I was recently asked to share a favorite story about my mother. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? After all, if you were to ask my children they would have multiple stories to share. Most of them would be stories that exposed one of those behaviors that causes them to murmur “Mom,” and shake their heads, but stories nonetheless. They could also likely recount stories I had shared with them from various times in my life.

But when asked for a story about Mom, I was a bit stymied. I could share many stories about my father, some of them ones that he had told us, others ones that were part of my growing up. But my mother, well, her stories were held close and the memories I hold are my memories that have her in them, not stories about my mom.

As I’ve reflected on this, I realize that I think of my mother as more of a presence. She was the essence of love and warmth and support. When she talked with you, there was no one else in the world. When she held you in her arms, there was no warmer place. The smell of “Youth Dew” perfume still lives in my senses as does her embrace.

Mom never wanted to be the center of attention. Her sisters told me about their friends making a fuss about mom’s beautiful eyelashes when she was a child. They were apparently long and curly eyelashes and their friends could not stop talking about them. Mom’s response? She took a scissors and trimmed those lashes so they’d stop fussing over her.

My mother believed that you should always look for the positives. Negativity was never part of her personality or her conversation. She would “make the best out of it” no matter what the circumstances and she urged us to do the same. I remember being excited about going to a party. I was probably in elementary school at the time. She told me not to get “too excited.” If I didn’t expect too much, she said, things would always be better than I anticipated.

When I was 14, she found a lump in her breast and a mastectomy soon followed. I remember standing at her bedside in the hospital as she woke up after surgery. She was heavily bandaged with tubes everywhere. She looked down for a moment, then looked up at Dad and me. “Did they take one or both,” she asked. And that was the only time she mentioned her mastectomy in my presence. I went with her to shop for a prosthesis and I watched as, for years, she wore that heavy prosthesis in her bra. Never once did she say a word of complaint. Never once did she bemoan her fate or wonder “why me,” that was just not her.

When I was 22 and about to make a move out of state, Mom came with me for a weekend of apartment hunting. She had a newly discovered recurrence of cancer on her pubic bone and had just started chemo. She’d never had chemo before and no one shared much information with her. So, while we were away, her hair began to come out in clumps. She didn’t say a word other than to note it. When we got home, I went with her to her weekly hairdresser appointment and I heard them talking about having had all her hair come out when they washed it. They raced to find her a wig, which they did. And she left wearing it and never discussed it further.

I don’t think that she was particularly stoic or that she did not have feelings. Mom, like me, could have tears running down her face during a Hallmark commercial. She was sensitive and kind beyond measure. Yet, her emotions were hers alone. I know I was not the easiest child and I imagine that part of that was the reality that then, as now, my emotions are always very close to the surface, so opposite of who she was.

Because I lost my mother when I was 25, so much of what I wish I had asked, so much of what I wish I had said, so many things I wish I had done, just never happened. I know that her love was the strongest thing about her, I know it carried me throughout my youth as it carries me to this day, helping to fill my full heart.