Certain things transport me to my mom. I’ll catch a scent in the air or taste something that brings her to me, even now.
If someone comes around me with a bag of Wise potato chips, especially the onion-garlic flavor, it takes me to being with my mom. The same is true of Werther’s butterscotch candy, Jean Nate bath powder, and Chanel No. 5 perfume. Those things never make me feel sad; they’re mostly good memories.
However, every time I hear the song “Who Can I Turn To?” I get teary-eyed. It was written by two British composers, Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley, and probably the most famous recording was by Tony Bennett in the mid-1960s. My mom would always sing along with the record.
The lyrics feel like they sum up my mom and how she made her way through life, and in some ways, it’s where I’m at now, too. It’s about feeling like you lost your guiding star and now you’re wondering who you’re going to turn to, who will understand you.
I’ve never been depressed. Or if I have, I didn’t recognize it. Once again, I’m lucky that way. I can see it in some family members, though. As much as my mother loved her life in California and having her house and garden, along with my dogs and cats, who were all devoted to her, there was a darkness that would surround her once in a while. Sometimes when I’d look over at her, she was not there except physically. She would be in some different place, probably a memory I had no part of, one that she was never going to talk about. I’d wait, let her be, not talk to her, and after a couple minutes, she would be back. I guess history had snuck up on her uninvited, and there was no point in letting it stay.
I didn’t know anything about feeling lost until after she died. I wouldn’t call it crippling grief because it doesn’t have a grip on me. It is more of a grief that stays way down in my toes. It doesn’t feel dark. It’s a kind of fog or numbness. I can’t figure out what I’m supposed to feel now. I’m not raving angry, but I resent the fact that my mom and Clyde aren’t here anymore.
It’s not like either one could have done anything about dying, but from time to time, I feel like, Why did y’all leave me here?
I’m not in any rush to go wherever they went, but a lot of days, I’m just sort of walking through it, getting where I need to go and doing what I need to do. I had no clue that things would change so dramatically for me once they were gone. Was I so tethered to my mom and brother that I can’t find my own bearings? It feels that way. They were my home base, my reality check, because they both knew me from the start.
A couple months before my mother passed, I apologized to her.
“Ma, I’m sorry I was such an asshole sometimes when I was a kid.”
She shook her head and smiled at me. “All kids are assholes at some point. It’s part of what you’re supposed to be. You have to get to know what’s going to work out for you and what isn’t.”
“Okay,” I said. “But was it really, really hard to get through?”
“No,” she told me, “because I knew what was coming. When you have children, then you have to expect that they’re going to be different from you. But the differences aren’t in every way.” She waited for a minute and then said, “I looked in the mirror one day, and I saw my mother coming out of my shirt. Same will happen to you. One day you’ll look and see me coming out of your shirt.”
She knew what would happen. More and more, I’m starting to look like her and sound like her. I look in the mirror, and there’s my mom . . . coming out of my shirt.
It doesn’t bother me, except I want her to still be here. I need my mom. I still need her to tell me, “Check your face” when I host The View. She used to watch the show and then call me and tell me that my face looked like I was not having any of whatever a guest or one of the other hosts was saying. She would tell me that my face was showing it all, and it wasn’t good. My daughter does it for me now.
“It looks like you’re pissed off or not agreeing at all, and I don’t think that’s what you want people to see because it might not be true.”
She was right.
That’s really the thing that I got from my mom while I was growing up: to be kind to people even when you don’t like them or agree with what they’re saying.
She would always say, “It doesn’t take much to be kind. There are things you can do. You can be kind with no money.”
Even early on in my career, she made me understand that I had a responsibility to be kind to my fans. She would remind me that it probably took a lot for a person to walk up and ask me for an autograph.
She would tell me, “When you’re here at home, you’re just you. But when you go out the door, they’re expecting Whoopi Goldberg. So do your best. And if you’re on your period, don’t go outside. Don’t go anywhere because you’re a little tough when you have your period.”
My mom and brother were the only ones who could tell me, “Don’t be a dick,” and it would feel like love. Because it was.
She could say anything to me, and I could say things to her that I couldn’t really say to other people. She could hear beyond my words when I was talking to her. She understood what was happening for me. To a similar extent, my brother was the same way.
As I walk into my sixty-ninth year on earth, I’m thinking to myself, Now, this is what becomes a legacy, right? My mom and brother left me enough information to get through however long I have left here.
