The Loss

In his heartfelt piece about his mother’s death, Sparrow wonders if he’s writing his journal for “people like [himself], who reach the age of sixty-six without having lost a parent.” My mother died last year when I was sixty-five years old, and I’m grateful that I had her companionship for so much of my life.

Some of us get so focused on dealing with our parents’ old age and their ensuing health issues that we don’t realize we, too, are getting old. I know I’m slowing down. I compare myself to my mom when she was my age and give her credit for what she was able to do in her later years, when she was well into her eighties.

Once both parents are gone, we truly are no longer someone’s child. We have no choice but to step into our new role as an adult.

I discovered The Sun in 2001 while looking for connection and meaning during my divorce. I started a Sun reading group and found that it helped me connect with people. Since then I have faced many other hard times, the most significant being the death of my twenty-two-year-old son, Alek.

In my extreme grief I stopped reading, writing, and listening to music, but I kept my subscription to The Sun. Now, three years later, I am starting to make my way through the issues that have piled up. When I read Sparrow’s essay about his mother’s death [“The Loss,” January 2021], I felt that sense of connection that I’d initially sought in The Sun.

Sparrow nails grief when he writes, “Sadness has a dimension, like length, width, and depth. A particular sadness can be miles and miles long.” Though the dimensions of my grief seem boundless, Sparrow’s words give me comfort.

A friend gave me my first issue of The Sun in 1987, just after my mother had died unexpectedly. I was twenty-seven years old. The first piece I read was by Sparrow, and I still remember him describing visiting communist bookstores in New York City in his teens. I assumed Sparrow was a woman and thought the essay was pretentious. When I realized he was a man, I recalibrated my view. The experience made me realize my bias against my own sex.

All these years later Sparrow is sixty-six years old, and I am sixty. “The Loss” [January 2021], his very personal piece about his mother’s death — actually all his writing is personal — reveals him as someone who has had close relationships with many people throughout life. I am the opposite: I have a few close friends and don’t know anyone from my younger years.

I somehow think of Sparrow, though, as a comrade through the ages. We have aged together. I am thankful for his thoughtful silliness and irreverence. I always smile when I see his name.

I loved learning about Sparrow’s mother’s zest for life. I imagine his mother and mine would have been good friends. My mother also went to university when I was growing up, and we ate a lot of tuna-sandwich dinners when she was in night school. She became a nursery teacher, and then a social worker.

I love how his mother let him run naked in the park when he was two years old, and how she rubbed Vicks VapoRub on his chest and sang to him. When I was two, my mom let me wear my snowsuit on a hot summer day, and I remember her gentle massage of Vicks when I had a stuffy nose. She sang “You Are My Sunshine” to me. Sometimes we squished together on our plastic-covered sofa and watched I Love Lucy.

I love that Sparrow was so loved by his mother.