A Year of Big Loss

I have had several years that just seem to be filled with loss. When I say "loss" what I mean is losing people I have loved in my life. The first person I lost, the first one whose loss I felt deeply, was my grandmother. She died in 1988. In the grand scheme, I guess I was lucky that the first real loss I felt occurred when I was 35. Grandmother had lost a baby at Christmas back in 1928 when she was just 17. The baby was only 5 weeks old. What a tragic loss that surely was, and in fact, Grandmother grieved for that baby all her life, never liked Christmas much because of the memories that came back to her during the holiday. It was appropriate then, I suppose, that Grandmother died on Christmas Eve. 

The next loss was when my grandfather died in 1991. We were scheduled to have lunch the next day. I really hate that I missed having that lunch with him. We'd had a few before that, and I had begun to feel like I was really getting to know my Pop on a one-to-one, adult level. He is missed.

And then came 1995, the first big loss year. I lost my mother that year, but also an uncle and an aunt, and a friend so close and dear to our family that it felt like another uncle. And then there was a long reprieve, before 2011, a tragic year with the loss of Wayne's best friend and two days later his son and only child. It was a year of bereavement that lasted well into 2012 and beyond. In fact, losses like that leave you changed, with a piece of yourself forever broken. But as Hemingway says, The world breaks everyone but afterwards many are stronger in the broken places. --Or something like that. It's not an exact quote.

My dad died in 2013. Yes, he was going on 89 and had lived a long, and mostly healthy, life. He had traveled widely and always kept a mind that was open and honest. I lost my guiding star when he died, and it took me many months to be able to wake in the morning without that crushing loss pressing on my chest. I still miss him, and not a days goes by that something doesn't happen that I want to share with him. In fact, after his funeral, when we were driving from Corpus Christi back to Yoakum, I kept thinking how when we got there I would have to call him to bring him up to date on how all the family members and friends we had seen that day were faring. It was something I always did after a gathering that he missed. He would have loved to have known that some of the people we had for so long in our lives were there to honor him. I can't believe that's been nearly six years ago.

And now I come to 2018. Another year of big loss. Mother always used to say that death comes in threes. Sometimes it comes even more than that, but I'm going to hold her to that rule of three because this year we have already lost three and that's enough. First my brother, Ray, another casualty of cancer, the scourge of our time. It's haunting to watch a death from cancer. Both Mother and Ray struggled to the end. Nothing peaceful about it. I was left with nightmares again that lasted into the summer. And Ray was too young, just 69, only a few years older than Mother.

And then Wayne's mother, Loraine, died. She was 95, another long life, but still missed, most especially for how she was before she began to deteriorate. She always reminded me of Mother, neither of them had a good filter and often let their mouths overload. They were both feisty and funny when they didn't mean to be.

Finally, at the end of last month my uncle, Ron, died, another gone too young at 74. Ron was part of my childhood. He took my dear sweet youngest aunt away from me, or so I thought at the time. They made me the flowergirl at their wedding, to ease the transition a little, I think. Ron seemed to accept that I, along with my brother, just came with the deal. We were always hanging out at their apartment on campus at UCC. We used to swim at the big pool there. And there are many many more memories, almost all of them fun memories. Funerals have become family reunions, a place where you get to see all those old friends and relatives who have played such an important role in your life. It's good to catch-up, to reminiscence. Seems that there is usually lots of laughter after a funeral, and the aftermath of Ron's memorial was no different. The only thing missing was Ron, with his big hugs and hello, his corny jokes, and stories about something he had just read or learned. He and I shared a love for reading history, and we often compared notes and traded books. I will miss that.

I guess the thing we all have to do--and it's so hard to remember--is to each and every day appreciate and cherish those we hold dear. I know that sounds like an old cliche, but boy-hidy, life really is short. It's no kidding about smelling those roses. We have to do that, and to be grateful for the people we have in our lives and the times we get to share with them. It truly feels just like yesterday I was that flowergirl in my aunt's wedding, or that I was bringing my newborn sons home from the hospital, or trying so hard to write a book that might get published, or meeting my darling Wayne for that first date at Olive Garden, or starting this blog, for that matter. Times, they do fly!

