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.

Get busy living

Reading my mom's biography that's she's compiled over the years ... this stands out. She was recovering from the birth of my middle sis.

"Dad brought me 'The Guns of August' by Barbara Tuchman. I somehow managed to finish it in the five days I stayed in the hospital. Probably the last book I read for 20 years. Things got rather busy after that."

Five post-partum hospital days.

Wow.

And reading "The Guns of August" in 5 days.

After birth of kid 4 of 7. And my dad brought her such a weighty book.

Families are interesting, aren't they? (And things got busy!)

Also "Guns of August" is still on my to-read list.

I miss my dad. So many questions I would love to ask him. But he was a pretty private person; guess that's where I get it from. 

 

Mind images

I take great pleasure -- and sometimes grief -- in revisiting events that I have seen over my life. They may be insignificant or of great meaning, but they have been captured equally by the camera and the audio recorder in my brain.

As in: Sunday the dogs and I were in the park for our long morning walk. There is a play area; it has a slide, monkey bars and one of those short plank bridges for kids to balance on. There was a young dad there with two kids. A baby and a toddler, a little girl.

 The dogs had paused to read a page in that day's doggie newspaper, so we were stopped on the slope just above the play area. I gazed around and my glance fell on them. I saw Dad scoop up the baby and trot off, with the toddler in bouncing pursuit. It's so funny to watch the movements of kids who have only just learned to walk. They seem to progress forward in a bouncy side to side motion that has very little control of itself. At any moment, they could go tumbling forward. Little one chased Dad and baby, bouncing along with Dad slowing down, then finally stopping. I couldn't hear, but the happiness of an unencumbered moment in a sunny park on a Sunday morning was unmistakable.

Dad and kids moved on, and so did we.

I've also noticed how often I've heard the red-bellied woodpecker this spring; usually he is much more noisy in the fall. I've also missed hearing a wood thrush that I have heard consistently each spring for at least the past four or five years. Perhaps I am missing that because we have been walking in to the park a different way. The thrush, which has the song of an angel, always has been in the same place.

The red-bellied, though, he is another story. In the fall, the air seems clearer, lonelier. Many birds are gone, but this big woodpecker sings on, in a high-pitched, sharp warble that echoes in the quiet park. I keep hearing him now, though, confusing me into thinking it is fall.

It isn't. As lovely as the season is, now, especially, with petal snow covering deep green spring grass, it is changing and moving on. The red-bellied woodpecker's stage season will be here soon enough.