The Mirror of Mom

 

While this is something of which I am always aware, it hits especially close to home today for me.  It was fifty-one months ago, today, my mother died.  She was a reflection of "WOW" every day of her life and I shall miss her every day of mine. 

Arlene Babakitis was a New York City girl, born and raised by her parents on the Lower East Side in a 12th-floor apartment on Catherine Street that she also shared with her two sisters.  Home was home - especially so for Arlene's mom, Sally Reoch, who in September 2001 was still living in the apartment where she had raised her family all those years earlier.  

Ms. Babakitis had long since "crossed the river to the Jersey side", living in Secaucus with her two sons, but the lessons she learned about family in that 12-floor apartment on Catherine Street never left her.  Her two boys, Vincent and Kevin, were twenty-one and eleven respectively.  Not too very long before what proved to be the last day of her life, Ms. Babakitis had moved the three of them into their own home.  It was, to hear her younger sister Karen Reoch tell it, "a very proud moment for her."  

Arlene Babakitis got her first job when she was only sixteen, working at Alexander's department store.  Two or three years later, she went to work for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which remained her professional home for the rest of her life.  In September 2001, she was an E-Z Pass Coordinator for the Port Authority, working out of its offices in the World Trade Center.  It was there that she died.  

Almost unbelievably, tragedy did not finish foisting itself upon Arlene Babakitis' family with her death in September 2001.  In March, 2011 her son, Kevin died.  He was a first-year student at Landmark College in Putney, Vermont.  He was just twenty-one.   He was just eleven when his mom was killed, which devastated him and broke his heart, as it would any little boy.  

Here is to hoping that each has found some measure of comfort in the other's company in the ten years since Kevin's death.  Neither deserves anything less. 

-AK