[My mother, Mary Hotchko Egan. She is striking a very ’50s pose in our backyard in Owego, NY. Photo is mine.]

“Don’t toss that saucer in the air. You’ll drop it.”

~~My mother to me, sometime in the late ’60s.

Of course I wouldn’t listen. I tossed it up and caught it, until I missed. It hit the floor and broke into many pieces. Mom just sighed and walked into the kitchen.

I felt like crap. She accepted my apologizes but the saucer was gone. She suffered something inside her heart that day, and I was responsible for it. But, she moved on, never holding it against me. Never saying: “Remember when you didn’t listen to me?”

That was a teaching moment of sorts, but it was lost on me. I constantly relive the hurts I suffered. I don’t think my mother did. I think she just had a way of accepting what life handed to her. And be thankful.

Maybe it was part of being a child of the Great Depression. Who’s to say?

Early On…

From things she told me, old notebooks of hers that I’ve looked through after she passed away, I knew she was a dreamer. She copied page after page of the sayings of Marcus Aurelius. She could quote him. I can picture her with her head in her hand and looking out of the window of the Falls-Overfield School where she was educated, and dreaming of the world beyond that nearby hill. Her parents came from Eastern Europe, likely Hungary…maybe Romania. The region shows up in my DNA test. She was born, probably in Scranton, and grew up on a farm in the rolling hills west of that city.

[To the best of my knowledge, my grandmother is on the right, holding a daughter. Perhaps my mother. No notations on the back of the photo. Photo is mine.]

[My mother’s mother, Mary Hotchko. Unknown date. Unknown location. Photo is mine.]

Sometime in the late 1920s, my mother met a young man, Paul Egan. They enjoyed each others company. So much that they married in 1936. The wedding photo is awesome. I’ll post it when I can get it scanned.

My father scored a job at IBM when the company’s importance was increasing. But they had to move up from NE Pennsylvania to Endicott, NY. And then to Owego in 1945. I was the last of four boys, born on May 31, 1947. In a drawer of a dresser I found a bundle of New Baby cards sent to my mom. They were dated June 2 or 3. It was no secret among my mother’s friends that she dearly wanted a girl. So the cards referencing me read like sympathy notes. But regardless of her slight disappointment at having a fourth boy, she was proud of her children. She boasted once that the priest at St. Patrick’s mentioned our family during the sermon. From the pulpit! Without revealing surnames, he said that one mother in the parish had named her boys strong Catholic names, strong names of saints of long ago…

“She named them, Christopher, Dennis, Daniel and Patrick.” Okay no girl at the end, but she loved her children without measure and told them so.

[My mom’s boys at the Birch Tree in our backyard. We posed there for four photos spanning decades. In case my readers don’t recognize me, I’m the one on the right. Photo is mine.]

My childhood darkness and my mothers affection…

I remember she had a soft cheek that I tried to kiss as often as I could. I clung to her. I followed her. I was afraid for her. Nothing tangible, just a vague sense of impending loss. A friend of hers collapsed and died on Main Street after dinner at a restaurant. It was sudden, unexpected, shocking. It saddened her deeply and that sorrow flowed to me. I felt her loss and by extension, I felt like death, for her, could come at any moment. I became terrified.

I have very distinct memories of walking out of my bedroom and leaning over the banister and calling for MOM. My father would come to the steps and ask what was wrong. I said I wanted to talk to mom. (Now, as a father, I can imagine how hurt his feelings were when I wanted to bypass him.) She would come to the bottom of the stairs, I would go down to the landing.

“Please promise me that you won’t die before me,” I would almost beg. I did beg.

What was she supposed to say? Trapped by my neediness, she said: “I promise”.

When she was 77 years old, she broke that promise. But by then I understood how life worked…and death. I spent the last night beside her bed in the living room of our house. I checked her often. She slept. She had seen the priest on Holy Thursday and she told him she wanted to go on Easter Sunday morning.

She did.

I remember sitting on the back porch and listening to her tell about her dreams. So and so courted her in 1930. Another so and so sent love letters from the war zone in Europe. Until they stopped coming.

She told me she wanted to travel. She craved the idea. There may be places she visited that I never knew about, but I know for a fact she visited: Alaska, British Columbia, many states, England, Ireland and France.

The hardest and loudest I ever heard her laugh, and I mean laugh, was when she and my daughter, my brother and his daughter came to visit me when I lived for a year in Dorset, England. It was the Christmas holidays of 1984. I took her to see a pantomime, an old British Music Hall tradition, presented all over the British Isles at that time of year. Truly, she never laughed harder. And days later, I held her arm while I walked her into Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. She was so tired. She was so happy.

Yes, travel was important but her home was her focus. She loved the house on Front Street (with the exception of the tiny kitchen) and did her part taking care of it. She re-papered the bedrooms, planted flowers and walked the property. She told me on several occasions that she would stand on the river bank and she would feel the presence of Native Americans. A chief, she said, was often standing behind her, protecting. She was never afraid.

So, reflecting back on a life time of memories, I am conflicted and regretful. I don’t think I told her I loved her nearly as many times as she told me that she loved me. An imbalance that I can not alter.

In her final hours, however, she must have known on some level, in her sleep, in her dreams, in her joyful anticipation of death and going to heaven and being greeted by her mother…well, she must have felt the love of her youngest son, the one who was supposed to be her Rosemary, holding her hand and bending over to kiss her soft cheek, once again and one last time.

~~Mother’s Day 2025