Loss

Happy Father's Day. This is about Mom...

Mom started to fade before Dad died. He didn’t have to deal with all of it. I did.

She was a wonderful woman. The pictures of her in her twenties were beautiful. She was used in Oregonian ads by her employer, the Portland department store, Myer and Frank. And then she married my dad.

He was a medaled war veteran, starting a business in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. He danced. So did she. They danced, then married. I guess, for her, the time seemed right. Or so she told me when I asked.

Even as a child I didn’t think they were a good fit. She taught us manners. He would blow snot out of one nostril, then the next. He introduced her as “the wife”. She was gracious and smiled.

But they stayed together. For us? The kids? I think because it was just what they did back then. Choices were less.

The Willamette Valley business failed after the war hero took his family to set off to chase his dreams. He left it in the hands of an associate who did not make the customers pay. As the family wandered south through Nevada and Arizona, the dream pressed. He thought he found it. After signing the papers to buy some prime Southern California real estate on expected income, the realization of failure proved too much for him.

He could not see a way out. He threw himself down the steep stairs of the old two-story farmhouse.

She called his father. She knew they needed help.

The old cowboy and his new young wife came down to talk sense into the boy, her husband. Then they went back to their hard work.

And she decided to get a job. They needed money.

She became a teacher.

She taught first grade.

She taught children to read.

She did this for thirty years.

Her discipline, her effort, kept our family from…I can’t imagine.

And the beauty of her effort was she shared with us her joy. She told the stories of the children who learned to read.

She brought a rug into her concrete floor classroom where they could be in a circle. They would all get down and learn to read together. The circle was important to her. Maybe to the children too.

She also told us the stories of the turds. One morning, walking the rows of desks as the kids were doing their written ABC’s a little boy nodded at his seat mate and whispered to her, “Him’s putting turds in my desk.” She laughed to us about sorting this out.

She decided to quit the teaching work when she found she could not get down on the reading rug. That told her, it was time. I had gone through elementary, into high school and was off at college when she decided. It must have been hard. I don’t know.

She never quit the old man. Not with his silly suicide gestures, his drinking, and his sham of making money playing poker.

She did lay down the law. She could not make him get a job, but she insisted, since he wasn’t paying for groceries, he had to be home when us kids got home from school. And so, through her insistence, I got to know my dad.

Maybe she was a visionary. She was the absent mom.

And so she became. Absent. After a while.

Her oldest daughter died. Her next daughter moved to the other side of the world. But her youngest child, her only son, me, married and gave her grandchildren. So she came here.

The house we bought had a basement apartment. They moved in.

Dad died there. That’s another story.

And so did she. That’s this story.

For after the years of reading to our kids, giving them puzzles, enduring their flights of fancy, she slowly became absent.

First, to me, it seemed, was her speech. She had always searched for words. “Bring me the…whatchamacallit.” I remembered from my childhood. But it got worse.

She knew it was happening. She did crossword puzzles, regularly, poorly.

She kept a list of the supplements.

I had to take them away when she had diarrhea from all the flax seed.

I eventually took away the car keys.

She could not tell me how she felt.

Her sister had committed suicide a few years before when she thought she was failing. Mom did not choose that end. She lasted. All the way.

She lasted until she could not remember to eat.

She loved grapes. We bought them for her. I put them on a small plate before her. Her eyes lit up. She would pick one up and smile at me. She would start to bring it to her lips, then her eyes would lose focus and she would drop the grape.

She had dry, caked lips, and saw the glass of water, but when she picked it up, she lost focus and looked up at me, and smiled and let the water tip out of the glass. When I held it for her, brought it to her lips, she sucked, thirsty, then choked.

She died of dehydration, malnutrition, since dementia doesn’t kill you.

All the obstacles of her life, the failure of a husband, the poverty, did not keep her from her joy. She taught children to read. She made sure her children were cared for. She demonstrated to me that keeping things going, working, intact, had value. Even as she failed, as her mind could not bring food or water to her mouth when she was starving and thirsty, she persisted in life.

She gave me this gift.