by Jeffrey M.
Published July 19, 2026
One of the things that I always appreciated about my mother was that we almost have the same birthday. I was born the day before her 32nd birthday. As I grew up, Mama and I had several great times celebrating together. When I turned 18, my father was out of town, so my mother and I had a very elegant dinner together at the Pillar House restaurant in Newton, Massachusetts. I remember I ordered coffee with dessert and felt very grown up.
After Mama moved overseas, I was sad that I could no longer celebrate our birthdays together in person. But thanks to the magic of time zones I would call her around midnight my time—early morning for her—when it was both of our birthdays. Mama and I would always laugh on the phone together, as we recalled times we had been able to celebrate in person.
Birthdays were just one of the ways we stayed connected over the years. Another way was the flowers that my sister and I got for my mother every Mother’s Day.
These are some of the many bouquets of flowers that we gave to my mother. My sister and I started this tradition probably 25 years ago. I had found a really good florist who lived near my parents. Overseas, they don’t celebrate American Mother’s Day—it’s just an ordinary Sunday there. So what we did was buy her flowers each Mother’s Day and had them delivered to her. That worked really well because she was always surprised. She was surprised the first year we did it, and it seemed that every year she would be surprised again—it just fell off her radar.
They grow a lot of flowers there, so you can get flowers pretty inexpensively compared to the US. Generally, we would spend $50 on a bouquet. That won’t get you that much in America—maybe a couple dozen roses—but over there, it brought great, glorious arrangements.
Here she is holding a bouquet. She was always happy to get flowers. She would usually send us an email thanking us for them. My brother and sister overseas saw her a lot more often than we did, but this was our special day where we could make ourselves feel seen and appreciated. We loved our mother.
She was always a wonderful gift-giver, especially for her grandchildren. She gave thoughtful presents. This was a way to give back to her. She wasn’t much of a gardener, especially in her later years. She lived in apartments where gardening wasn’t really possible, so having flowers brought in was super sweet.
I’m still grieving. It’s been so soon, and I do think of her often. One of her favorite phrases was, ‘The One And Only Mama.’ She would sign her letters to us that way and, in fact, usually abbreviated it TOAOM. So even right now, when we’re talking about what to put on her tombstone, that’s coming to mind. It makes me sad knowing that I’ll never hear that from her again.