Onward...

My Thoughts, Beliefs, and Opinions

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Not in any particular order of importance--

My Fundamentals: I believe in a woman’s right to chose. I do not want the government to legislate morality or make decisions that are deeply personal. I support gay rights. I believe the LBGT community should have the same civil rights as the rest of us--to marry, to raise children, and to purchase a wedding cake from any damned bakery they please. I believe in the separation of church and state, and I support the notion that when churches become political, they should lose their tax exempt status. Religious activism has caused many people to turn away from religion and caused a precipitous and unfortunate drop in church attendance. I believe in public education. One of the reasons our ancestors came to this country was for the public schools. I consider 2-year community colleges  public schools and believe they should be tuition-free. I believe in the arts in public education. The arts (great literature, visual arts, dance, music, and film) enrich us and expand outward our minds and our souls.

I think corporations who have been lucky enough to exist in this country should pay their fair share of taxes, without loopholes. I do NOT believe in “trickle down economics,” which has been proven time and again not to work for the middle and lower classes. I believe billionaires can live on less and therefore should be taxed at the same rate as the rest of us. I once read that a billion dollars lined up end to end would encircle the earth three times. Now, honestly, who can’t live on a billion dollars?

I believe in labor rights and that the minimum wage needs to be doubled. It’s expensive to live in this country and workers need to be paid accordingly. And I believe corporations that move their businesses overseas to avoid paying state and local taxes or to avoid hiring American workers should be penalized with a higher tax rate and with the tariffs that apply to the country where they have moved. I believe that health care is a human right and should be given freely by a country as wealthy as the United States to ALL of her citizens. I believe in humane immigration laws. I believe in a guest worker program that will regulate the wages paid to non-citizen workers, and provide a work force willing and able to do the service jobs that most Americans do not wish to do. However, I do believe that the United States is an English-speaking country and should designate itself as such.

I believe in legalizing marijuana and decriminalizing other illegal narcotics. I believe in the death penalty, but only in the case of heinous crimes, such as serial killings or mass murders. I believe that Federal Judges should be elected by the people and not appointed.

I believe in a strong military force that provides career opportunities and education for enlistees, and gives them the lifetime benefits guaranteed by the G.I. Bill. In return for their service to the country, I believe we should pay our soldiers more. It’s a disgrace that a newly enlisted serviceman earns so little that they qualify for welfare programs. In addition, I do not believe that our military force should be used for extended periods of conflict without a formal declaration of war.

I believe in a national gun registry, title included, the same way we do with our cars and trucks and RVs, so that when a gun is inherited or bought from a friend or person other than from a gun store, the title to that gun will transfer from one individual to another. I believe in regulating magazine capacity to 6 rounds, and that ammunition sales should be tracked and reported to the gun registry. You can’t buy too much decongestant from the pharmacy within a given month. I know because I have been denied. So if that can be tracked so can the purchase of guns and ammunition.

I believe Election Day (first Tuesday in November) should be a national holiday. I also believe that all states should have the same election laws and conduct their elections in a uniform manner nationwide. I believe that a voting ID with a picture and bar code should be given to every registered voter and that this ID should be the only item required at the polls. I believe that voting districts should be determined by population and by a regulatory committee and those districts should remain the same so long as the populations of those districts does not change. Voting districts should not be determined by any Political Party.

As regards the office of President of the United States: I believe that any candidate running for the highest office in the land should be REQUIRED to show five years of tax returns. I believe that once elected, all presidents should be REQUIRED to divest of their business interests in the form of either a blind trust or a straight divestiture. I believe that the power to pardon should have judicial oversight and be used sparingly. I believe that the FBI, CIA, and DOJ should fall under the Judicial Branch and not under the Executive Branch of government. I believe that the President should be held to the same standards under the laws and ethics of this country as any other citizen. I believe that he--or she--can be arrested, tried, and convicted just as the rest of us. We do not have kings in this country. In fact, we fought a long war to get rid of our king.