I know I’m okay on my own, but I didn’t really know how lost I would feel. I stopped moving around much after my mom passed. I didn’t really want to go out to the theater, or concerts, or Yankees games, or basketball games. I used to have parties at the house. I didn’t want to have anyone over. But I did make an effort. I knew my mom would want my brother and me to keep on celebrating birthdays and holidays and having a good time even if she wasn’t here.
Then when Clyde passed away, I thought, Now what? I had a hard time feeling up to doing much at all. Clyde was my beacon. He was the one person left who knew everything about me. He knew everything about our mom. He was my port in the storm as a kid when she was hospitalized. And he gave me peace of mind when I was older and he was looking after her. When he passed away, I really lost my footing. I felt very scattered.
It was the first time I felt like an adult, totally on my own. Before, I was always my mother’s kid and my brother’s little sister. Now I was only a stand-alone adult. I didn’t know how to be. I wasn’t prepared not to have anyone older than me.
I would want to come home from work and just roll up and hibernate. But I knew I couldn’t do that. I knew if I slipped into letting grief immobilize me, I could swim around in it for a long time. I really didn’t want to get like that. The way I was raised is that you pull yourself together. And if you can’t, then you need to ask for help. You have to talk to someone about it. It has happened a couple times for me since she died. I’ve had to talk to somebody about what was happening to me.
I knew what my mother would have said if I had given in to closing out the world. I can hear her in my head: “Get off the bed. Get up and go do something. Do something meaningful. You’re still alive, you know? It can’t be about me not being there. It can’t be about your brother not being there. This is about how you’re still there. What are you going to do?”
I had to show up for my work and project commitments. I had to be okay for my daughter and her family.
I’ve started writing cards to my friends who are now going through it and have recently lost their own mom. I want to pass along to them what I found out for myself, hoping it will help. Maybe it can be helpful to you, too.
I start out by saying that other people who still have their moms will not know what to do or how to respond to your loss. Do your best to be kind to them even when you’re not feeling it.
There will be times when people who haven’t lost a parent, particularly their mother, are going to say things to you that make you think, What the fuck! You don’t know what you are talking about. They aren’t where you’re at. They don’t know any better. The best you can do is say, “Thank you,” then wrap it up quickly and get the hell away.
There will be people you like a lot, even other family members, who are talking to you, and you’ll realize you’re just not there with them. You checked out and didn’t hear whatever they were saying. That’s okay. It’s going to go like that.
The loss of your mom is the loss of the first person who ever looked at you and thought, This is my baby. Regardless of whether she raised you all the way through, you were still a part of her in the beginning. She was the first person who looked at you and thought, Okay, wow. Here we go.
If you were put in the arms of a woman who took it on herself to be your mom, that’s the person who made sure you stayed alive. She fed you. You peed on her. You threw up on her. And she still took care of you, talked to you, and got you to the point where you could do more for yourself. So she was the first connection in your life. When you’re a kid, you never think about that relationship coming to an end. Even as you get older, you don’t let your mind fully accept that she’s not going to be there someday.
For those of us who have lost our mom, our grief is going to be different from one another’s. A lot of folks might go into deep mourning right after losing their mom. For some of us, it takes a while to feel it. An anomaly about me is that it took a long time for her loss to really set in on me. I put the grief in a compartment because I’m an efficient person. I wanted to get shit done, do what needed to happen, and figure out how to get through it. But that’s not how it goes.
If you mourn right away or try to put it on hold, or can’t really feel much at all, there is still one thing we all have in common. There’s no timeline and no finite ending to grief for your mom. You keep waiting for it to change or to feel differently.
Some days the tears are going to come, and you just have to let that be. They might not be convenient, or they might show up unexpectedly. If you go into a funk, then really let yourself go fully into it. Pull up a fainting chair. Draw the curtains. Close out the world for a while and get as insane in your grief as you ever thought you could. Get into an insanity funk all over the house. Let it out. It will help you get up faster and back into life.
But count on the grief to come back. Even years later. Three years after my mom passed, I would sometimes think, Why am I still feeling like this?
It’s not a grief that has an end date. It evolves, but it stays around. You know, it becomes something that hangs out in the corner. It’s still nearby, every day. And sometimes it comes up and runs at you. You just have to let it do what it’s going to do.
If it’s uncomfortable for you, don’t put yourself in places where people might be celebrating and having a good time. At first, being around other people who are out there getting on with life might make you feel somewhat angry. Again, they aren’t going through it. You have to remember that you’re looking at it all through the eyes of loss.
Eventually, you have to separate your grief for your mom and your grief for yourself. That’s okay, too, but you have to call it what it is. If you’re grieving for yourself for a long time, get some help from somebody who can help you figure it out. Take the onus off it. You’re not crazy; you only need to talk some stuff out.
