My mom died today. She was 83 and frail. She had been diagnosed with lung cancer around Thanksgiving last year and underwent surgery in December to remove the tumor. She never really recovered and spent the last six months in and out of hospitals and nursing homes. I am not really looking for sympathy--I am just sitting here 8 hours after hearing the news feeling empty and indulging myself by putting this out in what has become a community of sorts for me.
My mom died today. She was born on March 8, 1925 to Polish immigrants in Minneapolis. She had 8 brothers and 1 sister. She was smart enough to skip a grade in grade school and graduated from high school at 16. She was independent enough to leave home at 18 and moved to Washington DC to work. She worked as a secretary--I think in some office related the the Mine Workers (at least she used to tell stories about seeing John L Lewis). 10 years ago, one of my brothers bought her one of those Time-Life books chronicling great events of the 20th century. As she was leafing through it, she called us over to look at a picture. It was a photo of Franklin Roosevelt's funeral cortege as it passed along Washington streets. The shot was taken from behind the crowd of people lining the street so all you could see was the back of everyone's heads.
All except one.
In the middle of the crowd at the instant the shutter was snapped, a young woman turned her head to the side and revealed a crystal clear facial profile. It was my mother.
My father was in the Navy and was stationed in Annapolis (he never saw combat). They met and were married in June 1944--she was 19, he was 24. After the war, they moved back to my father's home town of Cincinnati. In 1955, they bought a new house in a small suburb of Cincinnati where she lived for the next 53 years and where I grew up. Between 1951 and 1965 they had 7 children. It was a pretty typical 1950's petit bourgeois catholic upbringing.
I can't say it was the happiest of households. My mother's moods fluctuated a lot. We grew up fearful of asking for anything because requests were usually met with a 20 minute tirade about how lazy we kids were and how much she had to work to take care of us. The result was that I learned how to take care of myself at a young age--cooking, ironing my own clothes, learning to sew so I could do my own alterations, etc--and very independent. The downside was that it made us all very guarded about expressing emotions or being open about our feelings. To this day, my siblings are cordial with each other, but we are hardly close.
As I got older I was able to appreciate her frustration. We had 9 people living in a Monopoly-type box house with 1.5 bathrooms. She was intelligent and curious about the world, but she was stuck with a husband who had little drive to do anything and tied down to a traditional 1950s household. She never developed enough awareness to consider herself a feminist, but she knew the frustration that fueled its growth.
Mom expressed herself in other ways. She was always trying some goofy money-making scheme. These included selling risque novelty items, buying some "super" strawberry plants through the mail with an idea to grow them in the back yard and sell them, going with a group of women to mob-controlled bingo games where they played for free but had to kick back half their winnings to the game organizers. In the late 1960s, she started buying second-hand furniture, refinishing and reselling the pieces. She never made a huge amount of money, but she did some nice pieces--I wish I had some of the rolltop desks and secretaries now. She had a blue-collar view of financial security. In fact, she continually downplayed the importance of my college education, reminding me that "plumbers make $75.00 an hour". It remained a constant joke with my brothers and sisters. In fact, 4 years ago I had an extremely successful year in my sales job and called my mom to specifically tell her: "Mom, you'll be happy to know I now make more than a plumber".
She was a great seamstress and would make curtains, clothes--even a faux mink coat. In the early 70's I wore a lot of hippy-type peasant clothes and had to make some period costumes for historical dance groups I was in. I would do all the work except the crappy detail stuff like collars and cuffs. I would drop the pieces off at mom's with the excuse that I needed to use her sewing machine because it was 10 times better than mine. "I'll stop by over the weekend and take care of these" I said, knowing full well that as soon as I left, she would go ahead and finish them for me ;-)
My mother and father were not liberal by any means, but, oddly enough, they communicated a powerful message of tolerance to us kids--at least to me. Basically, they believed the idea that "all God's children" meant EVERYBODY. It wasn't a big moral pronouncement--just a matter of fact practical one. My mother used to say her biggest disagreement with HER mother was over her parents rabid anti-semitism. When I was 10, she gave me a copy of Black Like Me to read. We grew up with the same matter of fact attitude towards people of color as well. I have always felt that sense of tolerance was their greatest gift to me. One of the most disappointing things as she grew older was to see her develop hardened right-wing attitudes as she listened to right-wing talk radio all day. (For my birthday one year, she gave me a copy of Rush Limbaugh's first book--I retaliated by giving her Al Franken's Rush Limbaugh is a Big, Fat Idiot for Christmas).
Like I said, home was not always a happy place, and the high school years were the worst. I was growing into my own person, and they couldn't handle that. I moved out when I was 18 and never went back. I got my own apartment and paid my own way through college. As I got older, I was able to appreciate life from their point of view and being on my own allowed me to get rid of most of my anger by my early 20s and we enjoyed a cordial, if not particularly close relationship.
