BEAR

"Thirty-five years earlier, my mother had sat down, drawn this shape, cut the fabric, sewn the seams...."

My mother left behind a lifetime of creativity in painting, collage, assemblage and sculpture when she died of ovarian cancer in 1986, at age 51. I was 25 and had seen her through the four-year illness to the end. Then I gave away her scarves, divvied up her jewelry, dismantled her studio and sorted her books. I would have said there was no corner of her life I had not touched in our too-brief years together. Until the box arrived three decades later.

It came on a dark day in April 2017, the year I began my own encounter with cancer. At home recovering from what would be the first of three major abdominal surgeries, I felt bleak and defeated and alone. An unseasonably late Boston snowstorm was pelting the windows when the mailman dropped the box on my doorstep. On the note inside, my stepbrother in California had written:
This is Bear. Your mother made him for me when I was going through a particularly difficult time in my life. I think you should have him now.
Love,
David

As my mother’s daughter, friend and caregiver, I’d thought I knew all her media: enormous PVC sheets bent into acrobatic forms and hung on walls, thrift-store dolls’ heads jammed into rusty cans, watercolor paint puddled into drifting forms of birds. At the holidays she would oil the old Singer and make gifts and decorations. One Christmas we all got velour hooded robes we wore for ages, looking like green monks, and every year she made new ornaments from whatever was around the house—my favorites, the angels cut from vintage catalogs and strung from the beams overhead.

I did not know what David was talking about. I lifted the tissue and found this stuffed animal with two tiny pink felt eyes and a tinier half-circle mouth. His fur was napped and flattened. When I picked him up, his arms flung wide.

Thirty-five years earlier, my mother had sat down, drawn this shape, cut the fabric, sewn the seams, stuffed the little body and placed Bear in the arms of her stepson, who was 15 at the time and struggling with his identity in the world. Anxious to come out, but with his own mother in denial, David moved in with my mother and his father, wore bright muumuus, painted his basement room black and gelled his hair high. My mother found him a new school and took him shopping. And, it now seemed, made him Bear to hug.

Time warped. Suddenly she was right there on my bed comforting me, her arms wrapping me in her turpentine-scented sweater, a plate of butter-and-sugar bread between us, oolong tea steeping. I thought how few, true, amazing surprises were left in life—good ones, precious ones—and I tossed the box on the floor and shook the packing off this little being. Thanks to David’s generosity, I could feel my mother just when I needed her most. I cradled Bear against my chest and wept.

Over the last seven years, as David has had his own losses, I’ve tried to return Bear. He won’t allow it. So, under a 10-year watch for carcinoid cancer, with 30 months—roughly 900 sleeps—still to go until I’m in the clear, Bear will be with me for all of them. Then we will see where my mother’s love is needed next.

—Alexandra Dane

With my mother, Alexandra, in 1980. My father loved her name so much, they made it my name too. Two weeks after my mother died, I found out I was pregnant. We had a girl: Alexandra, of course.

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Alexandra Dane won Bellingham Review’s 2023 Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction and has published essays in River Teeth and San Fedele Press’s American Writers Review; her work is forthcoming in Two Hawks Quarterly and The Sonora Review. The mother of three adult children, she splits her time between Seattle and Boston.

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