Skin cancer pic

My seventh-grade locker was green. Four elementary schools merged into one junior high--Sawmill was its name. My mom was dead and there were now new people who had not a clue. Swimming in dread, I began. Around day 3, I was caught in the hall without a pass.

I had just slammed my locker shut when I heard her voice. Ms. Maravel, a 20-something, beautiful, almost hippie-looking math teacher, engaged to Mr. Pic, the bandleader. I loved her insanity: "Open your locker and take out all the books." I did--speechless. With arms full she slammed the locker door. "Next time, detention. Now go." And I did.

Pat Maravel died last week, nearly three decades after our rocky start. We buried her today. I sat in the front row, where she placed me from the start, inside her family.

I was born twice--once in 1962, to a woman who left so quickly, I never got to know her. I carry her name, and from the few pictures I have, her face as well. I was born a second time, three years after her death, to Pat Maravel, a woman who refused to let go. She forced limb back into my soul. She stood solid and strong. She showed up. She stayed.

I never got to ask her why she rescued this lost puppy of a girl. What did she see in me? I tested her for years, still so broken, not able to trust. I couldn't shake her, no matter how I tried. I was her most difficult child, she always says--said.

When my mom was sick, I thought if Barbra Streisand's mom were sick, she would go on Johnny Carson and ask people to send a dollar. Then with all the money she got, she would get her mom the medicine and her mom would live. I believed that to be trim. It's not. I have all the money now, and there is no magic medicine.

"Do you think I am dying?" she asked me in December.

"Yes," I answered.

"Me too," she said. Then, after a moment: "Ro, this is going to be very hard for you."

I laughed as I cried, telling her, "I could not love you more. I will look after Jessie and Alex." She put on her glasses to get one last look--held my face in her hands and said, "Now go." I did.

Well, God has a sense of humor--she gave me two mothers; both died of breast cancer. Both times I am devastated beyond words. Pat Maravel taught me about mothering, freedom, and family; about tolerance, activism, and compassion. She showed me how to live, how to love, how to give back. She had strong opinions, an open mind, and a will to live that defied doctors' rules.

Last month I went oil a cruise, not with Pat Maravel but with her children, the ones, like me, she left behind. Pat would have loved the cruise--full of every type of family one could imagine. "There are many ways to be in this world, Ro," she would tell me often.

I took her daughter and son with their fiances and we sailed out to a point in the ocean where the water is as deep as six cities, one piled on top of the other. Down there was a darkness I could not comprehend. Once someone told me fish had little lights to get them through that perpetual night. I'd like a little light too.

Pat's daughter, Jessie, looks like her mother, but they don't smell the same. You can carry a face forward, but the particular signature of scent goes when you go. I remember how Pat smelled--of sprinklers in summer, soapsuds, and strawberries. She smelled like a mom, like my mom.

On the cruise I ate dinner with her kids. The ship was forging forward, but at the table I felt myself pulled back to her smell and her skin and her sound; the ship sailed one way; I sailed another. Backward, forward, sideways; time is its own kind of cruise.

I made a slide show on the last night, the kind I constantly make of my kids. Afterward Jessie, Alex, and I cried and hugged each other. We were crying because the ocean was as deep as six cities, because fish had little lights and we had none, because the ship was coming to dock.

Winken, Blinken, and Nod, like the lullaby.

But no mom to sail home to.