I know she always wanted more out of life. When my dad passed away in 1997, we encouraged her to sell the house, move into a more active community, take some trips, etc. By that time, however, she had become so settled in her ways and habits that she never did anything.
My mom started smoking when she was 16 and never could quit. Even after she developed chronic bronchitis in the 1980s, she couldn't stop. Especially in unfamiliar settings, she would get nervous and have to light up. We wouldn't allow it in our houses and she knew we didn't approve, so when we stayed with us, she would sneak in the bathroom and try to blow it out an open window. That was sad to watch.
But it was no surprise when she was diagnosed with lung cancer last November. She had a golfball sized tumor in one of her lungs. I had really bad feelings when she opted for the surgery. I spent 15 years working in hospitals and cardiac rehab and I saw too many older, less hardy individuals go into surgery and never come out whole again. My thinking was it would be better to spend the remaining time at least lucid and relatively "healthy" rather than risk a major surgery at her age. Of course, we all have to make that choice ourselves, and I was careful not to try to influence her decision. The doctors were convinced she would tolerate things well (as they usually do). In the end, my mom decided she really wanted to keep every second of life that she could and she felt like the surgery offered her the best chance of a longer survival.
I called her the night before the surgery. It was a difficult conversation. I wanted to have a meaningful and positive conversation--she was so nervous about the next day, she said she just wanted to go to sleep and rest up.
That was our last conversation. As I feared, she did not tolerate the procedure well. She was slow to come out of anesthesia and spent a number of weeks on the ventilator in intensive care. The surgical lung collapsed and never regained function. She eventually became conscious, but had dementia and was rarely lucid. Oh, and it was discovered that she still had some cancer in her lymph nodes. The collapsed lung was a breeding ground for infection. She eventually recovered enough to leave the hospital, but had to go to an assisted living facility. Her final weeks were spent going in and out of the hospital, usually due to infection or respiratory difficulties. I didn't second guess her doctors, esp because my sibs who were in the area told me this was really her decision, but I was still angry. It seemed like she was in this limbo--too sick to really live, but too healthy to die. Prey to a medical system that is geared up to make sure they suck up all of your resources before you get away--talk about a death tax.
I also felt guilty about my own behavior. I unfortunately had a surgery of my own the same day she had hers, so I was not able to be there at the hospital. I live 350 miles away, so I am not in the local neighborhood. Things have been going really badly at my job this year and I am probably not going to have a job much longer. Given that she never really recognized anyone who came to visit, I didn't go to visit at first. I kept waiting for her to get better, and my own semi-depression put me in a state of apathy. So I never did see her, and, on top of everything else, I feel like scum.
Why am I writing this? Like I said, it's more self-indulgent than anything else. Any passing of someone close causes you to reflect and take stock--it's a pretty standard reflex. I can't say I have any great insights--this is obviously something that most of us go through eventually. In some ways, I was more upset and emotional when my father passed away 11 years ago--but I think I was feeling more the loss of never feeling like I had a real father at that time. Now, it's the marking of a passage of life where that final tie to your parents is now broken, at least in a temporal sense. Even in my case where we never spoke or visited more than a couple of times per year, parents are a constant in most people's lives.
So here are the usual caveats: give your mom a call tomorrow; spend some time learning their stories and oral histories before they are lost, make every day count, blah, blah, blah.
Time to go pet the dog and look at funny cat pictures to cheer up.
UPDATE:
Thank you all so much for the kind words. I had written this as somewhat of a catharsis, and expected it to sink down the diary list quietly through the night. Like I said, I wasn't really trying to push the sympathy button--but the comments and feelings are so heartfelt that they are truly comforting (although I am a little embarrassed that this is on the rec list).
Losing parents is a common theme for all of us and we all have unique (and sometimes complicated) relations with our parents. One of my reasons for writing was not to make my story seem special, but more to touch on a piece of community shared experience, to relate to others, and maybe provide a couple of smiles.
My mom had a long life and, while it's never long enough, it was her time. Many of you have faced much worse with courage and strength.
One thing about the "guilt" remarks: I feel some regret, but I am not beating myself up. I know that life doesn't always go exactly the way you want and I am pretty good at forgiving myself the same way I forgive others.
I am proud of how we faced this as a family. I have 4 brothers and two sisters (I am second oldest, oldest male). During all of this, we communicated regularly and no matter what the issue, everyone's sole focus was on doing the best for my mom and on respecting her wishes. There was no squabbling or egos. Difficult as it was, we have come out of it stronger as a group and that was my mother's final gift to us.