Memorial Day is always a bittersweet time for me. It’s the beginning of summer every year. Time to open the pool, dust off the porch cushions, plant out the seedlings. It’s finally the last of the frost dates in our cranky Catskills.

But it also reminds me of a fateful Memorial Day weekend in 1977, when my stepfather had a fatal heart attack on his way to our family cabin in Connecticut. He was driving up the Saw Mill Parkway early on Friday, with the cat Leo and dog Gretchen in the back of the station wagon, to open the cabin ahead of my mother, who had to work late in the city. She was to meet him at the train station in Goldens Bridge that evening.

Just past the toll booth near Yonkers, he veered off the Parkway into the Saw Mill River—just a stream at that time—and was dead at the scene. Leo escaped his carrier; Gretchen stayed with her master but had internal injuries that would spell her demise not long after.

My mother’s neighbors and good friends were notified when a police officer arrived at her loft building on Wooster Street to announce the death. They wisely set out to her office to tell her in person and to comfort her. She was only 52 and he was barely 50 when he died. They were a love story long in coming, having met in their 20s and married others. When they finally married each other, it was for life. They didn’t know it would be such a short one.

My mother and I had been estranged for a year by then. A raft of perceived injustices, on both our parts, had led to a stalemate neither of us could break. I was living in Boston; she was in New York. The many summers we had enjoyed together at the cabin in Connecticut were seemingly over. 

The year before we had joined the village of Litchfield in the bicentennial celebration. I wore a colonial dress I made, and we paraded through the town square arm-in-arm. My mother was a great celebrator. She knew how to party and always made the best of her situation, hosting dinner parties on a dime that live on in memories today.

But in 1977, the death of her beloved mate crushed her. It crushed me too. He was more of a father to me than my own, if you count the time and care he spent. When I was notified that evening, I rushed to her, forgetting all that divided us. We wept together, she wailed; her heart almost breaking.

What is the sweet of that bittersweet memory, you may ask? Only this: it was the beginning of our reconciliation. Nothing could matter so much as the need for comfort then. We buried our grievances with her husband’s body and started a new relationship built on mutual love and care. I moved back to New York to be nearer to her and to start a new life of my own, more aware of its brevity. One of her famous parties introduced me to my husband. She lived to dance at my wedding and welcome the births of her grandchildren, who multiplied the love she had for them. 

That Memorial Day taught me so much about love and death and how to live through both, joining pain and grace. May your memories be sweet. Enjoy your summer. Hold your loved ones close.