THE ROBE

“…I needed something tangible to connect me to her.”

As a child I never had a security object. But the morning my mom died, when I was 27, I put on her bathrobe and instantly understood why toddlers cling to their blankies and stuffed animals.

I was the oldest of four kids and maybe the greediest for my mom's attention. When she rocked the younger babies, I weaseled my way onto her lap. I resisted every bedtime, wanting to stay up with her. I think I just felt from the very start that we were, as my grandma would say, sympatico. When I hit junior high, we got braces together (mine garishly silver, hers clear plastic). When I left for college, she returned to school to earn a new biotech degree. When I went vegetarian, we learned together to make ratatouille and spaghetti with eggplant. She always accepted that I was—as one high-school teacher put it—“intense.” She was my anchor.

The morning she died, an unseasonably cold Ohio morning in April, I needed something tangible to connect me to her. The robe had been a gift from my siblings and me a few years earlier, when performance fleece and polka dots seemed ultra-fashionable. I wore it while we cried and hugged and called my grandma and uncles from the kitchen—her kitchen, where she should have been. I wore it while I wrote her obituary. And the nights after her funeral, when everyone else had gone home and the house felt so weird without her.

Back at my own home, I wore the robe until it stopped smelling like her (Downy fabric softener and Oil of Olay?). I wore it when it barely fit around my pregnant belly and I couldn’t imagine knowing what to do with a baby without her. I wore it while I rocked my son to sleep, just as she’d rocked me 31 years before. And then one day I realized I hadn’t worn the robe in months.

So often after she died, I had worried that she might disappear. That I’d forget her voice, or the little things that made her her. But 14 years later, she’s still with me. I see her in the way my son teases the people he loves best. In my habit of poaching eggs for our dog. In my sister’s exuberance for science. My niece's dark hair and brown eyes. The tenderness with which my burly brother rocks his babies. The way my youngest brother—who was only 19 when she died—turns strangers into friends wherever he goes.

I still have the polka-dot robe. Sometimes it hangs in my closet, sometimes on the hook in the bathroom, and when I set out to write this, I had to hunt it down. Like any good transitional object, it’s served its purpose. I put the robe on because I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to my mom. I could take it off when I realized I won’t ever have to.

—Kristen Convery