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 May 2007 Post Book Essays "On the tenth anniversary
of my mother's death" -Tuesday,
May 15, 2007
"On the tenth anniversary of my mother's death" -Tuesday, May 15, 2007 I woke from tangled dreams this morning, crazy intergenerational dreams that included my mother at various ages, me, my daughter, my granddaughters, my stepdaughter all the women in this family. I rarely dream of my mother, so I was relishing that time between dreaming and waking, turning over the images in my mind that had filled my dreams and wondering what it was all about. Then I remembered with startling clarity: it was ten years ago today that she died. Mama had truly suffered with Parkinson's disease coupled with severe emphysema, the ravages of which took her down, down, down, despite the fact that she had quit her three-pack-a-day habit cold turkey in 1963. My father, then in his 80's and not well himself, had finally succumbed to the inevitable and had placed Mama in a nursing home three weeks before. Her respiratory status rested on a knife's edge, teetering, and when she contracted a cold it went rapidly into her chest and she began retaining carbon dioxide. She was going to need aggressive intervention within hours, probably including a ventilator, to bring her back into some kind of shaky equilibrium, and the threat of pneumonia hovered over all of this. When she was taken to the hospital, my dad and my brother arrived to find her consciousness rapidly diminishing, a by-product of her deteriorating respiratory status. A kind doctor God bless him said gently to my father and brother basically that there was a choice to be made. If they intervened as aggressively as her compromised respiratory condition conventionally warranted, it would be hard, if not impossible, to wean her off a ventilator. Pneumonia was definitely a threat and probability. Days in the hospital and tough decisions about the ventilator might lie ahead. If they didn't intervene aggressively and just gave gently supportive care, Mama's CO2 levels would continue to rise, her consciousness would continue to ebb, and she would pass away in the next 24 to 36 hours. Daddy and my brother made the most loving decision. They called the family minister, called me 600 miles away in Chattanooga to let me know what was going on, and stayed with her, talking and praying her into the next world. It was a good end, when it might have been nothing but struggle and terror. I think often about my mother, who was a junior high school music teacher for ten years. Among her students were Warren Beatty and Shirley MacLaine. When I see my oldest granddaughter Jesse and her ambitions to become a choral director, I think of Mama. When I watch Jesse perform or see her own directors in the choirs in which she sings or most recently watch her direct, I think of Mama. I watch the energy and confidence and even abandon that it takes to be a successful music teacher and director, and I long to have known my mother when she was that woman. Mama was an athlete. She and her classmate, actor Forrest Tucker, were voted the most athletic in their graduating class at George Washington High School in Arlington, Virginia, the class of 1938. Mama wanted to be a Phys. Ed teacher, but a thyroid condition in her early years at Madison College (now James Madison University) in the mountains of western Virginia put an end to those dreams. She switched gears and declared music as her major. She was a fine pianist and had a glorious soprano voice, and she already knew that she wanted to be a teacher, so the shift mustn't have been too difficult. She was the first one in her family to go to college and she graduated in 1942, ready to teach. She came back to the Arlington area and began to work. She told me how she used pop music as a portal to teaching the classics to her students. She wasn't that much older than they were, after all. She recounted to me the zoot suits and dance crazes of those days. She could herself truck with the best of them and she taught me to jitterbug. In those times, classical themes often found their way into movies or popular hits, so she just led those students back down the path to the foundations of that music. She produced musicals and revues and directed large glee clubs and was evidently beloved of her students. She also was working on completing a Master's degree at Northwestern, where she went to study in the summers, when she met my dad, a handsome baritone in the Arlington Methodist Choir, in which she also sang. She was 28, probably beyond the hope of marrying for her parents, siblings, and cousins, an old-maid school teacher in the days when that phrase was spoken aloud. She loved my father deeply. He had a big personality that commanded a lot of attention and took up a lot of the sunlight. I think that she rapidly fell into his shadow and just stayed there. I never knew the mother who had the personality of the choral director or the confident Northwestern student, enjoying Chicago in the summers. When Daddy began drinking heavily, Mama shrank into the shadows even more, retreating for safety as much as anything, to avoid his vitriolic tongue. She had two children who lived, my brother and me. She endured the loss of five other pregnancies, four of them early in gestation and one heartbreaker when a little girl was born at six months and hadn't the lung development to live. Outwardly, at least, she packed away her feelings and shrugged it off with her stock phrase for all tragedies, great and small, "That's life." She was hard to know, so encased in whatever protective emotional armor she had constructed. Now that she is gone, there are so many things I wish that I had asked her. What was her dog's name again? How was it that her father came from upstate New York and met her mother? What did she like best about teaching? What were her disappointments in her marriage? What were her sweetest memories of her life? How did she endure the losses of so many little ones? Why did she never finish her Master's? Was she sad to give up the life of a successful teacher? My mother was hard to reach. I think that
she was clinically depressed, as her father had been, but not
in such a paralyzing state as he manifested. She self-medicated
with cigarettes and later alcohol. It made it hard to get below
the surface and know what was going on. For a while in my adulthood
I was angry with her for that and for the ways in which I felt
that she should have more actively protected my brother from
my father's alcoholic rages and attacks. I thought she was weak. Any strength that I have is from you, Mama. I wish I'd known you better. Rest now, rest. 
"Ocean and Respite" - Monday, May 7, 2007 Each year, I try to reset my internal clock with a trip to the beach. There is nothing more elemental to me than to stand at the edge of the ocean. I don't know if it's because of the fact that its salt still runs in our veins, or because we feel so small next to the seeming endlessness of the sea, but it unfailingly calms me and helps me to put my life into perspective. Each year, time at the beach is also a milestone for me. My first walk to the ocean's edge is always emotion-laden. It used to be that I would stand at the waves' margins and think, "Maybe this is the last time" The past couple of years, however, all I can think is, "Here I am again. Still here!" Steve and I had a wonderful time on the way down to the Gulf from Chattanooga. There is nothing like the forced confinement of eight hours in the car to push you toward deep conversation. We talked about everything, reflecting finally on how precious we are to one another and how these recent years have been such a gift, beyond any expectations. We also acknowledged that a vacation from cancer will be nice, even if not completely possible ever. I've still got my Xeloda with me and an appointment with a radiation oncologist to explore new treatment options waiting on the other side of this vacation. In the meantime, I'm stepping fully into this time away. My husband is a generous soul. He's impulsive and a man who knows how to enjoy. When he gets into "vacation mode," he really knows how to have fun. Yesterday, as we drove south, he saw a field of wildflowers that the Alabama Highway Department had planted along the Interstate. "Wow!" he said. "That would be a great place to take pictures." He got off at the next exit to turn around and go back to the field of black-eyed Susans that stretched for hundreds of feet along a swath of green at the roadside. When we got off to turn around, he noticed immediately that at that exit was a field of poppies. We took pictures of each other there, and then started to go back to the first exit and saw a field of bluebonnets. We took more pictures and still went back to the first buttery yellow field. He helps me to stay in the moment. Later that day, we looked down at our pants and noticed that they were stained golden from all the pollen we had brushed against. A nice momento. So, we have this time-out-of-time together. We will fish and walk and swim and sit and read and eat great seafood and talk some more. We'll reconnect with each other without the cares and pressures that are the normal part of daily life. I'll reconnect with my own cells, washed in the warm Gulf waters. I'll sink into thankfulness for another year, another year of my full life stolen against the odds or more likely, just given, without any strings, as broad and beautiful as the ocean. 
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