Tag: Mom

Mom’s Eulogy

Joy

While I’m attending XOXO Fest, I’m running older writings that have not yet been published. Here is the eulogy I wrote for my mom’s funeral, back in July of 2001. Probably this would be more symbolic if I posted it on an even anniversary, but regardless here it is. Enjoy. I’ll be back soon, recharged and ready to create again soon.

On Christmas of 1993, I gave my mom a blank book. I intended for her to use it as a journal, to record her thoughts, her poems or whatever she wanted to write down.

She kept the journal, off and on, until 1999. The book spans five years of her life. There is a gap coinciding with her first bout with cancer. I think that she was embarrassed by it, even in so private a place as her journal.

In going through her belongings, I found and kept her journal. I completed the circle; I gave it to her, and I’d like to think that she would have wanted me to have it now.

I sat down with it a couple of days ago, and read it straight through in one sitting. I had never, during her life, thought to read her journal. My mother was a private person; there are still parts of her life that I will never know. I had a question, however: what did my mother feel was important enough to write down?

First, it’s interesting to me to make a comment on what she didn’t write about. Herself.

In five years of keeping a journal, my mother commented on her health exactly three times. On December 29, 1993, she wrote: “Max is not up to play today. He has a slight fever and cough. I have one too. I hope we all stay well this year.”

Then, five years later, on December 30, 1998, she wrote of a Christmas trip to Cancun: “I was not feeling well and it took us four hours to leave Mex.”

Finally, on February 10, 1999, she wrote: “I went to the Dr. and have to take Blood pressure pills.” That was the final entry.

Three times in five years, she wrote about herself. And what fills the rest of the pages of her journal? What was important to her, important enough to write down, off and on, for that length of time? What did she want to record, presumably in a place that only she would see?

Family.

Entry after entry, she talks about her family. Everyone appears in there. She talks about dad coming home from work and taking her out to dinner. She talks about Lisa, stopping by to visit her, or going over to Lisa and Bill’s house. She talks about me, moving to Texas to follow a silly dream of working for a silly computer company. She talks about hearing from Donna on Mother’s Day, and Kevin, and Daniel. She talks about her sisters and brothers; Carol coming over to stay the night, or taking a road trip to the beach with Mary and Carol to visit Marge and Bill. She talks about dinner with Don and Helen. Aunt Lois appears in there.

And Max. She wrote about Max a lot. December 30 1993: “Max and I spent the day together. He is joy.” I can’t believe that that was a typo.

She felt that way about all of her family. Her family was joy. This was a woman who knew what was important in life. She rarely mentioned things, and money doesn’t make a single appearance in her journal. Her family, however, is front and center.

My mother was a human being, like all of us. She had strengths and weaknesses, like all of us. I really hesitate to try to force a single lesson out of a life as rich as hers was. But if I had to do it, if I had to point to one lesson that we could all take away from having had her in our lives, it would be this: family should be the one thing worth remembering.

98 years since

General

Today was my mom’s birthday, although she isn’t around anymore to celebrate. She passed away in June of 2001 from lung cancer. Today marks the 98th year since her birth, an immeasurably long time. The years since she passed are also long but in a different way. My memories of her are fragmented. I see her in flashes, from many different situations.

The first memory that flashes up are of the most recent time I spoke to her. She was in her bed, and we were watching TV. I don’t remember what was playing. I just sat there on the bed next to her, holding her hand. I’d come over straight after work. The urge to spend as much time as possible with her was so strong, I felt guilty for going home that evening, and going to work.

Mom was still lucid. This was a few days before the hospice nurse had started upping her dose of morphine. Understandably mom was coughing, a lot. She was always thin and frail; we would tease her about her bird legs (it seems mean now but that’s how our family talked; just stating facts.) But with the cancerous cells choking off her ability to breath, replacing her good cells, she had shrunken even more.

We still had conversations, though. I did not, and do not, believe that any part of us survives death, so when death is on the line I know I need to be present. And, reader, death is nearly always on the line. I would ask mom about her favorite movies, or favorite songs. I’d ask her where she learned to cook. I’d ask about her dreams, and her regrets.

