Things I Had Planned for that Won't Come to Be

I had always expected my mom to be here to take my daughter on a three-week cruise around the Baltic Sea as a high school graduation present. I’d often fantasized what a wonderful opportunity this would be for grandmother and granddaughter to get to know each other better and to see some of the Old World’s most exotic sights. (I’d even more often fantasized about what a wonderful opportunity it would be for father and mother to wander around the child-free house in their underwear, swigging deeply from open bottles of red wine.)

But alas, with my mom’s death, it is not to be. And while alternatives will certainly present themselves—there’s always Junior Year Abroad programs—the finality of this lost opportunity serves to remind me of other doors that have closed on dreams I had once—or many times—dreamed.

For example, it’s obvious that any hope I had of roasting my mom on her hundredth birthday is now quashed. All those jokes I’d been putting together about being called “my baby boy” at 70 years of age will have to be mothballed. And while this hardly represents a literary tragedy, it does, I think, count as a sad day for the septuagenarian I one day expect to be.

My mom, who was as she put it, made a “rich old widow” by my father’s death (and life) had always said that she wanted to die with “one dollar in the bank.” I’d being doing my best to help that come to pass for years—just ask my architect, building contractor, and the bookkeeper at my daughter’s private school—but my program for impoverishing her will now remain unfulfilled. I’ll just have to do my best to squander my inheritance instead.

Finally, Mom’s death wrecks any chance of watching the Steelers win the Superbowl together. I’m sure both of us would really have enjoyed the game and the ice-skating in Hell that would have followed.