Almost a Daughter

remembering Edie

My mother gasped when she took the photo of my young niece from the envelope and looked at it.

“She looks exactly like you at that age.”

She ran to her drawer of memorabilia and returned with a crumpled photo of me in the backyard, feeding the family dog.

I took note of our matching dark, wavy curls, our large eyes and the distinctive way our wrists turned backwards, reaching for something behind us. Most would believe the shots were of the same small child. Edie, my niece, was just then three, and I was seventeen.

At that moment, my young niece became special to me in a way I didn’t fully comprehend. It was as if I knew the destiny of my whole life. It seemed as though I looked into the future and knew this would be the closest I would ever come to having a child of my own. There would be no other snapshots of a daughter who looked exactly like me at one age or another, no small, private idiosyncrasies that made us both smile. That little girl, the daughter of my much older brother, was the closest I would ever come to motherhood.

One would think with prescience so keen that a story would unfold of love freely exchanged during mentoring sessions and morning coffees. But my life took the shape of a mission, halfway across the country. Born to marathon, I raced with a singular-minded purpose, to leave my modest provenance behind. Success, for me, meant more than hard work and smarts. It was also a series of concessions and insights shaped to fit a life much bigger than my birth. I went from the rural Midwest to the fashion and beauty world of Manhattan, Paris, and London. There was more to learn than business planning. It took more than time; it took my life.

Edie was always my special treasure, but I delayed the specialness. Like a fine wine, stored for deferred enjoyment, I always believed the golden hour would arrive and, with the uncorking, we would live close to one another. We would chat and shop and laugh uproariously at the odd things that most people didn’t find funny.

She regularly sought my advice. When we were together, we were like magnets-to-metal. We naturally carried on as though we’d never separated.

After graduating from high school, Edie worked where teenagers work when they’re no longer in school: fast food restaurants, retail stores and other places I don’t now recall. I became disappointed in what I viewed as her lack of ambition.

“Get a college degree,” I emphasized when she asked me. When she didn’t heed my advice, I was disappointed. But I let go. I didn’t push. I wasn’t her mother, I reasoned. It would be years later that she would tell me the money wasn’t there to follow my guidance.

I wish I’d known more at the time, but I was struggling then too, in my thirties. I was trying to figure it out. I had no extra funds to help, a marriage that was so-so, and both parents aging. Manhattan society was rushing around me and I was endlessly hoping I would catch one of the waves. In the early part of life, we are fixated on ourselves, trying to get by and generating regrets we won’t see till later.

Edie married and settled into an administrator’s job at a hospital, in her early twenties. Two daughters were born. Some years later, I was quite proud when she received her college degree, by taking evening courses after work and even prouder when, much later, she became the head of the department with a V.P. title.

On one of those metal-to-magnet evenings together, she articulated her rational, yet heartfelt wisdom. She explained that it would have been nice to wait for her children till finances were perfectly square, but she didn’t think you could always wait for life to line up in just the right order. Because motherhood was her greatest desire, she seized it at the most opportune time and then confidently wove all the other pieces around her chosen center.

It was a time when the scientific advances of frozen eggs and embryos were not commonly available. Timing options for motherhood tenures were rare.

Even though a generation apart, we both lived in the world of binary choices.

I watched from afar as she crafted her life. Neither of us had a lot of time to chat, but when we did it was simple to pick up where we had left off. Because her laughter came easy, she generated mine. And maybe because we were family, I felt free to show the silly side of me.

I took note of her grace, the balance she managed and the rituals she tended. Edie was the great mother I would never be, and I lived in the C-suite, where she would never reside.

My success was established; I was traveling the world, while running companies. Her daughters were teenagers when she told me her tests had come back.

She told me in the family room of my sister’s home. I’d come to Missouri for the Christmas holidays and her small family of four had traveled seventy miles, to celebrate the festivities with our slice of her extended family. My sister’s kitchen table was stacked with the goodies of holiday callers. Homemade candy swaddled in aluminum foil butted up against the collection of mismatched Santa mugs. Old muted Hallmark movies playing in the background made the mid-morning feel like all the other Christmases that had preceded it and offered the oft under-appreciated and soon-to-be revealed false notion of permanence.

Cancer. Stage four. Lymph glands and breasts. The words hit me like bullets. It happened so fast.

She delivered the staccato message with an aloof precision she’d reserved for the difficult content. The exactness carried on as she explained that she needed to be home by early evening, as she always made hot chocolate and gave a new pair of pajamas to the girls on Christmas Eve.

