Remembering Mom

Remembering mom as Mothers Day approaches. She was 69 when she passed, which is 12 years older than her mother was at her passing.

For the first few years after I lost her, it was really hard on holidays. And as people celebrated their moms, I didn't have words to respond to questions about how I was celebrating her.

Here's what I remember writing in my journal on the plane 19 years ago as I flew to her memorial service. For some reason, it was scheduled only 4 days after her death. I was still in shock. We all were.


At 6:30 on a Tuesday morning, the telephone rang, cracking the morning open like an egg and changing my life forever.

"Are you sitting down?" my sister's voice asked.
"Yes."
"Mom's dead."

"What?!" I heard someone scream far below me.
Now I know why people ask if you're sitting down before breaking this kind of news.

"What happened? Was it a car accident?" This was very unexpected. Sudden is an understatement.

She has died a few hours before, and our brothers had waited until a reasonable hour to call us on the West Coast.


The story unfolded over the next few days. She had a problem with the main heart valve going out to the body. She knew about it. Her sister had had 3 operations for the same condition, caused when they both had Scarlett Fever as children.

Mom was going up a flight of stairs on Thursday and felt faint. She had tests at the doctor's the next day. She died at 3:30 am on Tuesday, the day she was supposed to get the test results. The doctor was going to recommend surgery. Apparently the symptoms she had been experiencing, she chalked up to her chronic high blood pressure.

She died with an open heart. Literally. Her aortic valve stuck open. And she died with an open mind. Her last words, in response to my father's question "Should I call 911?"
were "I don't know." That gave me comfort since she had told me that she didn't believe in God. I think she was just angry at the God she was taught about in her youth. I was very glad that she rebelled by not sending us to church. I found my own spirituality later in life, unaffected by early programming.

But she would not have wanted to be an invalid. She had taken care of her mother through a series of strokes, and she was much too independent to be a helpless patient. So it fit who she was to go out with a bang.

********

Mom had two Master's Degrees and minored in Psychology. She raised 6 children, and wanted to go to Law School after the kids were grown. I wonder how different her life would have been if she had had access to accurate information about birth control?

When I was 5 and my friends in Kindergarten said they wanted to be nurses, I declared that I wanted to be a doctor. I had a crush on Dr Kildaire and I wanted to be like him. I imagine now that women were just allowed into medical school at that time. But mom said I could do anything a boy could do, and I believed it. Thank you for that mom.

Problem is, I didn't get to say goodbye.

That Sunday, she had dinner with my three brothers with lived close. My sister spoke to her on the phone on Sunday evening, and said she heard something in her voice. She was tired of caring for her mother-in-law, who, to put it mildly, was not a kind person. Especially to her.

But I hadn't spoken to her in a couple of weeks. I usually called once a month.

And now I wish I could talk to her. Sometimes I'd like her advice. Sometimes I'd just like to talk, even if she was going to ask when she would have a grandchild. Even if there was "stuff" - you know, the expectations between a mother and daughter. It doesn't matter. As long as you have her, there's the possibility for connection face to face, voice to voice.

So if your mom is still alive, call her or visit. If she isn't, remember her. And if she wasn't perfect, know that she did the best she could with what she knew at the time.