I had her in my life for 60 years. She often drove me crazy, more when I was a teen-ager then unexpectedly in our shared golden years. Our tiffs—OK arguments, OK fights—when I was growing up were along the generation gap but never the major issues of the 1970s: smoking, boys, teen run-away, criminal, drugs, alcohol, addiction, sex, and teen pregnancy. Not at all. Our fights were … more about mutual respect. She treated me like a kid; I treated her like an old harpy. She always said we don’t get along because we’re too much alike.
Of course, I’m talking about my mother. Earlier this month she died, expected yet not so soon. She was 85 and in declining health after breaking her hip a year and a half ago. Her transition from this world to the next was, I hope, glorious and peaceful because the last few months of my mother’s life were a strange odyssey of which we never foresaw.
A few months ago, she stopped eating then stopped drinking. And this was a person who loved to eat, especially sweets. For more than a year, she had said food didn’t taste good to her anymore. She was losing weight. As she took to lying flat on her back on a living room sofa, she spoke of feeling uncomfortable yet not in pain. Her feet, however, were horribly swollen. Then a fall, her third one, did not break a bone this time but got her carted away in an ambulance and later diagnosed with renal failure. She was incapacitated and hospitalized for weeks. With all this, she caught Covid. When I visited her in the Covid wing, she appeared to be on her death bed: weak, sleeping, somber, confused, thinking she was at home on her couch, unaware of the flurry of specialists and staff watching over her. I figured she’d pass away as another statistic of the pandemic, which in the end hit our world’s elderly most of all.
But like many times with my mother—who survived a hysterectomy and a heart attack and in old age recuperated from a broken arm, started using a walking cane until a couple years later broke a hip and though permanently disabled could slowly get about with a walker—she seemed on the mend. Or so we thought. We weren’t sure what was going on … until she was finally diagnosed with a rare auto immune disease that targets the kidneys. The treatment, besides some rounds of dialysis, would be a shot every six months. She’d be all right if she had the wherewithal.
She didn’t. Not this time. My mother—a tall, big-boned woman with large hands and feet she’d jokingly point out to strangers like she was a human oddity—to me resembled a firmly rooted tree. She would always be taller and in my daughter mind with no choice but to look up at her never came across as ready to accept death, to cross alone into the Great Unknown. It took a few blows by nature’s axe to her body—one that as a kid was skinny and malnourished yet active in sports and as an adult after a couple decades of sedentary life working and parenting by age 50 returned to daily exercise and healthy dieting.
In her final days, she was in a nursing home requiring 24/7 care. She could not sit up on her own or get out of bed and into a wheelchair. She must have been so humiliated because she could not take care of basic bodily functions, and she was well aware of this her fate. She would not socialize with nurses, staff or residents. She was not the mother I knew. Even in her wheelchair at a previous rehab facility, she socialized when exercising in the gym. I guess at the very end of her life, she had given up. But her husband and two grown children felt this persona was not her style. We expected her to fight, like she had so many times before. We were asking too much. We perceived her behavior as childish: expecting people to feed her and turn her body in the bed. She would scream “NO!!!” when nursing staff tried to lift her out of bed and into a wheelchair or vice versa. She was sure they’d drop her. She didn’t want to fall again.
And that’s the mother I knew: She always needed to be in control.
Light the corners of my mind
Looking through hundreds of family snapshots to prepare Mom’s memorial, I could see the love she always had for us. In the early years of getting to know each other, words got in the way. That along with a look of disapproval, disappointment or unconcern left deep emotional scars that never heal whether parent or child. Nevertheless, Mom always loved us. At old age, she would stop herself and rephrase what she was saying so to not overly criticize. She knew life is short. We can’t go back in time during the whirlwind of 18 years spent child rearing. Must’ve been as hard on her the parent as it was on me the child.
Still, my childhood was spent with lots of laughter, some angry periods, few blow ups, and mostly the calm boredom that comes with routine and knowing parental boundaries. My mother was the disciplinarian, strict but not overly so. I never had a curfew. Never needed one. Mom could be a very loving person especially with people and even pets truly ill or needing her care. Among her siblings she would be driven to occasional tears of sorrow or much more often giddy elation depending on their recollection of shared chaotic Depression childhoods in rural Oklahoma.
Having lived most of my life as an adult, I understand my mother’s motivations, why she cared for her children, put her foot down in certain cases, and purposefully cut the apron strings. She was determined her children would be independent kids and therefore more prepared for adulthood. Decades later she explained she was aloof and expected us to take care of ourselves in preparing meals, hygiene and other essentials because she knew life can be cruel and a parent can be suddenly taken away from her children. As a kid, you’re thinking she doesn’t care or is too busy doing other things.
There were beautiful moments of time spent with my mother. When I was in 5th grade, for my 11th birthday Mom bought me a genuine silver ring with my birthstone in the shape of a heart. I wore it on my wedding finger for years. Later I realized she may have done that because a few months prior I started my first period. Maybe she wanted to mark my passage from child to young lady.