A normal Christmas for her family was her aim that day, and for all the days that followed. And in the end, we would see that she stretched normal to a shape none of us recognized. Because she wanted the delight of her teenager’s prom dress and slippers to not be diminished by the fate she herself had been given.

“I want them to be young girls worrying about boy crushes and dates, while looking forward to college, career and to life.” And she wanted it so much that she missed some of the timing and stole some of the truth that should have been doled out sooner about her final certainties.

Two years they told her she had, but she believed it was longer and only spoke of the projects that needed completion. She sat with me, not asking advice, but asking for help. She wasn’t quite ready for her daughters’ tuition. She’d needed more time. Could I help? Would I make sure they went to college?

“Of course,” was all I could manage.

She tidied her 401(k)s. Later in her journey, she studied the insurance policies for cyber knife coverage, and held on to her work life way longer than the initial two-year time frame she’d been given to live.

I looked at her daughters, strangers in ways. I’d seen them once a year, usually at Christmas, sometimes summer, no more. Their walk was familiar, their laugh, an echo that rebounded in threes, theirs and their mother’s. Restlessness simmered within them, not yet brought to a boil. They might have been more like I was at that age than like their mother.

Edie and I worked with her remaining runway. She came to New York and each time she came, we silently deemed it her last. No words, no acknowledgement, and no tears. We could hear the thoughts of each other and when we felt the rumble of the unalterable destiny coming up from our insides, we curled a string of hair with our finger or picked at a troublesome hangnail till the roar went away.

By the time it was over, six years from the news, she had made three trips to New York. Even though I made ever more frequent trips back to Missouri, it was during those New York trips that we had time to speak alone.

I asked her what mattered to her then. “Lunches and nothing,” she bluntly replied. “What matters to me now is having nothing to do and having time with people I love, especially my girls.” We laughed when she told me she neither wanted or needed another new handbag. Handbags were always the mutual passion we shared.

She kicked back in my living room chair and told me her youngest, C., was most like me.

“Did you see her in Soho today? One store after another; she just didn’t quit!”

And her oldest, J., “a treasure, so kind, so mature,” she whispered.

With no fanfare, no circus, she gave their similarities to me. They didn’t know me that well. They had walked lightly around my persona, because she had put me on top, not an easy person to reach. But, there, at the end, she held them up like a mirror to my face, putting them close, ensuring I loved and knew them by showing their resemblance to me.

And then she was gone and the three of us knew she had put us together.

It’s a unique memory that has lingered since she’s been gone now going on ten years’ time.

“It was my favorite thing ever we have done in New York,” Edie had said as she sat on my sofa the morning after attending a black-tie gala at the Waldorf. It might have been her last visit with me. I’d watched her that night. She had studied the chandeliers I’d seen hundreds of times. Her eyes reached to the end of the room and back, up and down the mezzanine heights. Not a gown went by that she did not see, as she dug deep in the swag bag long before the evening’s end.

As I watched from across the table I ached for a rewrite or a director to call “Cut” and then scream “Take two.” A stylist to appear and turn dried chemo hair into dark wavy curls, an artist to sculpt back the cheeks from the steroid round face.

And then, the stopwatch clicked. Her race was done. But the tick of the old wall clock pestered me forward, midst my own deliberations that I could have done more, but maybe not really, because, like others I was busy putting order to the ordinary; I drank my coffee at 7:00 and rushed to my desk at 8:00.

The day after Edie died, I looked with a different perspective on the day before. All the activities of that yesterday dwindled to hogwash and drivel. Nothing seemed important compared to the empty hole that she left behind.

On a Manhattan sidewalk a few years after Edie had died, I told her visiting daughter to learn French, while getting her business degree. I let her know I’d always regretted not taking the time to learn it, as I had worked for three French companies during my career, and she might end up doing the same.

Just days ago, she sent a photo of herself in front of the Eiffel Tower. She captioned the text ‘my first time in Paris.’ I imagined her there, hailing the taxis and riding the subways while reading the directions with ease. She had stopped in Paris on her way to London, where she is relocating to work for a beauty company.

“C., the youngest, is most like you.”

And J., “so kind, so mature” has her master’s degree in clinical Mental Health Counseling. She travels the world when she is not working, and posts photos from every corner.

Her smile is exactly her mother’s. When I see the photos, I am reminded of my own mother’s comment about Edie and me.

The universe twists us in odd funny ways. We three are still spread from Europe to Florida and back to the Midwest. History does frequently dance to familiar rhythms.

Once again, no Golden Hour timing of geographical proximity is likely to come, so I enjoy Thanksgiving or Easter, or regular times, when they choose to visit.

“Listen,” I can almost hear Edie whisper.

”They have my laugh.”