This is probably the longest entry in my blog that I have ever written. And it is probably about Mother’s Day, and about what I am trying to say to myself more than to anyone else.
For as long as I can remember, Mother’s Day was a very special holiday in my family. Preparing a surprise was a tradition.
My father and I would wake up ridiculously early on Mother’s Day, quietly sneak into the kitchen of our tiny two-bedroom apartment, and start preparing something for my mother. My dad, who never cooked under any normal circumstances, would somehow find a recipe for chocolate muffins. He would take knitting needles, cut little flags out of postcards or bookmarks, glue them onto the needles, and stick them into the muffins so that they looked like tiny towers with greeting banners waving from the top.
And then we would wait for my mother to wake up and be surprised.
When I was a child, getting ready for Mother’s Day was an event in itself. We drew postcards with colored pencils, glued flowers and buttons and whatever else we could find onto them, trying to make them beautiful and special. We gave them to my mother and to my grandmother while she was still alive. We bought flowers even though they were ridiculously expensive because Mother’s Day back in Riga was celebrated on March 8th.
In some ways, things are much easier now. So much easier.
Now I can use my imagination, ask ChatGPT for help, create a tapestry design, order it, and make a particular Mother’s Day feel unique. It may not always arrive on time, but the possibility itself exists.
And obviously, I discovered Suno, which has given me yet another hobby.
Now me — a person with absolutely no ear or voice for music, someone who does not even sing in the shower — can suddenly write lyrics and hear them transformed into actual songs. Before, I could only write words and rely on someone else to sing them. Now there is this strange little miracle that can do it in almost any variation I want.
I have not mastered it. Most of my attempts are still puny. But little by little, I am getting there.
It usually takes fifteen or more attempts before I arrive at a voice I actually like, the right style, the right rhythm, the exact pronunciation of a single word that sounds the way I imagined it. I cannot sing myself, but I can absolutely hear when something is off.
Looking back, most of what I wrote over the years were puny rhyming attempts. Occasionally I would stumble upon a good line, and it would rhyme. But I could never really create full songs by myself because I lacked the musical instinct for it.
And yet sometimes one conversation, one phrase, one word is enough to trigger something in me, and suddenly I start writing.
These last three and a half weeks were very difficult for me.
Besides bruising my ribs after a fall, I caught a vicious viral illness. I was in so much pain that, honestly, it felt worse than after surgery. My entire left side hurt. I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t move properly, couldn’t breathe deeply. And I was trying very hard to keep my chin up and hide all of it from my mother because I did not want to worry or disappoint her more than she already was.
And on top of everything else came the coughing.
Every single cough felt like a spear driven into my ribs.
I actually opened a bottle of narcotic pain medication that had been prescribed for after surgery — a bottle I had never touched before — and started taking it simply so I could get at least a little sleep.
In those last three weeks, I barely survived. I’m exhausted. I’m still in pain. I’m only now beginning to stop coughing.
And, naturally, I also managed to share my virus with both my mother and my brother, who became sick as well.
My brother’s birthday always falls very close to Mother’s Day, so every year I end up preparing for a double holiday.
This time I created a huge tapestry for him — enormous, almost absurdly large, nine by seven feet — showing places around the world I would like him to visit, with my brother himself making some heroic leap above the earth.
And yes, once again, I used my imagination, ChatGPT, and a photograph I already had in order to create it.
I designed it, ordered it, had it printed, unrolled the massive thing dramatically across the room…
And my brother stared at it for a while and finally asked, very seriously:
“What exactly is happening with my right knee?”
It turned out that AI had thoughtfully added a third ear just below his knee.
A completely random extra ear.
Something I somehow had not noticed before printing a nine-by-seven-foot tapestry.
So yes, perhaps one should still be at least a little careful with ChatGPT.
So when Mother’s Day came, I got up at five in the morning and started getting ready.
I went to two stores, walked the dog, and then began making breakfast — brunch, really, though at that point the distinction hardly mattered anymore. Somehow I ended up making an almond flour and almond butter chocolate ricotta tart, a goat cheese beet salad, pink-and-white deviled eggs. I baked a few ready-made finger foods from Trader Joe’s and redecorated the room and the table.
Meanwhile, my mother and my brother — both sick from the same miserable virus — were trying to function through coughing fits and viral exhaustion.
My brother, dutiful representative of my generation, pulled himself together and announced:
“I’m going to get flowers.”
And I told him, “Listen, I don’t think she wants flowers. Why don’t we get something green instead? Something she can actually enjoy. Buy her a plant — we can plant it later instead of buying cut flowers.”
So my brother returned carrying a giant bag of bagels, cream cheese, and three pots of thyme that we planned to plant later.
And then my mother walked into the room.
Everything was ready — except for another tapestry I had ordered, this one with photographs of my mother holding me as a baby, my brother as a baby, my son as a baby, and my daughter as a baby. Of course, that tapestry was delayed and would only arrive three days later. A small but genuine tragedy.
Oh, and I forgot my masterpiece: the chilled peach soup.
There was a memorable moment while making it. Bear in mind, I do not cook.
