Today would have been my mother’s 93rd birthday. It’s the first without her. Last November, I flew home to spend some time with her. Being able to work from anywhere allowed me to do that. Even though she was very old, she was still fairly sharp and independent. But on my third day there, she collapsed. We took her to the hospital where, 9 days later, she died, determined not to live any longer, if living meant medical problems and visiting nurses. She wasn’t having any of it. “Let me go. I’ve lived a good life.”

Indeed, she’d had, although she was a baby of the Great Depression, born in 1931 to a single mother who had left home (or was kicked out) and had gone to live with her Slovak grandparents. There’s a story that the doctor who delivered my mother offered to adopt her, but my grandmother said no, I’m keeping her, and so little Margaret was raised by a village of loving great-grandparents, great aunts and great uncles on Pottstown’s South Side. Times were hard, but she was surrounded by a generous and supportive family, and when her parents did eventually marry, that loving family got bigger.

In school, Mom originally considered studying art. But then something happened to change the trajectory of her life. She had been singing in a girl’s choir at school, and one day her teacher put her in front of the choir and had her conduct it. Mom said that, in that moment, she knew exactly what she wanted to do.

She studied music education at West Chester State Teacher’s college, and the way she told it, she just managed to squeak by in her academic subjects. She told me about a geography course she had to take in college. One day the teacher gave a surprise quiz: the students had to identify lakes of the USSR solely by their shape. She was completely lost (even though her classmates took pity on her and surreptitiously lifted their papers so she could see their answers) and failed the test. Music was a different story, although she somehow allowed her piano teacher to believe that she was a voice major — and let her voice teacher believe she was a piano major —so that she wouldn’t have to prepare and perform a degree recital. She wanted to conduct choirs, and that’s what she did. Then her Dad got sick, and graduation seemed uncertain, but the village pulled together once again, and word went out, and her tuition was paid for.

She met my Dad on a blind date, set up by their two best friends who happened to be going steady with each other. The date was for New Year’s Eve at local country club, and we know, from a poem that Mom wrote a year or two later, that they kissed at midnight. I think that’s why she always had a special liking for the song Auld Lang Syne.

They got married and had a family, four kids in all. Eventually she decided to get back to work and landed a teaching job at a good local school. She started a choir, then a show choir, then convinced the school to let her direct musicals. Mom loved her job. She’d come home from school, get dinner ready, eat with us, and then drive back for an evening rehearsal. Every summer, she’d sit down at the piano and get to work putting together her show choir’s next program: arranging songs, working out transitions, writing narration, thinking up the kids’ costumes, and by September it was ready to be learned by a new crop of young performers.

Her students loved her. She didn’t realize it back then (we’d talked about it recently), but she gave them a safe space to be themselves, be creative, be silly, when they had nowhere else. Some of them came from unhappy homes. She gave them music, roles in the musical, songs and lines to learn, and for some of them it was life-changing. The great irony in this is that, while her students were getting away from unhappy situations at home, unhappiness was brewing in her own home. The oldest child dove into rock music and drugs, the next into literature and dreams of departure. It was the seventies. It was a difficult time for parents who expected that their kids would do as they were told, just as they themselves had done. My father was often angry. Maybe her students weren’t the only ones who were looking for a brief escape.

But there was always the next school year, the next crop of kids, the next musical to plan. When she retired, she started traveling, going overseas several times with me or with friends. She waded in the Black Sea, talked to strangers in German beer gardens, watched the Love Parade pass our Berlin hotel, marveled at the bones in the chapel at Halstatt, drank mulled wine at the Christmas market in Salzburg. Eventually she talked my Dad into joining her, and they visited his ancestral village in Sicily, sailed up the Danube, and happened to be in Paris for a Three Tenors concert on the night that France won the World Cup and Paris exploded in joyful celebration. Their tour companions stayed back at the hotel, rather terrified, but my parents went out into the street to bask in the festivities.

The year she turned 80, one of Mom’s former students contacted my sister and me about arranging a surprise lunch for her that summer, with all her old show choir members in attendance. Over a hundred of them came, and there was singing and speeches, and she was so taken with this reunion, this re-living of old times, that she started planning them herself five years later. She hosted three in four years, the last one being a concert in the auditorium of our old high school, which felt steeped in memories. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and my father got sicker and the reunions were put on ice, with some light discussion about whether we would have another one this summer. Mom liked to be busy, she always liked to have a project down the road. Planning those reunions got her through my Dad’s last years.

We’ll be having that reunion this summer, but not the way we’d hoped. Instead, it will be a celebration of her life, and held in the fellowship hall of a local UCC church. She had been raised Roman Catholic and stopped going to church decades ago, but I think she’d like the UCC’s liberal, peace-and-love vibe. And after that memorial, while the family is still together, we’ll honor her last wishes: to take her and Dad’s ashes, mix them together, and scatter them on the two acres of woods that they both loved so much and called home for over 60 years.

Happy Birthday, Mom.