My best advice to anybody who has lost their mom is to find a way to celebrate her life. Regardless of what your relationship was with her, figure out how to find some humor in who she was and your life with her.
The best way to honor your mom is to laugh.
Laughing makes you breathe differently and lightens everything up so you can see where you’re going and put one foot in front of the other. I was so fortunate to be my mother’s daughter and my brother’s sister. I got to be with people who knew how to have a good time when they could. We had a good time when I was a kid, and there wasn’t even extra money to eat out at a nice restaurant or take an actual vacation away from New York. We made up our own good time. I don’t know how my mom did it, but I never felt I had to settle for less.
The three of us knew how to enjoy life when it was all going great and I was making enough money for us to do whatever we wanted. We may have upped the experience—Hawaii hotels and spas, trips to London to stay at the Savoy, courtside seats at NBA games, Las Vegas suites and carefree gambling—but it never changed the dynamic among the three of us. We didn’t have a good time because there was more money to be had. We could laugh together with whatever was going on. It didn’t matter if it was a three-star Michelin restaurant in Rome or a Nathan’s hot dog on Coney Island. It was always amazing to go to great places, but it wasn’t really about the surroundings. It was about this nucleus family of mine.
I’m lonely, but not for other people. I’ve got plenty of people in my life: friends, coworkers, and family. I have my daughter and her family. But it’s different. Alex has her cocoon of her husband, three kids, and granddaughter. She’s got a strong hexagon family of her own making. I’m always included, but it’s still not the same. I’m lonely for those people who knew me from my first breath: my mom and my brother.
For those of you who still have your mom, dad, and siblings, don’t let a lot of time pass without talking about death. I know it’s something we all avoid thinking about, especially in the US, so we’re all unprepared for how to handle it. We’ve hidden it away in sterilized situations, in places where most of us don’t go often unless we have to be there. Our family members often die in emergency rooms or during surgery or in the intensive care unit. If they are old or sick, they might be in the hospital or a nursing home, or we might have hospice to help us, which is a godsend. But most of us don’t have to face or think about death all that much. Let me tell you when you don’t want to have to figure it out: after the person has died.
It’s important to have the talk with each other and make sure it’s all down on paper, what you want to happen to you, what they want to happen to them. Have the discussion at age twenty-five, then again ten years later, and then another ten years down the road. Make sure that everybody’s wishes are up to date.
Maybe you feel estranged from your family, or you have very different views on a lot of things that matter to you. Still, the time to process all of that is while they’re alive. Say what you need to say while people can still hear it. Give them a chance to understand and to respond.
Maybe your parent was not motherly at all or particularly kind. Even if they couldn’t be a mother or father, they were still a touchstone for you. So, at some point, you’ll have to come to terms with your relationship with them. While you can still connect with them, tell them how it is for you and see if they will sit down and talk to you about it. Because once they’re gone, that begins to run up on you, the fact that you didn’t say what you meant to say, you didn’t do what you meant to do. Even if you need to tell them how mad you are, you can do that.
I have a friend whose mom is going through dementia and forgetting a lot. As it progresses, she’s becoming a pleasant person everybody loves to be around. This is really different from how she was as a mom.
My friend told me, “Now I can say to her, ‘This is how I felt when you did this or that.’”
And her mom looks at her and says, “You know, I’m sorry, dear.”
The person she is now is sorry for everything she put her kids through. She doesn’t understand when she did it, but she knows she caused her daughter some pain.
My friend said, “I feel like my mother may hear something from time to time.”
I said, “Keep it nice so you don’t scare her. She can’t remember where she is or why she’s there. The person you’re talking to now isn’t the same person she was when you were a little kid.”
She told me, “If it had been like this when I was growing up, we would have had a different relationship.”
I get what she’s saying, but I also remind my friends that it’s easy to forget that our parents were kids, and they had parents, too. You don’t necessarily know how they were raised. So, you have to be a lot better about opening up to say, “I don’t know how you were raised and how it made you the way you are.”
Even if you don’t get to say it to your mom, at least recognize that she might have responded to you the way her parents responded to her as a little kid. She probably did the best she could with little information. Chances are your mom grew up in a family that never talked about their feelings. Maybe they only had the time to figure out how to keep shelter over their heads and enough food for the day. Or maybe they were raised in a strict household where there was no room for a mistake or even individuality. Take a deeper look. It’s all more complicated than we like to think.