As regards campaigning and lobbyists: I believe that it should be illegal for any campaign to go on for longer than 1 year. I believe that all campaigns should be paid for with public money and that “dark money” or PAC money should be illegal. I believe that there should be term limits placed on all elected officials of 8 years, the same as there is for the President. I believe that lobbying should be strictly regulated, and consist of only verbal or written solicitations and not monetary campaign contributions. I believe that Third parties should be included in the Party Primary system and should also be included in all public debates and town hall meetings. We must remember that we "hire" elected officials to work for us. We should be able to set the rules.

Above all, I believe in fairness and equality and the absolute meaning of both of those words. I do not believe that one race or the wealthy or any class of people should have more rights than another. I want an open and ethical government that is transparent to its people. I want a moral but secular country where all people are free to practice their religious beliefs--or not--without bias. I want government FOR the people and BY the people.

I love my country but I do not love the place where I presently find all of us who live here. We have strayed, I believe, far from the fundamentals of our Founding Fathers, partly because they could not, in the late 18^th Century, have foreseen the changing and globalizing world we have now. And we have been divided by people and corporations with ulterior motives, a division that worries me greatly, and I think worries most of us. We have to remember, once again, the old Golden Rule we were all taught as school children: Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You. That doesn’t mean we all have to have the same emotions or opinions; it just reminds us to respect one another.

Anyone who has read this far might not, and probably won’t, agree with everything I have laid out here. That is perfectly OK. We are all entitled to our own opinions and beliefs. That’s what makes this a “free country.” My opinions are mine, developed over 60+ years of watching, reading, and paying attention to the goings on around me. I own them, and actually, I’m proud of them so don’t expect me to change them easily. I’m hardheaded and I’m actually not looking for debate.  I simply want some understanding of the positions I hold dear. We all make the mistake of assuming someone feels the same way we do about a subject, and that assumption is often deeply offensive to me. Yes, I am a liberal-thinker, and I am certainly not ashamed of that. When I look up the word “liberal” here is what I find: “Open to new behavior or opinion; broad-minded; tolerant of individual rights and freedoms.” I proudly accept that label.

Onward....

Brother

 

My brother is dying, and he doesn’t want me to tell anyone. He didn’t even tell me until he was through with all his treatments, until they told him there was nothing more they could do and put him on hospice. Then he calls me to tell me he has a tumor in his liver and it is too large to remove. He has 6 months, he tells me. But that turned out to be an erroneous estimate. He made that call to me on the 22nd of March. It’s now, ^{April 16th}  and we are already at the end. 

Two days after this revelation, we drive up to see him. He has lost 50 pounds and almost all his hair, but the main thing is his color. He's jaundiced, sitting in his lounge chair, which he stayed in for most of our visit. He was still fully engaged, talking a lot, eating tangerines and drinking Cokes. We reminisced a little. My brother has a skewed memory of his childhood. Or maybe mine is skewed. I remember happy times and he does not. It has been the great divide between us for many years. His bitterness and anger have made it hard for me to be around him, and so, for the last 20 or so years, we haven’t seen each other much.

Before this visit, the last time we got together was about 18 months ago, when I was still working in the county job. A law seminar took me to Austin. They picked me up at my hotel and we had dinner at a catfish place. The old bitterness arose and tainted our time together, as it has done so many times before. But we have always talked on the phone a half dozen times a year, birthdays and Christmas, and other times, too. We usually end up talking about our pets. Nice, safe subjects--maybe some movies or television shows we’ve seen. I catch him up on family news I might have, which he never seems to care about much. Maybe he would make some flippant remarks about it all. But it wasn’t always this way. 

I don’t have any one particular early memory of my brother. He is five years older than me and he was just always there. He was my mentor, my protector, my Bubbie. He held my hand a lot. He guided me through the world, choosing the food we liked, the games we played, the movies we needed to see, and television shows we should watch. He was in many ways, the most important person in my life. My confidant. My cohort. I told him everything, and he did the same, although not always with such openness. If something terrible happened at school, a kid got shoved down on the playground or got licks from a teacher, I raced home to tell my brother all about it. His unremarkable responses instructed me that these things were part of life, and nothing to get excited over. Bad things sometimes happen, and that’s just the way it was.

