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....