One of the best mother-son reunions, in my mind, was in the award-winning Bing Crosby-Barry Fitzgerald movie, “Going My Way,” in which Father Fitzgerald is reunited with his aged Irish mother, a trans-Atlantic move facilitated by Father O’Malley. The other Big Screen mother-child reunion was the post-World War I return of Gary Cooper in “Sergeant York” as he detrained near his hometown of Pall Mall, Tennessee, in the Valley of the Three Forks, to reunite with Mother York (as Walter Brennan’s Pastor Pile used to call her).

The toughest decision for a mother to make was in “Sophie’s Choice”: she was forced by the Nazis to decide on which of two children she would take with her. But the same Meryl Streep in an unfaithful role in “The Bridges of Madison County” did make the best decision eventually for her tepid husband and two children as she let Clint Eastwood drive out of town after a scorching affair.

In “The Coal Miner’s Daughter” Loretta Lynn’s mother was heroic in caring for her many children in the most spartan of homes in Kentucky’s Butcher Hollow. Cecily Tyson had only two children in “Sounder” but her dedication to her offspring as well as her husband despite grinding rural poverty is inspiring.

Then there is the determination of a dedicated Frances McDormand in “3 Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” to rectify the worst of hurts done to her daughter years before.

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If ever a sad mother should have been better portrayed on the silver screen, it should have been Anne Baxter in the “The Fighting Sullivans,” the true story of five brothers from Waterloo, Iowa, whose ship, the U.S.S. Juneau, went down in the South Pacific in WWII. The directors opted to focus the grief of the father, Thomas Mitchell, who, after hearing the news, somewhat blithely, if not in shock, merely resumes his work as a freight conductor on the Illinois Central.

And who can forget the mother-son relationship – admittedly questionable – in the movie “White Heat”: a loathsome Jimmy Cagney so devoted to his equally evil mother?

So, if your mother has passed, how do you recall your mother? Hopefully in the same tender, loving way as did the Norwegian Hanson family in the 1948 movie with Irene Dunn, "I Remember Mama.”