Because of my brother I became an avid reader. Not because he sat me down with books and forced me to read. But because he put books in my way without realizing the effect they would have on me. We regularly took the bus downtown, usually to go to a movie, but the bus stop was right outside the library, which meant we spent a lot of time inside, waiting for the bus. We could see through the plate glass windows in the library when the bus arrived and raced out there in time to hop on it. My brother had important things he wanted to research, things that entailed microfilm and old magazines and newspapers, which meant I was free to roam the big three-story library at will, as long as we were back together in the lounge at such-and-such time to run for the bus. He gave me my orders and taught me how to read the big round clock beside the elevators.

The third floor was where the kid’s books were and I spent all my time up there, sitting at pint-sized tables with stacks of colorful books. I couldn’t wait to read them all, and usually got through one or two before I had to make the difficult decision about which three I would check out and take home. Three was the maximum back then. Eventually, our library started running a Book Mobile out to our part of town. My brother learned the schedule and where they would stop, and we walked hand-in-hand down our long block and over two short end blocks. I always wanted to run ahead as soon as I saw the bus-like vehicle, with “Book Mobile” emblazoned on its side. I can still remember the wonderful bready smell as I climbed the two stairs. It was like stepping into a book cave, absolutely magical to me. These were the wonders I would never have known without my brother to show them to me, and they defined me all my life.

There are so many other memories, so many things we did and told each other. We loved one another without question. I could have had a mean brother, one who didn’t like it that as the baby of the family and the only girl, I got special treatment at times. If he resented it he never showed that he did. His teen years were difficult, and I remember hurting for him. I remember taking his side against nagging parents. I remember missing him terribly the summer he spent in California with our aunt and her family. I missed him so much I slept in his empty bed the whole time he was gone. We used to sing for each other, and dance. We used to play like we were in movies and make up our own scripts. We were inventive children and we didn’t even realize it at the time. Sometimes it seemed like we were in our world together.

But time passes. Children grow up, get their own circle of friends, their own outside interests. It happens to all siblings. We no longer lived in the same town, sometimes not even the same state. We saw each other less and less, but for me those bright shining memories of our childhood continued to glow in the back of my mind. But as the years passed, he seemed to dwell on the wrongs that he felt were done to him by our parents. Not imagined wrongs, they were real enough but so long ago wrongs. He never could seem to turn that page, and it became more and more of a roadblock in our relationship.

And now he is about to die. My feelings are hyper-emotional and complicated, all mixed up with my childhood devotion and my adult resentments for the support he couldn’t give to me when I needed it. I love him dearly; maybe in the back of my mind I knew, since he was older, that he might go before me, but I never imagined it would be this soon. And once he is gone, I will truly be orphaned, with no one else in the world besides myself, who shares all my history from the beginning. Part of me cannot believe this, or fully accept it. I guess in a way, my brother was my first FIRST love. I will miss knowing I can’t pick up the phone and call him. That will seem odd, and awful. I miss him already.

The Last of My Trilogy of Tributes: My Pop

Most people in my generation were lucky to have two sets of grandparents. But because my dad was a "caboose" his parents were older, born in the 1880s, and they were both gone before I was born or shortly after. Which left me with one, younger set of grandparents. Since Mother was a working mom, even way back in the Fifties, and since the idea of day care hadn't occurred to anybody yet, I stayed with my grandparents during the day while Mother worked. I adored them. They contributed greatly to my happy childhood.

My brother was the oldest of their grandchildren, and Pop was a name my brother could say at an early age, so Pop he became. Pop was a lay Baptist preacher. He told me he found his calling on watch on a Navy tender ship during the Battle of Leyte Gulf in World War II. The ship was the USS LaSalle, and Pop promised the Lord if He would get him through the battle, he would turn his life over to preaching the gospel. The Battle of Leyte Gulf was the first battle where the Japanese sent kamikaze pilots to commit suicide by divebombing their planes into the decks of US ships. I would imagine that after watching a few ships sink in this way, quite a few seamen said quite a few prayers and made many promises to God. Pop kept his promise.