My mother was an elementary teacher. For a while when I was in junior high, after each of her monthly paydays, Mom would take me to a teen dress shop with the latest styles, all denim in the mid ’70s. Mom made sure I had a new outfit every month. My friends were jealous, so I realized I needed to help more with household chores. By that age, I kept my bedroom organized and tidy, vacuuming my rug and dusting my shelves on my own volition, everything in its place. But helping her clean the rest of the house every weekend, I wasn’t keen on—a source of many fights between mother and daughter. Anything I cleaned was never good enough anyway.
For some reason, my bedroom was where the old furniture ended up. My bedroom had a towering dark wood bookcase; at one time a jukebox; two-seat divan; bean bag chair; wicker chair and basket; my parents’ former bedroom dresser drawers; and major-league stereo system that played records, FM/AM radio & 8-track tapes—that last item my parents bought just for me one Christmas. It was like I lived in a small apartment. That might explain my independent streak.
Growing up with TV, Mom and I watched the Ed Sullivan show with all the pop music of the late 1960s and early ’70s, the Lawrence Welk Show with orchestrated Big Band numbers, the Tom Jones Show, Sonny & Cher, The Partridge Family, the Carol Burnett Show. All that music plus a stack of LPs played while housecleaning or barbecuing, each record from American pop and country music, instilled in me a lifelong love of music specifically America pop music. The love of music culminated at Mom’s family reunion when her siblings and my cousins jammed dusk to dawn one weekend every summer. Music was our family bond. Too, the musician relatives were very good at emulating the hits. That took practice, discipline, and a remarkable ear to perform songs precisely as the recordings by big-name stars.
That perfectionist streak was another aspect of my mother, the teacher. She corrected my grammar whenever I chatted with her or friends or when she read something I wrote. She was firm and meaning to be kind, sometimes laughing at my many unintentional malapropisms.
Without realizing it, Mom taught me to overcome fears, mostly her fears. She was afraid to drive in Dallas though we lived in a suburb. So I was determined to get familiar driving in the big city. I loved driving. Mom, however, was my worst passenger—and she taught me to drive, letting me practice on the vast high school parking lot when no one else was around Sunday afternoons. From then on, Mom remained deathly afraid of my driving, constantly hissing at every stop which she naturally assumed I hadn’t seen and a crash was inevitable. We got into so many arguments about her unfounded fear over my driving … all those spats while I was driving.
Mom was afraid to swim, so she made sure my brother and I were enrolled in the Red Cross swim lessons. She’d take us to the public swimming pool in the summer and sit in the sun reading a book while my brother and I learned to hold our breath under water, float, swim and dive into deep water. I tried to get her to be more comfortable in the swimming pool, holding her hand as she’d walk from the shallow end to where the water covered her waist. She would go no further, not to the deep end when you had no choice but to stay afloat with feet dangling unable to touch the bottom of the pool. I’d demonstrate how to relax in the water, reclining back and floating on the water like it was a mattress. She could not, would not do it.
Facing the final curtain
After retiring from teaching, Mom spent her time exercising and became a mall walker. She befriended others her age who kept active indoors regardless of the season for free. The mall awarded walkers after logging so many miles.
Mom had a good run of health up to about age 65 when she had a heart attack. She had been told years earlier she needed a pacemaker. Mom, who was left-handed, felt she might mess it up somehow. She’d heard stories of others whose pacemakers had to be refitted or caused some temporary problem. I told her if a doctor told me to get a pacemaker, I’d damn sure get one. [Mom cussed on occasion.] But this was probably the first time I realized Mom would defy her doctors. She had her own ideas about things, and there was no changing her mind. She was getting old.
Sometimes when I’d visit her, I was stunned to see the color of her face was grey, like the aliens in outer space. No one else saw the hue, just me. I don’t think she or her doctors realized it, and I wasn’t about to point it out and frighten her. I knew she routinely saw several types of doctors, one who pointed out her oxygen level was low. I told her to see about getting oxygen, those portable light-weight containers that allow people to go about their lives outside the home. She wouldn’t pursue it. This was Mom officially in old age.
I called her just about every weekend, checking in, usually complaining about something happening at work or expensive repairs for house, auto or health, but first wanting to hear how she and Dad were doing. In our phone calls, we’d often delve into politics especially during my first career as government newspaper reporter. In those days, the 1990s, and for the earlier part of my life, Mom was a democrat. I mean a staunch Democrat. I would not be one if not for her. And she was one because of her father, an FDR supporter all four terms. Mom taught me the difference between republicans and democrats: republicans care about business and the rich while democrats care about workers and the poor. Sounds dead on. Then race got in the middle of politics followed by women’s rights and gay rights. Way back when, none of that mattered to Mom. She remained a Democrat throughout my upbringing in the 1970s. It was like growing up with TV’s Maude. Mom’s sense of humor was just as dry and on point. She understood life, especially the lives of women and men, girls and boys. She grew up with nine brothers and a mother who gave birth every two years.
