This blog is a personal story and dedicated to my mother for Mother’s Day.
“The foot bone connected to the leg bone, the leg bone connected to the knee bone,
the knee bone connected to the” femur bone, the femur bone connected to the pelvic bone. Let me know when you’ve stopped singing. The femur bone, also called the thighbone, as you may know, is the longest, largest, and strongest bone in the body. It’s an unusual thing to think of for a daughter, but my mother reminds me of a femur bone because it’s her strength of character alone and continued support and love that gives everyone close to her a leg to stand on. She is like an indomitable scaffold that sustains our courage and our family through the hardest of times.
There is not a thing upon which she lays her hands that she does not transform from average to beautiful--from décor, cooking, fashion, to extracting an individual’s full potential. Even death she made beautiful for my father. After the doctors told us that he had six more months to live, she didn’t leave him to their care but rather took care of him at home, herself, and decorated the remaining days of his life with music, love, and laughter until the angel of death closed his big blue eyes.
My parents were deeply in love for 38 years, like Romeo and Juliet. My mother would visit his grave every day for five years straight after he passed away. But I will never forget the night my father died in their bed. Through her sobbing tears, my mother went to blow dry her hair because the funeral was the next day. She said to us that my father loved seeing her look beautiful and even after having lost her parents, a daughter, a sister, and now her beloved sweetheart, she would not allow death to triumph over life. We all looked at her in awe. She was our femur that kept it all together just as that durable bone brings the upper and lower half of the body together.
But life’s a bitch and even as you try and put your best femured foot forward it can ravage you. A few years ago, my sprightly, energetic mother got out of bed one morning and five steps later found herself lying on the floor in screaming agony. It took her three hours to reach the phone. She called my brother, and being the superhuman body builder that he is, he beat the ambulance and broke down her five inch wooden doors with his own hands. I got the phone call in New York. I was on the next plane out. My mother’s complete femur bone was broken, eaten up by lymphoma. My beautiful mother, my best friend who I speak to a thousand times a day--I was not ready to say goodbye. I never will be. I had just signed a deal to ghostwrite a book on Jewish success, but instead of heading to the library I found myself sleeping on a lawn chair in my mother’s hospital room for three weeks and then staying in Canada for the next five months caring for her and her toy French poodle, Papoush. It was excruciating for me to see my mother that way. She was always so independent, coming and going, and now she had to go through chemo and learn to walk all over again with a titanium filled leg. She was my rock but now I had to become her femur. Yet even in the hospital, my mother wouldn’t surrender and refused to wear their hospital gowns or use their bed linens. She may be the only patient in the history of the oncology department who had a chiffon beaded nightgown and 700-thread sheets.
It was the hardest thing that we ever went through. Even the dog fell into a depression during that difficult time. Yet, I found strength in myself that I never knew I had. That strength was shaped like my mother. I have never met a person whose presence brings such light into any room as does hers. That light continues to guide my way. As we went through MRIs, surgery, chemotherapy, hair loss and rehabilitation, I was empowered by all the times in life I saw her fight instead of fall. I’d sing to my mother to distract her from her nerves and would make all the technicians and doctors laugh with my terrible voice. At my mother’s bedside, I wrote a book, nurtured her and her French poodle back to health, found the power of laughter, and realized that I stood in the shadow of the greatest role model a daughter could ever have. But most of all I learned how deep, special, and strong are the bonds of a mother, a daughter, and a French poodle. The femur bone had nothing on us.
On this Mother’s Day, I just want to thank God for the great blessing of a having a mother like mine, a mother who has taken so many lost souls under her wing and taught them to fly, a mother whose honesty will criticize you into perfection not weakness, a mother who has surely done God’s work, when He was busy elsewhere.
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