A lay minister usually is adopted by the poorest churches, the ones who can't really pay much if anything at all to their preachers, so Pop also had a regular job during the week. When I was a child staying with them, he would come home every day for lunch, or dinner as they called it then. Supper was the evening meal. Pop's arrival mid-day was a big treat. When I heard his car pull into the driveway, I would race to hide behind the refrigerator--which we called the icebox back then--and when Pop came in the kitchen door, I would leap from behind the icebox with a loud "Boo!" Without fail he put on a big show, trembling all over and moaning like I had scared the dickens out of him. After we ate our dinner, I would sit on his lap and he would sing songs to me. I always thought he sounded like Tennessee Ernie Ford. Then he would go to the back room and lay down for a short nap. He called it "resting his eyes" but more often than not, we could hear him snoring clear up in the front room.

Unless he was sick, Pop always wore a white shirt and often a tie. On weekends if we stayed with them, my brother would also be there, and we slept on pallets in front of the black and white TV set. Pop never missed "Gunsmoke." He wanted all the lights in the room turned out, and we watched without speaking. I didn't know it then, but learned later in my life when I became a writer, that Pop was a great student of Western history. He knew all the stories of the outlaws, the marshals, the feuds, and the Indian tribes. In fact, he claimed to have Indian blood running in his veins, and he did have their jet black hair and dark eyes.

Pop could speak Spanish. He and my grandmother had eloped to Mexico and he told me once he wanted to be able to read their marriage license. He was self-taught. He also taught himself to play the harmonica, or mouth harp as he called it. He tried to teach me "You Are My Sunshine" but I never got the knack.  For a while he had a Sunday morning sermon broadcast on the local radio, which he recorded on a big reel-to-reel recorder on Saturday afternoons and took to the station for airing on Sunday. When I was about six, I sang on his radio program: "He's Got the Whole World In His Hands," complete with the arm and hand gestures. I didn't think about it being played on the radio where nobody could see me. My youngest aunt accompanied me on a little portable organ.

In church, Pop was a pound-the-podium style preacher, had a powerful voice, and his congregation adored him. They payed him with eggs and vegetables from their garden. I once helped my grandmother pluck a chicken a member of the church had given to them. That was really hard work. I remember telling her I never wanted to have to do that again, and I haven't!

After my grandmother died in the late 1980s, I moved back to Corpus Christi for a few years, and Pop and I got together several times for lunch. By then he was preaching in nursing homes once in a while. I enjoyed those lunch visits. We talked about old memories, but also about the Old West. I was astonished at how much obscure history he knew. We always seem to underestimate the people in our lives. He had a fierce intelligence and interest in life, past and present. We had our last lunch the week before he died on February 5, 1991, twenty-seven years ago today.

After Pop died, we had a big garage sale before their house was put on the market. My mom and all her siblings and in-laws were there. My aunt gave me one of Pop's Bibles, and an old antique Mr. Peanut desk tray I remembered on his desk when I was a kid. I still have both those things and cherish them. When the sale was over, as I headed to my car, I spotted a heavy old metal sprinkler lying by the side of the garage. I recalled playing in that sprinkler on hot summer days when I was little. I picked it up and put it into my trunk, afraid it would get thrown to the curb if I didn't take it. It's heavier than any sprinkler you can buy today, and puts out a big spray as it rattles around in a circle. Wayne, even though he came into my life long after Pop was gone, calls it Pop's sprinkler whenever he sets it up somewhere in our yard. I hope it never breaks.

Onward....

FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY

I can’t believe that it’s already been five years since Daddy died. The day before, we watched the Super Bowl together, until halftime. It was the most animated he had been since he’d gone into the nursing home 10 days before. I took Lulu up to see him. He really wanted to see Heidi, his own dog, the one in the picture, but she was not sociable enough to be around a lot of strangers. I knew Lulu would behave and she did. Daddy seemed to get a charge out of her visit, running his arthritic hands through her thick black coat. We went outside, him in the wheelchair, and he wanted to hold her leash while I pushed him all the way around the nursing home. We made the circuit twice, talked to people we saw. Daddy wanted to show them Lulu. She was always a good girl. Then Wayne took her home, and I stayed to watch some of the Super Bowl with Daddy.