According to ChatGPT instructions, I simmered peaches in a saucepan with a little honey and lemon juice. Then I took a hand blender.
Fireworks.
Absolute fireworks across the kitchen.
Peach splashes everywhere — walls, counters, probably the ceiling. Cleaning the kitchen took far longer than making the soup itself. But eventually I blended everything properly, added cream, ricotta, vanilla, and rum, poured the soup into little cups, and placed them in the refrigerator like a triumphant amateur chef who had barely survived the experience.
And it is impossible to fully explain what she felt, or what I felt watching her walk into something I had spent six hours creating.
We sat down for breakfast. I presented my song.
And I honestly do not think she liked any part of it.
What struck me most, though, was something else entirely.
While I was preparing everything — waking up at five, running between stores, decorating the room, creating peach explosions in the kitchen — I was tired, but genuinely happy. I was preparing a surprise. And somewhere in the middle of all of it came this quiet confirmation of something painfully simple and old-fashioned:
Giving can bring more joy than receiving.
For those few hours, I was happy.
And then it all went downhill afterward.
None of my children said anything. No “Happy Mother’s Day.” No “We love you, Mom.” Nothing.
And when the excitement of preparing the surprise wore off, when my mother’s reaction to both the breakfast and the song turned out lukewarm at best, all I really wanted was to lock myself in my room and cry.
But of course it was Mother’s Day, so I couldn’t.
And then the thoughts started pouring in.
I started thinking about last year’s Mother’s Day, when I wanted to prepare something but physically could not because I was moving. I had just undergone my third atrioventricular ablation a day or two earlier, and although I was trying very hard to keep my chin up, even walking around was difficult.
And yes, life is much better now than it was a year ago. I am no longer on chemotherapy.
But it still makes me ask, again and again: what was the point of surviving, of staying alive, when I am not loved?
And that is a very hard question.
Harder still is finding the drive to keep going afterward.
Because when I had active cancer, life was strangely simple. The perspective was brutally clear. This was another task on the list. This was what had to be done. Survive. Endure treatment. Keep moving forward.
And now that goal has been achieved, all those thoughts rush in and overflow my brain.
What was the point of fighting so hard only to spend every day afterward struggling against the indifference of the people closest to you?
And it is doubly sad because several physicians in the community — people I had known as vibrant, healthy, flourishing doctors — are gone now, victims of cancer themselves. They died at sixty-four, sixty-five. I was never personally close to them, but they belonged to that generation whose careers began just before mine and unfolded alongside mine all these years.
I knew them as successful, energetic, alive.
And now they are simply gone.
So despite everything I said before, despite all the bitterness and loneliness of this day, I still feel lucky.
Lucky that I survived. Lucky that I came through it — maybe not unscathed, but alive, functional, and still ready to live.
And they did not get that chance.
And again I think about everything I did alongside chemotherapy — not instead of it, but together with it. Everything I am still doing now. Those twenty-five capsules a day. No — twice a day.
All of it.
I strongly and firmly believe that this is what helped me survive. Not only survive, but achieve the outcome I wanted so desperately to see.
The deaths of those physicians rattled me to my core. Truly shook something fundamental inside me. And strangely, because of that, they also pushed me toward the exact opposite conclusion from the one I had reached earlier.
Not “What was the point of surviving?”
But:
I survived. I made it. Therefore every remaining day of my life has to be worth living, no matter what.
No matter that I see myself as a failure at finding a partner. No matter that I sometimes feel like a failure as a mother because my children have moved so far away from me — not geographically, but emotionally. They are close. They live under the same roof. And yet sometimes they feel impossibly distant, unreachable in ways I no longer know how to bridge.
And despite all of that — I survived.
I made it.
I am changed. Maybe physically worse in some ways, yes. But I also gained a kind of wisdom impossible to explain to people who have never walked through something like that.
And of course I would never wish that experience on anyone. But like all truly life-altering events, it changes the way you see existence itself.
Life is something you have to hold with both hands and carefully bring into the light every single day, looking at it and thinking: what a miracle it is that this life exists at all. No matter how difficult it may be — full of tears, grief, worry, disappointment, exhaustion — all of that becomes insignificant compared to the absence of life itself.
And I am trying. I really am trying.
I’m making songs. I’m dancing. I’m reading. I’m walking through the pain, through the cough, through the exhaustion, through everything. And I appreciate that I am alive.
And I think that despite the fact that there is not much love surrounding me right now, I will still find another purpose. I will find another source of warmth and solace somewhere, somehow.
But I will find it.
Because I did not survive that year because it was easy.
It wasn’t easy at all.
I survived because I kept going.
And maybe writing is part of that too.
Maybe that is why it mattered just as much as everything else. Because when you pour out everything that has accumulated inside you — everything pressing against your mind, everything spinning endlessly and refusing to let you sleep or think clearly — once you finally release it, once you lay it all bare, you free yourself from it.
It stops being a splinter lodged somewhere deep inside, refusing to let you rest.
It leaves you.
And afterward you feel lighter.
As though, by sharing it with the world, you shifted a tiny piece of your burden onto the shoulders of the Atlases holding up the earth.