mom looked at me with a beautiful smile that I hadn’t seen since I was a child. She took my hand and gently rubbed her other hand across my arm.

“Thank you for being here today,” she said.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Mom.” I kissed her goodbye and I walked away thinking that she had not thanked me for any of my other visits.

Mom died at 11:30 that night.

On Mother’s Days, I think of her with fondness. She had tried her best to make a happy home, but the black cloud that festered above the roof of our small Cape Cod house my father had built had never drifted away, even upon the sunniest of days.

I have known sadness, experienced days of depression, and witnessed the end of Mom’s will to live left at the bottoms of empty beer bottles. Yet, what remains inside me is the comfort zone I keep with Mom from mornings of long, long ago.

She stands behind the screen door as I walk down the driveway on my way to my first grade class at New Market Elementary School. I turn to wave bye and she waves back. I walk halfway down the street, I turn around and wave again. She waves back. When I get to the end of the road, I stop and make my final wave. She is still behind that door and from way up the road, I can see her hand waving to me.

Years and years have passed, but those yesterdays have become todays. From way up the road, Mom is waving her hand to me from behind the screen door. I turn my eyes to the heavens and I wave back.

Email Rich Strack at richiesadie11@gmail.com