A Mother's Legacy - Barbara, Ravens & the Gold Coin

What my mother gave me, and the book I'm finally writing because of it.

Eighteen years ago today, my mother died.

She was sixty-nine. Stage 4 liver cancer. Eight weeks from diagnosis to gone.

Each year brings me new appreciation for the creative gifts she shared with me throughout our lives together.

The first was the love of story. She loved to tell them, to write them, and to watch them played out in old movies, soap operas, science fiction and horror shows, and novels that ranged from Wuthering Heights to Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls. We spent hours together throughout my life analyzing plots, deconstructing characters, predicting what would happen next.

The second was the means to share them. She gave me a typewriter when I was ten and taught me to use it, because "real writers must be able to share their stories with others." This concern over accessibility ran through her critique of my work. I tended to cloak my feelings and stories in metaphor and mythical creatures, in language that was complicated and not always transparent. Write what you know, she'd say.

I was angry at her for a long time. If I wrote what I knew, I thought, it would hurt her — and so I kept my secrets safe in tangled images and made-up words. Until now.

The third was a symbolic language for the things that are hard to say in plain words. Not through traditional word books written for small children, of course. Not Barbara. She taught me to read tarot cards instead, when I was four, sitting on the linoleum floor of my bedroom in our Astoria apartment, laying down a card and saying, Let's tell a story. What do you see? What do you think the people are doing, are saying? Why?

The cards weren't magic, she told me much later. They were mirrors. They let you see what was deep inside yourself and others. And she taught me the soft ethics that came with them — that you read people, not cards. That you create a safe space first. That you respect a person's right to know or not know. That how you tell the story matters more than what the card "means."

The night before she died, we talked for hours about everything and nothing. She put her hand on my head and told me I was the most important thing she had ever accomplished. She fell into a deep sleep.

The doctor stopped in and asked if she was waiting for someone, because her body should have given out days ago. I shook my head. She'd said all her goodbyes. He shrugged and left me to continue my vigil.

Finally, I fell asleep at her bedside, and I dreamed.

In the dream, we were home in the Astoria house. Two ravens sat on the arm of the couch where her body lay. The ravens flew upstairs to my closet and turned into a black wooden box. I opened the lid, and an angel arose with one finger to its lips, holding a secret that couldn't be told in words. The angel dropped a gold coin into my hand. I nodded. I understood. And the angel was gone.

My mother died the next morning. I went back to the Astoria house later in the day and straight to her closet. I found the box where I knew she kept important papers — a wooden wine box full of prayer cards from the wakes of family and friends. On top was her mother's, dated May 29, 1973. Thirty-five years to the day, at the same age of sixty-nine.

It was the symbolic language she had taught me that let me understand the dream — that let me recognize her safe passage.

The doctor had been right.

Years later, these gifts would carry me through my own cancer — the journals, the cards, the practice of reading what was happening inside me when the world's plain words weren't enough.

So, Mommy, this year, in your honor, I am writing the book you told me to write. It's called Cancer at the CrossRoads: Towers, Hermits and the Fool. It's a book about what it took for me to survive cancer, written for women facing the same ordeal that you and I have faced.

Eighteen years, and I still hear you. Today, especially.

Cancer at the CrossRoads: Towers, Hermits and the Fool is Book One of the CrossRoads Series. In progress.