I don’t know where you are right now. I don’t believe in Heaven or Hell, but if there’s a Heaven, then I imagine …
You sitting at a picture window, in front of a card table where a spread of 1,000 puzzle pieces wait for your attention which is distracted by the Baltimore Orioles and Cardinals and Bluebirds also vying for your attention outside your window.
Your oldest daughter Charlotte is watching TV which is permanently set to daytime soaps, the ones you and she would discuss on the phone when she lived in Florida and you in New York. She sits in her blue leather recliner, offering running commentary that you only half listen to.
Your other daughter Shirley is flipping through Amway receipts while she recites the latest accolades of her grandchildren. During commercial breaks she’ll pick up a James Patterson novel and read a bit. She sits in her chair, a facsimile of the recliner she left behind, the shawl I knitted for her draped over the back.
You watch your birds, piece together your puzzle, and maybe listen to your daughters. You don’t have to hear every word. It’s enough to have them near you.
Maybe you’re waiting for one of your siblings to drop by. Maybe Beatrice who was the first to go, or Alice who was the last before you. Maybe your brothers Virgil, Ed, Bob, or Leon will show up, or Mildred, Edith, or Leona. It’s been so long since you had seen your siblings. And you wonder about the last two–Howard and Orvetta. You want them to be well until it’s their time and then … no pain, no pain.
You miss berry picking and going to the casino, but then your daughters might take you when you’re in the mood. In this version of Heaven, Shirley does not have Parkinson’s and Charlotte can breathe easily on her own.
After your daughters–your girls–died, you missed them so much that you were relieved to miss your 100th birthday. You got close, very close. But the pull of your girls was too strong, the loss of them too much to continue to bear.
People ask me why your last two children–me and your son–weren’t enough to keep you going. Why did you openly lament the loss of your girls as if they were the only children you had?
They were the only children you had for eight years. You were in your twenties then. By the time your son and I came along, unexpectedly, you were nearly middle-aged with a sick husband and decades of hard and poorly paid work ahead of you.
I want to believe that those first eight years, when it was just you, my dad and your girls, were happy years. Maybe, when your girls died, that was the loss you felt most keenly. They were no longer around to remind you of that time.
No child should die before their parents. No parent should experience the death of their child.
I know you loved me as best as you could. I loved you as best as I could. Yes, I could have been a better daughter. My efforts paled compared to my sisters. Yes, you could have been a better mother. Hindsight is 20-20. There’s regret on both sides, but no point in it.
You were never one for regrets. You didn’t like to look back, and you didn’t pay much mind to the future. From you, I’m learning to live in the moment. That may be your greatest gift to me.
On this day, October 25, my mother would have turned 100. She died on September 22, peacefully by all accounts, but, sadly, not in her home as she would have preferred. Up until September 3, she had been living alone in a double-wide mobile home, coveting her independence which was only possible because of my brother and our cousins who brought her food, cooked for her, cleaned up after her, and gave her company when she was in the mood for it.
My mother didn’t mind being alone. She had her phone if she wanted to talk to someone. She had the birds outside her kitchen window to entertain her. She had a front porch where she would sit on warm days and watch her neighbors come and go. She had her TV shows, and she dozed … a lot.
One could argue about how independent she truly was. The thing is, while others worried about her being alone at night, she didn’t.
Then she fell one night and wasn’t found until the next morning. From there, it’s textbook statistics. Hospital, surgery, rehab, COVID, comfort care, death. Just as with her life, her dying seemed to go on much longer than we thought possible. But, as far as anyone could tell, she was sleeping those last few days. At peace.
She missed “her girls” terribly.
My mom’s girls–Shirley and Charlotte.
First, Shirley died in July 2022, then Charlotte in November 2022. My mom might have been happy to live to 100 if my older sisters had still been alive. They had been her constants, more so than my brother or myself.
My mother married in 1942, I think. Pathetic that I don’t remember her wedding date.
My mother and father’s wedding photo.
Charlotte came around in October 1944, Shirley in August 1946. For the next eight years, it was just the four of them: Dad, Mom, Charlotte and Shirley.
Dad with Shirley and Charlotte.