He always loved football, spent his entire weekend watching one game after the other during football season. Except for the Cowboys. He would not watch the Cowboys. He rooted for the Manning boys, no matter what team they played for. This was because of their father, Archie Manning, who had played for the Saints when we all lived in Mississippi. This was back when the Saints were a dismal team, and Archie was sacked time after time. I think Daddy felt sorry for him, and so when Archie’s sons came up in the NFL, they were who he threw his allegiance behind. Seems like one of their teams was in the Super Bowl that year, but I can’t be certain.  Denver maybe. I don’t really watch football, but was there to be with Daddy. I had a feeling he was near his end.

The next morning I came up to the nursing home and learned that one of the physical therapists had pretty much ordered Daddy to go eat breakfast in the diningroom instead of in his private room. She stopped me out in the hall and told me he was doing better. I disagreed, and I told her about my fears that the last fall might have caused a hematoma. He had fallen backwards on his head and it had blackened both eyes. He couldn’t walk without assistance after that fall. She said I should speak to the nurse when she arrived. 

I went in to see Daddy. He was sitting in the wheelchair, and as soon as he saw me, he asked me to help him get back in the bed. He said, “I feel terrible.” Daddy was not a complainer, so I wanted to know in what way did he feel bad, and he couldn’t really explain. He finally said his back was hurting. I helped him into the bed, and rubbed his back for a bit, but it wasn’t comfortable for him to lie on his side, so that ended shortly, and he fell asleep.

The nursing home had good wifi so I had brought my laptop and sat there while Daddy slept, Googling hematoma, Googling everything I thought applied to his condition. As he slept, his breathing got ragged and gasping. He would snore, then wake himself up gasping. He laid there with his mouth open, with what I call a death pall on his face. I recognized it from when Mother died.

When the nurse got in, I went down to her office and talked to her. She said she was going to call Daddy’s doctor to order a cat-scan. I felt better about things after that. And then the plumber called my cell. Daddy’s backyard was flooded from a broken pipe and they were coming, they told me. Could I meet them there? I went back to Daddy’s room, shook his shoulder to rouse him, and told him I had to leave to let the plumber in. I promised I would be back as soon as possible. He smiled, nodded. I kissed his cheek. Almost as soon as I got to Daddy’s house, before the plumbers arrived, I got another call. This time it was the nursing home telling me Daddy had died. I could not believe it. I still can’t believe how quickly it happened after I left. Ten minutes before I had been with him, and he had heard me, nodded, smiled. They said his heart stopped beating so it was listed as a heart attack, but Daddy was almost 89, had lots of ailments including renal failure. It could have been a number of things, I suppose.

I still miss him every single day. It isn’t easy to lose all the people who have your history, who share old memories, who know you about as well as anybody on the planet knows you, those few people who need no explanation when it comes to your past. Daddy and me--we were simpatico. Oh, there were times when we aggravated each other, especially in his last years. I’m sure I hovered too much, probably bossed him more than he wanted me to, worried over him when he wouldn’t answer his phone. He was easy to know, fun to be around, a jokester--often the funniest when he didn’t intend it. He was open-hearted and accepting and not at all an old crotchety stick in the mud.

My earliest memory involves my dad. I was running away from a peacock, terrified, running over an uneven grassy lawn with that peacock coming up behind me fast. I tripped and fell head over heels, but before the peacock got to me, Daddy swooped in and lifted me in his arms. I once told him about this memory. He said it happened at Knotts Berry Farm in California, and that I was about two and a half. He was my savior then and I felt that way about him for the rest of his life. When he died a light went out for me, and stayed out for quite a while. I felt like I had lost my North Star.

