My Mother’s Watch

Jim Estrin/The New York Times The watch given to Jane Gross by her mother, Estelle Gross, shortly before her death.

By the time my mother died in 2003, everything she owned fit in one carton, the rest shed along the way as she moved from the house where she had raised a family to an assisted living facility in Florida, to another in New York and finally to a nursing home.

Never one for sentiment, she would insist at each move that we discard, discard, discard, and mostly we did. My brother Michael and I had no interest in the furniture or clothing, so off it went to Goodwill. There were no family heirlooms, as our grandparents were poor Eastern European immigrants. The family vault had long ago been emptied of its documents – birth certificates, wills and proxies, deeds to the cemetery plots.

We had already laid claim to the family photographs, mostly of my father with various famous people during his career as a sports columnist for the New York Post. My brother had most of the sports memorabilia, including diamond-encrusted Knicks championship rings and baseballs autographed especially for him. I had the “good china” and the holiday sterling, which turned out to be silverplate. My sister-in-law had my mother’s engagement ring, a gift on the eve of her marriage into our family. I had her pearls, although I never wore them.

There was only one thing of my mother’s that I wanted as she lay dying: a delicate gold Longines watch, circa 1949, two years after my birth and three years before Michael’s. She wore it until her arthritic fingers could no longer work the tiny latch. Then it remained in her night table drawer, neither one of the things she asked us to get rid of, nor one of those she gave up ahead of time. I can’t remember the moment she finally offered it me, an odd gap in memory given my intense desire to feel its cool touch around my wrist.

I put it on the day she died, and the pleasure it gave me literally took my breath away. Every time I looked at it, wound it, heard its soft ticking, I was astonished anew that this woman I had struggled with all my life, who seemed so indifferent to me, so impossible to please, had come to mean so much to me – and me to her. The watch was a minute-by-minute reminder, literally, that nothing is impossible, that it isn’t over ’til it’s over, and not even then.

Then, one terrible day, the watch was gone. Lost. On my hand in the morning, and missing by afternoon. For weeks I was inconsolable. Friends and strangers tried to help me find it. My brother and sister-in-law offered other things that had belonged to my mother as replacements. I was bereft in a way that I hadn’t been at the time of her death or her burial. Often I awoke in the morning to find my thumb and forefinger circling my wrist, as if expecting it to be there.

My dear friend Esther Fein said, wisely, that the phantom sensation of it around my wrist was good enough, given that the watch itself would have meant nothing to me not so many years ago. My sister-in-law gave me my mother’s engagement ring as a substitute, her greatest kindness to me in 20 years of being married to my brother.

Painters and contractors then working on my house prowled the neighborhood during their lunch breaks, looking for the watch in the street. A local cop came by with his metal detector, because I was so sure it had fallen through the gaps in the old floor boards. And a neighbor I barely know offered to recite this prayer: “Dear Saint Anthony, please come around. Something is lost that must be found.”

But as with all things, the intensity of the loss finally passed and life moved on.

I got used to telling time by looking at my cell phone. I began this blog. I signed a book contract. My mother, watch or no watch, was never far from my thoughts. And then something magical happened.

After 15 months – and long past the point of tears – I found my mother’s watch. I’d lost it during the remodel of the second floor of the house, and it had taken me that long to re-open all of the packing boxes. Every time I’d see the last four in the dining room, they seemed a symbol of my long procrastination beginning the book, so unlike me, surely the result of how frightened I was by the unfamiliar task, how real failure seemed, as it never had before.

I thought finally getting it all unpacked and organized in my office might break the evil spell, or at very least provide a virtuous chore at a hard and lonely time of year. So, last Christmas, I tackled the last few boxes, the ones with all my newspaper stories and phone numbers about old age. I unpacked one box. Unpacked two. Ditto three.

Then I was down to the last one, everything else already either put away or at the curb for garbage pickup. And just as I was about to take the last empty box outside, I saw a glint of gold inside, among the paper clips, dried-up rubber bands, crumpled Post-Its – the watch, one bracelet link broken but otherwise intact. What are the odds it would be in the last box, not tossed out with the previous ones? Or the previous three I’d unpacked that very day? And even in that very last box, what are the odds it wouldn’t be scooped up with old press releases and wind up, unnoticed, in a garbage bag?

My friend Esther, whom I told of the little miracle in an e-mail message, had some wise thoughts about the watch’s reappearance, as she had its loss.

The watch is reminding you that your experience with your mother is not one that should be lost to time, not something to be left in boxes and forgotten. I believe that the experiences that you went through with your mother and surrounding your mother – with Michael, with your sister-in-law, with the nursing home staff, with near strangers – were not meant for you alone. They were meant for you to share.

And I intend to do so. This will be my last official post on The New Old Age for a while, as I turn my full attention to a slower and more ruminative kind of writing, the book I always dreamed of, which took shape during the time I’ve spent with you. In my place here you’ll find contributions from others whose experiences with caregiving both mirror mine and differ in remarkable ways.

I hope you will gain from their insights and that I will, too, from my new perch. I hope that you’ll be as generous with your experiences and advice as you have been in my tenure. And I hope, also, to post again on occasion in the intervening months and to return to this community once the book is done.