My brother didn’t show up until August 1954, then me in June 1957. I once made the mistake of asking my mom if she had planned our births so that Shirley and Charlotte would be old enough to babysit me and my brother. She admitted that she hadn’t expected my brother and me. She hadn’t planned our births and, she added, something like abortion wouldn’t have occurred to her because “it just wasn’t done back then.”
My mother was sometimes too honest.
Mom.
I remember my mother as always working, inside the house and out. If she wasn’t working at a grocery store like Philbrooks’ Market or a discount store like the Big N, she was busy working inside the home. Cleaning, cooking, fixing. Even when she finally settled down for the night to watch a TV show with us, she had mending to do. I used to watch as she slipped a glass jar inside the leg of her pantyhose and stitched up the runs. I wonder if she is why I always feel like I’m wasting time when I just sit and watch TV, my hands idle.
I remember our relationship when I was growing up as mercurial. One minute we’d be laughing at some joke together, the next we’d be throwing daggers at each other with our eyes. Of course, it was worse when I was a teenager. I was the youngest, but, by no means, did she spoil me.
She once said she didn’t want to make the “same mistakes” with me that she had made with my brother. Whatever that meant. My brother was in trouble no more or less than any other kid his age. But my mom took every mistake we made as a slight on herself, as an accusation of bad mothering.
My mother wanted to let me go but without me ever leaving home. She wanted me to learn but without the benefit of experience. She wanted something other than an early marriage and babies for me, but she was afraid of what that would be. For all of her independence, she didn’t want to teach me to be independent. So we fought and eventually I left.
We fought even while I lived in California, sending angry letters back and forth. I remember reading one of her angry letters while I was soaking in the bathtub. I remember tearing it up, but I no longer remember what she wrote.
When I was growing up, I rarely felt that her love for me was unconditional. I often thought that I bored her or exasperated her. Sometimes she even scared me, her anger unexpected, her silent treatment dropping the temperature in our house to freezing. And yet when she hugged me, she hugged so tight I thought my ribs would crack.
As I developed physical and emotional distance from my mother, I started to understand. She was one of 12, born somewhere in the middle to a middling farmer and his wife who died too young. My mother did what all her six sisters did, which was to marry and have babies. I don’t know how long she and my father enjoyed their marriage. I was about 10 when I witnessed for the first time my father having a nervous breakdown and listened to the soft brushing of her palm on his back while she tried to comfort him.
But it wasn’t his first breakdown, and it wouldn’t be his last. And here was my mother who was somehow expected to keep us all afloat while my father went in and out of the state hospital, then to a halfway house, then through a divorce and finally into the care of my sister Shirley.
My mom and dad when they were so young.
As I began to imagine the weight of responsibility she must have felt, I also began to be fascinated by her. I became less concerned with her as my mother and more interested in her as a woman who was once young like me, who used to watch sunsets with her sisters and wished she had clothes in those colors.
(She did eventually. At one time, after she remarried, she had a pair of polyester pants in every bright color that you might find in a box of 64 Crayola crayons. She was also quite proud of the fact that the pants only cost about $2 each. My mother was frugal from the day she was born until the day she died.)
In writing this post, trying to celebrate what would have been my mom’s 100th birthday, but, frankly, feeling tired of writing posts like this, I find myself struggling to avoid the obvious.
How could I have been a better daugther?
Let me count the ways.
[Insert list that never ends.]
My only comfort is I really believe she knew how much I loved her. That, despite all the struggles, the frequent shadow-boxing of our personalities, she made me fall in love with her by finally becoming herself, becoming something other than a wife and mother.
She became Florence, a woman who loved to watch birds, to pick berries, to play the slot machines, to eat two hot dogs with chili sauce, to gossip, to talk on the phone, to know whose birthday is when (and how old they are), to live in the moment because the past is past and the future might never be.
I’ll end this post with the verse I picked out for her prayer card:
Fill not your hearts with pain and sorrow, but remember me in every tomorrow. Remember the joy, the laughter, the smiles, I’ve only gone to rest a little while. Although my leaving causes pain and grief, my going has eased my hurt and given me relief. So dry your eyes and remember me, not as I am now, but as I used to be. Because I will remember you all and look on with a smile. Understand, in your hearts, I’ve only gone to rest a little while. As long as I have the love of each of you, I can live my life in the hearts of all of you.
Marie at 1 Write Way 