Thoughts on Mother’s Day 2020

Yesterday there was a Mother’s Day parade at the assisted living community where my mom resides.

The last day I spent time with Mom was March 17, when she had a routine doctor’s appointment. That day, I was still allowed to take her to the doctor, although visitation in her community had already been curtailed. Very shortly thereafter, in-person visits were shut off completely.

The Saturday parade was a drive-through affair. Residents’ sons and daughters and grandkids gathered in the church parking lot next door to decorate our cars, and then proceeded through the circular driveway with windows down, waving and calling out from a safe social distance to the mothers and grandmothers assembled on the gracious front porch. My mom and her best friend were sitting next to each other in cushioned rocking chairs, smiling and waving as the cars went by. More than seven weeks after I last was face-to-face with my mom, I got completely choked up as our car approached and I glimpsed her from the passenger-side window. I had meant to take a photo of her, but I kind of lost all sense at that point.

As both a bereaved mom, and a daughter forcefully separated (as most of us are right now) from her own mother, I see Mother’s Day as a minefield this year. That word, “minefield,” is the descriptor chosen by another grieving mother, Kelly Cervantes, for this, her first Mother’s Day without daughter Adelaide Grace.

I wrote about the Cervantes family — Hamilton actor Miguel, Kelly, and their son, Jackson — last October when they lost 3-year-old Adelaide, also known as Adelaideybug, to epilepsy and a neurodegenerative disorder. I’ve included that essay below, with some minor updates at the bottom.

Kelly Cervantes writes a blog, and I’ve included her Mother’s Day Minefield essay here. Click the Inchstones link to read more of her insightful, no-holding-back blog entries, and to enjoy the photos that accompany them. You can also follow Kelly and Miguel on Instagram, and Kelly/Inchstones on Facebook.

Mother's Day Minefield

Kelly Cervantes, Inchstones blog

During a call with my psychiatrist, she asked how I was feeling about Mother’s Day. I told her about a call I had had with my mother where I had asked her if we could just skip Mother’s Day this year. My mother’s response was an emphatic, “No!”. To be fair, my mother deserves all of the honor and recognition we can give her. I won the jackpot when it comes to mothers and that has never been more evident than in this last year. But I’ll get back to that. My psychiatrist went on to suggest that I come up with a plan for how to approach the day. This seems logical of course, but all I have been able to see is yet another emotional landmine on a pock-filled calendar. So far my track record with avoiding them has been poor. I spent Thanksgiving in and out of my cousin’s bathroom in tears. Once gifts were opened, and I had feigned excitement for Jackson, I spent the rest of Christmas in bed. I tried to deny New Year’s existence and did fairly well until emotions ran too high resulting in a rare fight with Miguel. On my birthday I drank entirely too much and paid for it dearly the next day.

With each tactical option failing, I realize now there is no avoiding these landmines. There is no armor that can protect me from the cutting grief. The landmine will detonate, it will be painful, but I also know that I will survive. Perhaps it is time to face the day head on. I can give myself the space to grieve, as many times throughout the day as necessary, but that doesn’t mean I have to deprive myself of the joy of the day either. After all, who is better at multi-tasking than mothers? I’ll survive the day, because it is just that, one day and I’ve survived much worse.

But it would be naive to enter battle without at least some protection. Instead of avoidance and denial, this time I choose gratitude. There is the most obvious source: for all the pain and trauma that came with being Adelaide’s mother, the lessons she taught, the happiness and love felt, all far overpower the negative. I would not be the woman I am today without having been Adelaide’s mother. That doesn’t justify the difficult path she walked. Nothing will, and I have to let go of any hope of reconciling the meaning of her pain. But I can still be grateful for the way she shaped me.

