Today, March 11, 2024, is the 30th anniversary of the passing of my mother.
She died of lung cancer.
My Mother died of lung cancer at home on March 11, 1994, while I was asleep. I had been up most of the night as I had been awake through the nights because Mom became nocturnal and so I stayed up with her to help her through the scary nights as most others were asleep. I fell asleep about dawn and a few hours later my brother woke me saying something was happening to Mom. She had died.
My Mother was born on November 14, 1930, and then was given the wrong legal name by some unknown clerk.
My Mother was supposed to have been named “Jo Anne”, spelled “J-o--A-n-n-e”. Unfortunately, the legal name that came out printed on My Mother’s birth certificate was the name “Joan”, spelled “J-o-a-n”, not “Jo Anne”. Nobody in the family thought it was important enough to get the correct spelling and thus pronunciation of the intended name or the system was such that correcting such an error would require lots of legal fees. Perhaps they just didn’t feel there was any point in questioning or challenging any authority. This unwillingness to challenge authority is a theme in my family, both my Mother’s Side and my Father’s Side. As a result, Mom was “Joan”, not “Jo Anne”.
My Mother was taken away from her Mother by her violently physically abusive Father leaving her beaten Mother on the side of an Oregon road when she was about 9 years old.
My Mother and her two younger brothers were together with their Dad, my maternal Grandfather, even if he was often a physically abusive monster. My mother told me how he would eat first, and eat big helpings of steak, and only once he was finished, his children and wife would get the scraps he left. He slept in a big soft warm bed while his children slept on the floor with thin blankets.
My mother would be taken by her father to pick crops like strawberries. She would spend a whole day working, and her father would take her money.
My Mother had a plan to get away. When her Mother returned for a visit, she told her two younger brothers that she wanted to go off with Mama. They did as she thought they would do and went to Daddy and told him that “Joan wants to go away with Mama”. Her father came into her room and stood menace over her. He glared silently in obvious anger. My Mother was afraid he would hit her as he had so often done before, but instead, he said, “Get your things and get out of my house”.
My Mother quickly packed and left with her Mother, who had not planned to leave with and take care of her ten-year-old daughter. As a result, My Mother got away from a traumatic life with her Father into another traumatic life, this time with her Mother.
My Mother’s traumatic life with her Mother was a different kind of trauma than the kind of trauma she had with her Father. My mother told me about how her mother would often leave her for weeks at a time with other people, and even strange men that my mother did not know. She told one story about being alone with a strange man who simply stared at her with an angry look for weeks until her mother finally returned. Another time she was left with someone who lived out on a distant country road. My mother told me how she would sit by the roadside and every time she saw a car in the distance her hopes would get up as she hoped it was her mother returning, only to be crushed each time the car drove by without stopping.
Mom’s abusive father was actually her mother’s second marriage. The first sh left after she discovered he was cheating on her with her best friend. He was telling her that he was going out of town on business but was instead spending time at her friend's bed.
My mother’s mother, my grandmother, had a lot of boyfriends. Dad has speculated she might have been a sex worker. There was one man who was with my Grandmother for a while, but she was going to leave him because he was physically abusive and a criminal. He sought out my then 14-year-old mother and begged her to get her mother to come back to him. My mother pleaded with her mother to take him back, and she relented, which was a bad thing. After they got married he became much more violent. Mom told me about how he would get drunk and take all her clothes, toys, books, and mother’s things as well as tear them up and set them on fire. One time he was chasing her and her mother through backyards they were jumping fences with him in pursuit drunk and screaming he was going to kill them if he caught them.
My mother felt intent guilty because her mother was going to get rid of that jerk, but because of her intervention, he stayed. It wasn't her fault because she was an adult who manipulated her.
He was in and out of prison many times. He was suspected of murder, but nobody wanted to testify against him because as they were all jailbirds they were afraid of what would happen if/when they were in jail with him, or what he would do when he got out of prison. In the last 27 years of my grandmother’s life, he was in prison more than he was out.
He told my grandmother that if she ever left him while he was in prison, he would kill her when he got out, so she lever left him.
Then My Mother met and married My Father with his background of traumas which blended into yet another kind of traumatic life. My parents fought a lot. I gather from discussions with my father that my Mother pushed him to marry her because she wanted to get away from her stepfather.
My Mother and My Father both had a lot of trauma in their lives and they generously and probably unknowingly passed their trauma effects onto me. 😥
My relationship with my late mother was complex and now 30 years afterward I still have strong emotions.
I tried so often to reach her, but she was, as was Dad, locked in the idea that as my mother she was essentially my owner. She was very jealous of me and tried to mentally disable me. She used to tell me:
“Everyone hates fat people and since you are fat, everyone hates you, and I’m the only one who loves you enough to tell you that everyone hates you”.
She hated every friend I had, especially the girls. In high school, she THOUGHT one girl was my girlfriend. She would scream at me “You can do better than that horse-faced bitch”. When I would say she was just a friend, not a girlfriend, my mother would slap me while literally screaming “There’s something real-bad-wrong with you that you would lie to your only mother”.
After her diagnosis, I was an engineering student at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. I took a junior-level Biology class called “Biology of Cancer”. It was a survey course about different types of cancer, with a different cancer being featured each week during the semester. We covered Moms’ cancer, large cell lung cancer. I realized that Mom didn’t have very much time left after that, so I took a leave from my time at Cal Poly to be with her in the last months of her life. As a bonus, the class also covered my own colon cancer, which I was then suffering effects from.
I recorded almost every conversation I had with Mom in those last months, and I got about 100 hours of untranscribed tapes that I needed to digitize and write her life story.
My mother’s moods always were volatile, and her last months were not any less so. I kept the audio recorder going while she was calmly discussing her childhood as well as when she was cussing me out telling me how ashamed she was of what a terrible child I was and then back to calm. I didn’t turn off the tape recorder because her moods switched so quickly and I didn’t want to miss something important.
I put up with her abusive ways because I, pretty much alone among the family, understood Mom’s days were limited. My siblings and father were in deep denial, and I’ve always been the family scapegoat and idiot. “If James says something, then James is wrong, and if James is right, he’s still wrong”. When I was telling them that Mom's time was limited, nobody believed me. My sister once SCREAMED at me “You mean you don’t want her to have much time left”. Dad had some fantasy up until the minute she died that she had months or even years left in spite of her obvious decline.
In her last days, I was terrified that her last words to me would be something like “I hate you” or “Get out I never want to see you again”. Her last words, the night before, were “I love you”.
I was often up with her in the middle of the night because she usually slept all day. I also had a fear that she would die while I was asleep so I stayed up many nights to be the only one in the house awake with her.
I was asleep when she died.
On the morning of March 11, 1994, I was asleep in my childhood bed in my childhood bedroom. The door flew open and my brother said something like, “Something’s happening with Mom’. I jumped out of bed and went through the hall to my parents’ bedroom. Mom was lying on the bed with my sister holding her screaming “She’s not breathing” over and over.
I called her hospice who said they’d send someone over. It took forever it seemed, about an hour, for someone to show up.
My siblings and father went into the backyard, but I stayed in the bedroom with Mom’s body until the undertaker took her body away.
…
I still have the recordings I made 30 years ago. I planned to transcribe them and use them to write the story of her life, but my life has intervened many times. It’s something I need to put on my bucket list now because if I don’t do it, it’s not likely anyone else will do so.
If you have any questions, please feel free to ask in the comments below.
#jtg