A Mother's Day Reflection

It's a strange world we live in, where things often don't seem real unless they've been represented or replicated in the virtual world. Mom died well before the internet became a fact of our lives. You can Google "Gail Margery Lee," and you get no hits. Her virtual invisibility bothers me, because to me she's so very present. If anything good in me persists, it's because of her fierce commitment to the project of raising her children, in the very little time she had.

This picture was taken in about 1970 or 1972, just a year or two before her diagnosis. You can see the anchor motif on her blouse, a cheesy 70s-era polyester, but also a nod to the Boston area in which she grew up and loved so much. Her badge reads "Patient Advocate," to reflect the volunteer work she did at the hospital that would soon treat her own deadly disease. I look at her hands in this photograph, and I can still remember the texture of her fingers and her well-manicured polish.

She died in 1977, at 35 years of age, far younger than I am now -- which remains a fact I will never be able to process. She never met her grandchildren, Jazz Snyder-Burton or Dashiell Snyder, but she would have loved them and been so proud.