When he first went into the nursing home, his dog was left alone at his house and she was nervous, knew something was wrong but didn’t understand it. Why was her old man gone? So to keep her company, and to fill the quiet house with noise, I decided to turn on the television. The television was always on when Daddy was there so I thought she would find it comforting. I searched for the remote, found it under some newspapers on his chairside table, punched the ON button, and as the picture took hold, I realized it was tuned to the Playboy Channel. That was Daddy. His body was old but his mind never was. He never gave in or gave up--until he did. That was February 4, 2013. Five years ago today.

Onward....

Twenty-Three Years Ago Today

 

On this day, twenty-three years ago, my mother died of lung cancer. She was 64, the same age as I am right now. It’s hard for me to wrap my mind around that--mostly, I feel pretty young still. And aside from some minor ailments, I feel pretty healthy, too. Certainly, I’m nowhere near ready to say goodbye. I know Mother wasn’t ready either.

At the end, once she got on hospice, I moved in with them. She had had a convulsion caused by radiation to her brain after the cancer moved there. She passed out on their hard tile floor, and cracked her head open, took 17 stitches to close the wound. Daddy pulled a hernia lifting her off the floor. So when he had his hernia surgery, I closed-up my house a hundred miles away, and moved in for the duration.

I miss Mother, but I am a clear-eyed realist and will never re-write history. She was complicated, and often difficult. Warm and fuzzy did not come naturally to her, but she did have her moments. She loved babies. With each of mine, she was a big help when they were born. They loved her but as they grew up they also recognized that she could be frosty and judgmental.

Her bugaboo was expectations. She wanted everyone around her to conform to her expectations. Friends, husband, children, grandchildren were all supposed to behave a certain way and when they didn’t, or couldn’t, she felt their failure as a personal affront. Everything with Mother was tit-for-tat. As example, at Christmas when she sent out cards, she made a list of all the people she mailed cards to and as their reciprocal cards came in the mail, she would put a check-mark by their name. At the end of the season, all those without a check-mark were purged from her Christmas card list for the next year. She was quick to notice a slight and it took her a long time to forgive. She often said she could forgive but she never forgot.

Truth is, this was a chink in her armor, a product of her longing to be loved. But it wasn’t enough to simply love her, you also had to cherish her and make her feel it. This was probably partly due to her being the product of her mother’s first failed marriage. The man who raised her from infancy was not her biological father but her stepfather, a fact she didn't learn until she was well grown. For some reason, this diminished her in her own mind. She always felt her mom and dad loved her less than they did the children they shared together.

But she did have a lighthearted side, too. She loved parties, and she adored playing games. It became a holiday tradition around our house to play games, a tradition that lives on to this day. She was a career woman before there were many career women, and fiercely independent. A civil servant, she rose so high and had so many outstanding performance citations and pay-grade increases that when she retired the Navy put on a grand ceremony for her, with a flag presentation and speeches. It made the local newspaper. She would have been honored by how many of her co-workers and supervisors came to pay respects at her funeral.

We are all complex. But for some reason, we sometimes forget our parents are just as complex as the rest of us. There’s so much history and emotional baggage attached. My relationship with Mother was often tempestuous. We had many times we went months without speaking. Too high of expectations on both sides, I suppose. But there were also times when we sought out each other’s company to shop for something special, or to go to a girlie movie together with banana splits afterwards. Mother loved a banana split. I once took her to a runway style show with high-fashion models and thought she would faint from excitement. For weeks she talked about it and  told everybody, bragged, I’m sure. It was one time I exceeded her expectations.

The last four weeks I spent with her were some of the sweetest. I have little memories of things we said, conversations we had before she became incoherent. I wanted the end to be peaceful for her but I cannot say that it was. She struggled and fought just like she did all her life. Her fight ended at 4:30 a.m. on February 2, 1995. I still have things I would like to tell her about, and things from her I want to know. I believe she would love Wayne,  and my grandson Jake. But she would not approve of this old house I’m living in. She never understood my affinity for old things. She was all about new, new, new. As time goes by memories begin to fade, but I still dream about her now and then, and I can still remember the way she sounded when she said my name a certain way.

Onward....