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....

A Tribute to My Mother

Yesterday was Groundhog Day. Don't think he saw his shadow here, but anyway, I can't remember what's supposed to happen if he does or doesn't. If it means winter is almost over, or that winter has a long way yet to go. Either one is OK with me. We had another two inches of snow overnight, and I like it when it snows. Every window has a beautiful scene outside, while it's warm and cozy inside. Good time for making soups and stews, which are a couple of things I seem to do all right by up here in this altitude.

Yesterday was also the 18th anniversary of the day my mother died. I often get the date confused with the 4th of February, which will be the 20th anniversary of the day my grandfather died. Both days have a poignancy for me, but for now, I want to focus just on one.

My relationship with my mother was tempestuous, to put it mildly. We often went months without speaking, generally because of some way she perceived that I had slighted her. She was quick to hold grudges, even against her children. She went to her death without speaking to my brother. She also had a nasty habit of saying critical things in a hurtful way, and in what my aunt (her youngest sister) called of being tit-for-tat on everything. When she sent out Christmas cards she made a list. If someone on the list reciprocated with a return card, they got a check beside their name. At the end of the season, those without a check got crossed off the list and those names would not get a Christmas card the next year, maybe not ever again. She also expected quick Thank You notes whenever she sent a gift. If she didn't get that Thank You, the gift recipient would hear from her. She was shameless about such things.

People are complicated. Mother was certainly no different. She could be difficult, yes indeed, she could. But she also delighted in holidays, would rather get a sentimental card or note than a funny one, or even a gift. She would sit vigil bed-side when someone was sick or in the hospital, and take over food to the family back home. She loved to dance. And sing. And did both rather well. I remember teaching her The Twist when I was about 9 years old, which made her only about 35 but I thought she was ancient, and so funny for wanting to learn the latest dance craze. Of course, long after The Twist was well out of fashion, Mother continued to do the dance whenever what she called "a fast song" was playing. I think she Twisted way into the 1980s.

She loved to play games, and was also good at most of them, most of the time, especially complex games with tricks and trumps and partners. Although she couldn't be called a good sport because she lost poorly. I remember once when she was playing Monopoly with me and my brother, and was losing pretty badly. When her token (always the Tophat) landed on Park Place, which my brother not only owned but had added several houses to, she refused to pay the rent and instead picked up the board and tossed everything on it across the room. So much for good sportsmanship, but later, probably feeling a little remorse over her behavior, she made peanut butter cookies. She let me dip the fork tines into sugar then mash the dough flat before she put them in the oven to bake. I was proud of the cookies she claimed we made together.

Once when I was in the fourth grade, Mother came to school to have lunch in the cafeteria with me. It was parents' week, and she took off from work to be with my class that day. She wore a boat-neck pullover top in a color of blue that perfectly matched her eyes. Her hair was done in a kind of Jackie Kennedy pouf, and her skirt hit her just at the knee. She wore the pair of fake-pearl cluster clip-on earrings my brother and I had given her for her birthday, and I thought she looked beautiful. When she appeared at our classroom door, I jumped up from my desk and went to take her hand, pulling her into the room to meet my teacher and the other kids in class. I seem to recall that there were a couple of other moms there that day, but mine was surely the best, and prettiest, mom on the planet.

As the years go by, 18 of them already, these sweet memories are the ones that have taken over inside me. I have not forgotten the arguments, the clashes, the butting of heads that she and I did as I grew into womanhood. But it does me more good to dwell on better memories.

At the end of her life we seemed to silently agree to believe in the good that was between us, the love, the devotion if not outright adoration. She was so sick, had lost all her hair and finally couldn't get out of the hospital bed set up in her front room. I spent one afternoon shortening her nightgowns so they wouldn't tangle beneath her, and applying Vaseline Intensive Care Lotion to her bald head because the new hair coming in made her scalp itch.

She struggled with her oxygen hose, and came and went in a drug-induced fog that made her grouchy and abrupt. She ordered me around, ordered Daddy around, too. She didn't have enough breath to couch her orders in kindness. The afternoon I spent sewing up her gowns, she interrupted my task endlessly. Do this, do that. Come over here and help me. I felt like a jack-in-the-box that day, jumping up and down from the sewing in my hands. Finally, she said to me, "Cindy," in a sharp tone that I knew would be followed by some sort of order from Colonel Mom. I sighed and prepared to put down the sewing yet again.

"What now?" I said, probably with some impatience in my voice, too. I looked at her and could see the glaze that had settled over her eyes. Whatever thing she had wanted me to do for her this time was lost in the pain killers, the confusion caused by the tumor in her brain.

Finally she said, "Come over here and kiss my head." She sounded forlorn and pitiful. I laid aside the gown I was hemming, got up from the couch and went to do just that. Her tiny new hair smelled like Vaseline Intensive Care Lotion. Her skin felt baby soft against my lips.

These are the memories I choose to keep close to me. I do this for myself as much as for anyone. It's easier to forgive than to hold onto hostilities. And it's a painful thing to lose your mother, no matter how difficult she might have made things from time to time. So much of your own self-definition is tied to your mother, and to those early days. These are things I see more and more clearly, after all these 18 years without her physically in my life.

Onward ....