Like my mom, I come from the school of thinking, There is no point in standing here screaming and crying about things being bad because I still have to get shit done. So let me just go get it done. If we’ve got time, then we’ll talk about it all at some point. If not, we’ll just have to keep moving forward.
Probably the most difficult task following the death of your mom or a loved one is to physically dismantle the life they had. After my mom died, my brother and I talked through what to do with all her possessions. I had to be back to work on The View, so Clyde assured me he would handle it all. Because one of Clyde’s favorite things to do was drive cross-country, he would come to see me in New York or visit family in Los Angeles. I didn’t go back to my Berkeley property for a long time.
I’d ask Clyde, “How’s it going, sorting through Ma’s stuff?”
He’d always say, “I got it. Everything’s okay.”
It wasn’t until Clyde passed away that I figured out that he had not touched one thing in the front house since Ma had died. Nothing had changed in five years.
It made me realize that he couldn’t do it on his own. He was so attached to our mother that everything in the house had a sentimental memory for him.
This is the other thing I tell my friends in grief: If you have siblings, go through all the belongings together. Pick a time when you can be together. You won’t know what holds meaning for your brother or sister. You’re going to have to get rid of a lot of stuff, but you can at least ask each other, “Anybody want this?”
It’s all going to take time. So if you have the option, don’t try to do it all at once. Pick days when everybody can participate. Start with the valuable things and then move on to furniture, books, papers, and clothing.
If you’re an only child, see if a cousin or a good friend will jump in with you. It’s good to have extra people to talk to about memories or silly things you did with your loved one. If someone else helps you with the process, you can run things by them, too: Keep it? Or let it go? You’ll probably cry some. It’s going to be tough because somewhere in the back of your childhood mind, you never thought your mom wouldn’t be in that house, that room, that bed. But you’ll also laugh if someone else is with you because crying and laughing aren’t that far apart in the world of memories.
In the beginning, you might feel like you can barely stand to let anything go. Do what you can to be realistic, but also cut yourself some slack. Box up the stuff you keep and find a place to put it for a year. A year later, go through the boxes. You’ll feel less sentimental and more willing to let a lot of it go. After a year, you’re going to look around and think, I’ve got to get rid of a lot of this. It’s not disrespectful to your loved one that you don’t keep everything they had. After a year, keep what means something to you now, whatever that might be.
In the end, I only kept my mom’s things that felt like the strongest connection to her.
Somebody asked me recently what I’d do if I could have my mom with me for one more long weekend.
For the first couple of hours, Alex and the grandkids and everyone who loved her so much would be jumping all over her and carrying her everywhere.
Then I’d say, “Come and get in this car with me.” I’d want her to experience an electric car because they weren’t around in 2010. And I’d show her how far smartphones and technology have come.
Next, I’d say, “Come to Italy with me and see the house I got there.” On the flight I would tell her everything that’s happened since she left: all the good, the bad, and the strange. We’d go to the beach in Italy, sit in the sun, smoke joints, and just laugh.
As I write these last thoughts about my mom, I’m looking down at my electric-blue metallic fingernail polish. My kid made me get a manicure with her, and now I’m hooked on having shiny nails. My mom had beautiful hands and long, strong fingernails, and she would have loved having all the nail design variety you can get now, the glitter, the symbols, the gems, and the full scope of colors. I’d end up taking her for a manicure. I think she’d choose metallic gold. Yeah, gold for the singular person she was.
Whatever our long weekend would turn out to be, I know she would be appreciative because she was always that way, especially after she came to California. She was very grateful for all the days she didn’t have to go to work. She loved the days when she got to travel and not wonder what time she had to be back. She was freed up to enjoy her life.
I never had to wonder if she was happy. Nothing was left unsaid between Mom, Clyde, and me. I know my mission to give back to her everything she had given me happened while she was alive.
I always wanted her to know that she was the best mother for me. She not only gave birth to me, but she gave life to my outlook, my confidence, and my dream. Every November 13, my birthday, I would have flowers sent to my mother with a card that read: “Thanks for letting me rent the room.”
She appreciated every gift, every kind gesture, and every opportunity. It didn’t matter if she was in the halls of the White House or sitting in a lawn chair in the garden reading a book—it was always a great day to her. She’d call me up and say, “I just want to say thank you. This was a perfect day. I had a great time, a great time.”
At other times, she’d say, “I’m so appreciative that Clyde’s here with me, and you’re there doing what you do, and we’re staying together and doing this as a family.”
I think that’s my new mission: to be more appreciative of my days, like my mom. Because there’s no doubt: I am the luckiest person in the world.