Six Months, One Day

As I’m writing this, I’m sitting at my kitchen table across from my mother’s high school varsity jacket. Today would have been her 66th birthday. She passed away exactly 6 months ago yesterday. Also on the table is a cup of chamomile tea, her favorite. Since I don’t own a kettle it is just filled with tap water, but it’s the thought that counts.

It is the beginning of Thanksgiving break of my MFA program and it is the first time I’ve sat still in months. Six months ago, I was selling 3D Printers at a tech startup based in Boston. I was overworked, exhausted, and generally pessimistic about life. Like my mother I had reached a high level of financial success, and similarly, was unhappy. I vividly remember calling my mom on the phone the evening before she passed. I wanted her thoughts on setting a plan to leave my career and having something in the future to be optimistic for. She answered, but had company over and said she would call me tomorrow. The next day, I got a call from Falmouth Hospital asking me if they should “keep trying.”

The unexpected passing of my mother turned my world upside down. Everything I cared about before felt irrelevant. There are few things in life that reset perspective like loss. I now had the tasks of scheduling an autopsy, planning a funeral, and managing an entire estate on my own. These are responsibilities I wouldn’t wish on anyone. One of the hardest things to come to terms with was the inheritance. I worked hard and was proud of being fully self sufficient at 24. It still feels like a sick joke that she gave me the answer to how I could leave my career that day.

My mother grew up in the Boston suburbs in a family of nine children. She came from an era when women were actively discouraged from pursuing their own path, let alone challenged for it. She attended Brandeis University on a basketball scholarship and later climbed the ladder in finance. Despite all odds being against her, she was incredibly successful. In most meetings she was the only woman in the room, but that never stopped her rising from a bank teller to a Senior Vice President of Global Markets at State Street: one of the largest banks in the world. 

In 2017, State Street famously commissioned a sculpture named “Fearless Girl.” The piece is a bronze statue of a little girl starting down the “Charing Bull” on Wall Street in New York City. The piece was created to advocate for more women in corporate senior leadership. In 2012, State Street laid off my mother a few months before being eligible for retirement benefits. It is of my understanding that she was the only woman in senior leadership at that time.

The world is often an unfair place. My mom continued to work after being laid off and never properly retired. I was given the opportunity to leave the corporate world at a young age. The cost of that opportunity was unimaginable.

My mother moved around often and didn’t keep many things. While cleaning out her house in Cape Cod, very few items had sentimental value to me. Her varsity jacket was stored in the basement closet; I had never seen it before. I will never know why she kept, just as I will never know how it fits me perfectly. My mother was 5’7” and I am 6’1.” But the jacket carries a new sense of sentimental value to me. I never was one for jewelry, but I’m happy to wear something that she would have worn with pride. She was a selfless person who was dealt an unfair hand. Even though she can’t be here with us today, I will remember to always live by the values she taught me. 

Catherine Norcott

November 21st, 1957 - May 20th, 2023

“A Fearless Girl”