I can also be grateful for the incredible mother to which I was born as well as the mother I acquired through marriage. Miguel and I have not lived near immediate family at any point during our time together. We leaned on cousins and close friends, but there is little replacement for having your mom. It is not lost on me how fortunate we are to have our mothers in our lives and that they are both willing and able to travel to be with us when we need them. Last September, on a Wednesday when Miguel was at the theater, Adelaide stopped breathing and I had to make the decision whether to intervene. We had just transitioned to hospice and I wasn’t yet mentally prepared to say goodbye. With the help of our home nurse, Adelaide was placed on her bi-pap/ventilator and we bought ourselves another month with her. That afternoon I called my mother in tears and she was on a plane to us the next day. She lived with us, on a pull-out couch in our basement, for SIX WEEKS. For the month until Adelaide died and two weeks after, she prepared meals, cleaned, and took care of my family so that I could be with Adelaide and grieve. Then she handed the baton to my mother-in-law who stepped in for the next two weeks and made sure we were functioning at a basic level before letting us find our own way. I will never forget their sacrifice of our most precious commodity: time. Or their unconditional love and compassion.

So, I will face the next landmine. It will detonate and it will hurt, regardless of whether or not I want to acknowledge it’s existence. But this time I will multitask like a mother, holding my conflicting emotions in tandem, and finding resolve behind a kevlar vest of gratitude. Happy Mother’s Day to all, and to those who struggle on this day, let the tears flow, feel the pain but don’t forget to feel the love and gratitude also. I’m with you.

In memory of Adelaide Grace Cervantes, 2015-2019

"There are moments that the words don't reach. There is suffering too terrible to name. You hold your child as tight as you can and push away the unimaginable. The moments when you're in so deep it feels easier to just swim down. The Hamiltons move uptown and learn to live with the unimaginable."
— Lin-Manuel Miranda, It's Quiet Uptown, from Hamilton

I've written about "It's Quiet Uptown" before. It's a song that reaches so deeply into the horror of losing a child, it's hard to believe it sprung from Lin-Manuel Miranda's imagination and empathy rather than real-life experience. He has kids now but his first wasn't even born yet when he wrote this song.

The show premiered off Broadway early in 2015 and the cast recording was released that year. I don't recall exactly when our family became aware of it. But by early 2017, the desire to see Hamilton dictated our Spring Break plans. With our oldest getting ready to graduate high school, it would be the last time for a while we'd all be on the same break schedule.

We planned a trip to Chicago, which has its own production of Hamilton. Family favorite actor Wayne Brady, of Whose Line Is It Anyway, was finishing up a short run as Aaron Burr, a fact that pushed us over the edge. We got tickets for his penultimate performance.

In April 2017, the four of us started off a memorable week in Chicago finally seeing this much anticipated show. We ate deep dish pizza. We figured out how to go where we wanted on the "L." We saw the giant mirrored outdoor sculpture lovingly called "the bean." We went to Navy Pier and took a water taxi over to the museums. We checked out the view from 360Chicago at the top of the John Hancock Center, one of the tallest buildings in the city. We had a great time! And two months later, Rader took his own life. Unimaginable.

My husband and I have been back to Chicago two more times to see Hamilton. We've not yet been to NYC. So actor Miguel Cervantes is 'our' Alexander Hamilton. He originated the role in Chicago and played it all three times we went. He's been singing that song almost daily for years now. Once to our whole family. And William and I clung to one another's hands and wept while he sang it two more times to us, as if we and our unimaginable loss were alone in the theater.

This past weekend, he and his wife, Kelly, lost their daughter, Adelaide Grace, to a neurodegenerative disorder that struck her in infancy. She was almost four years old. She's also survived by her brother, Jackson, age 7. Miguel has stepped away from the role of Hamilton for an unspecified period of time, but said in a statement to People magazine that he would return soon.

There are moments that the words don't reach. I have nothing profound to say to Miguel and the Cervantes family as they are going through the unimaginable. Other than, I see you. I feel for you. As your work helped me in the darkness of my loss, I hope you, too, find yourself enveloped in a grace too powerful to name.

Susan Ward, October 2019

Note, May 10, 2020: Some things have changed since I wrote this piece. Miguel returned to his role of Alexander Hamilton in Chicago. The Chicago production closed in January 2020 (thankfully William and I were able to make one more trip to see it before it did), and then Miguel became the new Broadway Hamilton. Of course with the onset of the pandemic, that production closed as well. We hope to see him there whenever the world opens up again.

Kelly writes a beautiful blog called Inchstones, available here.