As Mom progressed into her 70s, she was starting to wind down. Yet even in her 80s, I’d call or visit, and there she and my dad would be exercising on their stationary bike and treadmill in their living room. Though she and my father would go to town to dine, shop thrift stores or get groceries, she started spending most of her time at home watching TV. Mom kept the curtains closed. My parents sat in the dark. It was like a cave when I visited them. I was shocked. They kept the heat on, too, sometimes past 80 degrees. They were always cold.
Fox News became Mom’s preference, especially after Oprah’s show left the air. My mother started to change. We didn’t agree on politics anymore. A few years ago, she told me she was no longer a democrat. She wouldn’t say she was a republican, but she wasn’t a democrat anymore. She also thought the whole world was in a great big mess, that these times were worse than any known to mankind, and we needed a savior like Jesus Christ to come down this very minute and smite all the evil doers. She was elated when Trump won. She had supported Obama his first term but not his second term. That’s when she changed politics permanently. As for me, I lost a good friend that understood and supported my political views, the views she taught me in childhood.
If Mom drove me crazy as a teen-ager, it was to the tenth degree as she grew into old age. She became everything I’d heard happens to people when they get old: more cynical, much more conservative, distrusting of strangers even neighbors and family, sitting in the dark during the day with the TV blaring, suspicious of the internet and bank account debit cards, monitoring every penny charged by utilities, closed minded, prejudiced, and super religious. Fox conservative commentary, country music shows and gospel music and preaching by the Swaggarts were the preferred TV viewing of my folks every single day. And then I discovered while staying with them … they sleep through most of their shows!
To be mother and daughter, Mom and I lived two very different lives. I had experiences which she could not possibly understand and vice versa. She regretted having stopped teaching in her 40s and wished if she could have done it over to keep at it and know more about the computer age. So my goal is to never retire (again). Mom had an utterly unimaginable childhood, only recently talking about how her large country family moved frequently from shack to shack, once living in a barn. I had the impression her family lived in one small house. I remember it as a little kid bathing in a large washtub and using the outhouse. That was in the 1960s when President Johnson soon dragged rural America into the 20th century with electricity and sewer lines.
When Mom turned 80, I threw a birthday party during the family reunion. We played Who Knows Aunt Clara Mae? I’d ask questions about her life, and family members competed for the right answer which only she could confirm. Her birthday cake was topped with a photo of her from her teaching days, one taken in 1976 when she would have been 39. I presented her with a charm bracelet with silver items based on her life and things important to her like a sneaker, basketball, diploma, teacher apple, Oklahoma shape, a cross and a Bible. On her birthday as she used her cane to get ready for the drive, Mom said, “I never in my life thought I’d live to be 80 years old, and yet here I am.” She was tired, I could tell. She was looking grey and not getting enough oxygen in her blood.
Mom lived a very good and long life. She may have wanted to live longer—or knowing her, simply didn’t want to die, not yet, not now, well not ever. I asked her brightly when she was so sick with Covid, “Do you see any of the family who’ve gone on?” She looked horrified and answered, “No! And I don’t wanna see them!” I understood, as she did, that seeing our deceased loved ones is a sign we’re near death. She would have been scared to death if she saw her parents or siblings who’d passed on.
In the nursing home, Mom would not face visitors, looking away at a wall, depressed and angry. Perhaps angry with God. “Why would You do this to me, let me be placed here, leave me weak and unable to defend myself, scared and alone, unable to be with my family or to die in my home as I wanted, as I deserved?” Her kidney doctor slipped while talking to me about Mother’s prognosis or next steps toward recovery and going home because she wasn’t improving. He said this is what happens when the body is shutting down …
I see it clearly now. Mom’s age and frailty, not eating and drinking, refusing physical therapy, her depression, not wanting visitors to see her or to talk to anyone even on the phone. She had to deal with her death and dying, her ultimate fear shared by … EVERYBODY.
When I read the news by text that Mom was gone, I cried yet typed onto Facebook that Mom would want us to sing Glory Hallelujah! She made it, transcended across the Great Divide! I am so proud my mother was able to face that hurdle and finally join her family on the Other Side. Her final lesson to me? Reviewing her life in pictures—photos I personally know and have analyzed since childhood when they were stored in my bedroom closet in albums and boxes—I realized all along we were seeing Mother’s spirit—not her body, once attractive and inevitably aged, that shell we must use to roam this world and live this life, that body that no matter how we take care of will deteriorate … and surely die. We saw Mom’s essence: beautiful, grand, lively, ethereal, eternal—that part of us shared with God, that part of us that never dies. Mom returned to spirit and now resides in a wondrous place where there is nothing but pure Love.