The day after my mother’s funeral was one of the best days of my life. It shouldn’t have been, it wasn’t supposed to be, it just ended up that way.
First, some context. My mom died on March 13, 3007. Her funeral was on March 16th, my birthday was (and is) today... March 17th… St. Patrick’s Day.
My mother was Irish so this was a big deal.
I wasn’t supposed to be born on St. Patrick’s Day. I was due in late February but the way the story goes is that everyone on my mom’s side of the family (except for my mom) was thrilled when the due day passed, then another, then another… because they were all gunning for St. Pats.
My dad’s side of the family, however, was less pleased. They were Italian, there were no grandkids yet and my mom was old (28) so they didn’t see the reason for all this drama. Just have the bambino/a already!
When I was born on the 17th, my mother’s father, Robert “Big Bob” O’Connor, and his clan rejoiced while the Rainones grumbled a bit: “She couldn’t have held on two more days until San Giuseppe Day?” “Of course not. She’s… Irish.”
“She’s… Irish” is what the old Italian ladies would whisper loudly every time my mother would walk into a room, knowing full well that loud whispers aren’t whispers at all, but rather the most effective way to combine screaming and hissing.
I’ve always liked to imagine that my mom held out on purpose but I knew it was likely just dumb luck. (My very pregnant friend just confirmed said lack of control over delivery date via text message, saying that if it were up to her, she’d be in labor right now.) It wasn’t until last night that a lone gunman theory entered the picture. I joined my husband in bed not long after the clock struck my birthday, cold as always. After stealing some of his warmth, I asked him to tell me a story “about me.” (Lest you think this was just some kind of birthday request, I’ll set the record straight. I ask him this kind of shit at, like, 1:13 in the morning all the time: What’s the meaning of life, Markus? What is your least favorite thing about me, Markus? Do you think the Palestinians and the Israelis will ever find peace, Markus?)
He said something about how it made perfect sense to him that I was born so late: not only do I hate the cold and love the covers but I’m the Queen of the Snooze button. I love sneaking in 5-minute dreams before dragging myself to work. (Or at least I did when I worked in an office. Now that I work from home, I don’t have to drag myself anywhere.)
It never occurred to me that perhaps I had some power over the day I was born. Probably because I don’t believe that the unborn are human or capable of thought of any kind -- let alone highly specific thoughts about a holiday on the 17th of March that involves green beer, blinking pins that say “Kiss me, I’m Irish” or four-leaved clovers, as that would also necessitate prior knowledge of the existence of numbers, months, malt, hops, green food dye, plastic, tiny batteries, sex, Catholicism, sainthood, nationality, and either the
genetic or environmental mutations of plants. Oh, and luck. Still, the idea that the alpha version of me might have been unable to come out and face the world is more in keeping with my personality than I’d like to admit. I mean, there’s a reason that I’ve been planning to write a blog for something like five years and am only “going live” today, on my 30th birthday.
That an unconscious Sarah might have hit some version of “womb snooze” to get in a few extra weeks of warmth is not unrelated to another idea that hit me lately: that maybe my mother held onto life a little longer than everyone expected so that she’d die around a time of year that everyone in my family, even the Italians, had come to love. She had, after all, requested on her deathbed that her funeral be a party and joked that she fully expected my brother and me to get a keg. And she was notoriously OCD about planning things: she left behind scores of notebooks full of color-coded meal plans and to-do lists for the holidays. You can’t tell me that a woman who writes notes to herself about exactly the time the homemade Toll House cookies should be defrosted to be at maximum freshness for the Christmas Eve party didn’t at least give a bit of thought to something as monumental as her last moment on earth.
There wouldn’t be a keg the day of the funeral, but the following day was another story. My friends had been planning a St. Patty’s pub crawl in Providence for months. They’d rented a van, one of those huge wheelchair-accessible jobs, so that no one would have to drive. At first, I wasn’t sure about the pub crawl no matter what my mother had said. But my family insisted I enjoy my birthday and so Markus, my out-of-town friends, and I joined the merry band.
Despite the fact that so many people seem to think St. Patrick’s Day is the "Best. Holiday. EVER.", I can’t say that my relationship with the day has always been a happy hour. When I was a drunk back in high school and college, I was always miffed that I had to share the holiday with so many other drunks who would usually forget they were supposed to be buying me drinks after the second round. When I wasn’t drinking at all, I found the drunkenness disgusting.
But on that day, being neither lush nor teetotaler, I didn’t feel neglected or disgusted. I knew my mother was gone but I also felt that she had become a part of me and that to honor this new part of me, this old part of her, I had to enjoy myself. “KO was always the life of the party” was how someone described my mother after the funeral, using her old initials and lifelong nickname, and of course I knew it was true. Which is why I found it strange that at times she seemed to resent that her daughter had turned out so much like her…
On my 28th birthday, I celebrated my mother as she might have been around that age – a young woman who loved being around people, who adored her friends, who was the life of the party – and in so doing, honored a part of myself I’d abandoned years earlier for some reasons that made sense (to have a healthier relationship with alcohol, to spend more time on my writing), for others that didn’t (to punish myself for living carelessly when I was younger, to allay irrational fears that I’d suffer from acute liver failure if I had an occasional glass or two of wine at dinner). I didn’t drink myself into oblivion like I used to but I didn’t abstain either because no matter how many times I’ve tried to convince myself otherwise for foolishly romantic reasons or author-bio purposes, I know I’m not an alcoholic but rather a
masochistic perfectionist who likes to build impossibly high walls she has no chance of scaling, impossibly high walls that don't particularly need to be scaled. And when she falls (and she always falls) she has an excellent excuse to beat the shit out of herself.
(It’s a Catholic thing.)
Perhaps it was the shitty circumstances that gave me license to be less than perfect for the first time in a long time, perhaps it was my mother’s death that liberated me from being the perfect person I thought she wanted me to be, perhaps it was just the presence of so many old and dear friends, but that day I remember feeling very loved, very nonjudgmental towards myself and others… and lucky as hell.
