The end of a story

Dad & Mom on their wedding day, St. Louis, 1954.

 

 

 

I had trouble choosing a headline for this post. It was going to be "Tears, Miles and Lowered Expectations," to go with grief, driving home and the shit of expecting one year of a pandemic to be over, done with and la-la life goes back to normal. Fuck.

But it's about me and my Mom. Our story together is over, so the chosen title seems more appropriate.

Mom died in June after a mercifully (and she would agree with that categorization) brief illness. The week or so before she passed away she had been in Maine, with sister Suzy and her two boys, Mom's favorite grandkids. My sister Mary was along as well.

The trip had been postponed from 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic.

I hadn't seen Mom since late 2019. Husband and I drove up from Pittsburgh in April 2021 for his mother's funeral. We had not seen her either, in about that amount of time. She died alone, tired, I think, in her locked down assisted living facility (which was a really nice place), on Good Friday. She was 91.

For mother-in-law's funeral, as the pandemic seemed to be easing, we stayed with Mom in her new condo. It was so good to see her face and feel her hug and hear her say "It's S-O-O good to see you!"

We didn't stay long. Got the tour of the new digs, ordered takeout, sat in the evenings and afternoons talking, talking, talking. About Dad. My brothers. Mom's family. Just figured there would be time for more visits.

Mom was in relatively good shape, as far as I knew, for a 90-year-old. Still driving (unlike the stereotype, she drove too fast! Not too slow). Still sharp mentally. But she had her aches and pains. Rheumatoid arthritis for one. And the still-simmering grief of losing, most recently, her youngest son in 2018 to gliablastoma. That was hard.

I kept thinking, every time we came home: I have to get Mom on tape, record her stories.

Never did, but the bonus/burden is that I now have decades worth of home movies and audio tapes to go through that Mom & Dad saved over the years.

The hardest, or maybe one of the hardest, things about this is that I can't talk to her anymore. I miss that so much. I keep thinking "Oh, I should ask Mom about ...." and then realize that I can't. No more Sunday phone calls. No more .... birthday cards, impromptu gifts, visits to art fairs, weekend breakfasts ... just, oh gosh. I have a drawer full of birthday cards. And a birding guide she gave me only a couple of years ago.

Mom's story was so interesting, and I was a big part of it, but not the whole part.

She was a beloved only daughter. A nurse (briefly). A wife to a husband who loved her deeply, as she did him. My parents weren't without their travails, and, in fact, Mom did say that at about the 12-13-year point in their marriage, she was ready to bail (my words, not hers). And, of course, this is only my take on their story. I honestly loved my Dad, but really did not know him well. They were married for 41 years and she lived another 26 after he died.

I guess, really, you never know what you sign up for. You think you do, but you don't.

The thing is, I am so grateful my parents met, married and stuck it out through the rough times. And those rough times never, in my memory, were inflicted on any of us seven kids. Sure, there were short tempers. But in a household of nine people, that's hardly surprising.

All of the family stories handed down from Mom, Grammio and to a lesser extent, quiet Dad, were all about fun, goof-ups and making the best of bad (for Dad and Grammio, pretty bad) or ridiculous situations.

I didn't know this until after Mom died, but she had a love of poetry, and the book she had thumbed well somehow went missing the clearing of her estate. Pretty sure she inherited that love from her own Dad, who wrote daily in a diary and loved musical theater.

Kind of got off on a tangent here. Still ... there's so much about my Mom that I didn't know and now, never will.

I'm glad I was a part of your life Mom. Thanks for being in mine.

About a dog

This story starts way back in the mid 1970s, but my reason for writing is right here in 2021. 

A few nights ago, in the waning days of the year's first month, I watched on our office TV a film released in 2019, "A Dog's Way Home." Kind of a latter-day "The Incredible Journey," which I loved as a child. The stories are similar. Beloved but somehow lost domestic pets find their ways back to their people.

It's been many years since I've seen "Incredible Journey," so I don't recall many details. Just that the trio was comprised of a Siamese cat, a Staffordshire terrier and a Golden Retriever.

"A Dog's Way Home" follows a single dog, Bella, a pit bull mix, on her way home to her beloved Lucas, his girlfriend, Olivia and his mom. Her travels take her from New Mexico to Colorado over the course of two winters.

Bella makes friends with a pack, becomes a mother-dog to an orphaned cougar (Big Kitten) is hunted by wolves, adopted several times on her journey and finally, finally completes the game Lucas taught her: Go Home.

But not without a final road to cross. And it nearly proves fatal.

She is hit by a car.

Now this movie pushes all the right buttons for a tear-jerker, but it brought tears to my eyes because of where this story began in the '70s.

It was spring, I remember because I was wearing just a jean skirt and a light top.

I left my apartment by the Ohio State campus headed for a morning class (which one, I don't remember).

As I approached Lane Avenue, a dog on the opposite side started to cross, trotting right into traffic.

A car hit him, then ran over him.

Amazingly, the dog got up, trotted back to the side of the street it had started from and laid down under a young tree. It sat with its head up for a moment, then the head went down.

I was in a panic. I ran back to my apartment, a matter of moments, and phoned campus police.

I don't know what I thought they could do, and I can't recall what their response was, I think the dispatcher promised to send a car.

It didn't matter. The dog had died.

I wish, rather, that I had gone to the dog and comforted it. Stroked its head.

Where it came from or where it was going, I'll never know. But it was just a simple ordinary day for that dog that ended in what I can only imagine was great pain. And tears for me. Then and now.

It would be many years from then until I had dogs of my own and learned all they had to teach me.

I don't know if I can really think of that pup as my first dog. If it was, I failed it by not comforting it.

But if there is a rainbow bridge, little dog, I'm sure you made it to the other side.

Forgive me.