With hindsight it is easy to see that mom was almost certainly neurotypical, since my dad, my sister, and I am. At the time, however, I just knew that her personality had a mixture of crankyness and silliness in almost a two-to-one mixture. The crankiness never bothered me much; I tuned it out. It was just mom. It was never biting, not when she turned it toward me. But the silliness was special. She’d make an odd joke. Suddenly break into a huge grin. It was like being dazzled by an oncoming headlight after driving on a dark highway.

I can’t keep one image in mind; I see her as she was throughout my life. She’s young, dressed up in her best, and we’re going over to Aunt Phyllis’ house for the Hayner Family Christmas. All the cousins my age would hang out and find some side room to conspire, gossip, and play; the adults would wander around, or sit in the living room, and talk and laugh. My mom was one of 13 children, giving me plenty of uncles and aunts and cousins, so the house would be full of people, spilling out into the yard, the driveway, the backyard. Mom was the second-oldest and she wore her Oldest Sister role well, praising her siblings’ new jobs, or the food they’d brought to the potluck. I can see her sitting on the couch, cigarette held like a magic wand, wreathed in nicotine smoke.

I swear, these are the good memories. Maybe I’m not explaining myself well?

I wanted this post to be full of stories but this draft appears to just be me reminiscing. I do miss mom. I wonder how she’d react to things today. Happy birthday, mom. The world is lesser without you in it.

Guessing Wrong on Purpose

General

I was sitting in the warm sun in my parent’s yard next to my mom, watching my dad grill a chicken with a beer can up its butt and my Aunt Carol working in the garden, when I realized that every conversation I had with her could be my last one. It was a Sunday afternoon, May 27, 2001, and she had been fighting lung cancer for about 4 years, but she was 72 and the fight was difficult and it had become clear to me that she would lose, and probably soon. I was right; mom would be dead just 13 days later.

Mom was always very skinny, our family inside joke made fun of her “chicken legs”, which sounds mean now that I type it out. But having her lungs fill up with tumor and not being increasingly unable to breathe had accentuated her thinness. But not frailty. She had a fierceness that showed in her sharp humor. She accepted our teasing and returned it and it felt like love sometimes.

I remember the moment I decided to set aside denial about her dying very clearly.

“What, if anything, do you wish you could have done?” I asked her.

Her face turned to me but I couldn’t see her eyes directly; she was wearing giant movie-star sunglasses and a floppy hat to shade her pale skin and white hair from the light. She didn’t smile, and she didn’t frown.

“I always wanted to be a torch singer.”

I did laugh. “But you can’t really sing.”

“Like in that movie, the one with the Bridges brothers, that actress, you know.”

“Julia Roberts?”

She swatted at me. “Don’t do that.” I would often guess wrong on purpose whenever she asked me to remember a piece of trivia.

“Sandra Bullock?”

“Brian. You know who I mean.”

“Michelle Pfeiffer. The Fabulous Baker Boys.”

She settled back in her lawn chair. “Yes. So glamorous. On the stage, a piano, a spotlight.”

“You could have learned. Taken singing lessons.”

“No, I couldn’t.”

Mom was the second-oldest of 13 children, and her parents, straining to raise so many kids, had apparently married her off young, 16 or 17, to her first husband, Bud Bodvin. They had a daughter, Donna, my half-sister, but the marriage ended in the late ‘50s and she returned to her parent’s home, a divorced woman with a daughter, at a time when that was seen as a scandal. Single moms didn’t go out in sequined gowns to sing torch songs in nightclubs then, not even in progressive Portland.

“Things would have turned out different, for sure. What ever happened to Bud, anyway? You never talk about it.”

She gave me a sideways glance. Said nothing.

“I might not get another chance to ask you.”

She waved her hand, brushing away memories. “It was a long time ago. He was so much older than I was. I was 17. It didn’t work out.”

I kept watching her face. She didn’t turn to look at me, watching dad at the grill, who was talking to Aunt Carol, mom’s younger sister, who had moved in to the house after the first round of cancer, to help with cooking and chores.

“What was he like? Was he tall? Short? Blonde? Dark? What did he do?” She scoffed. “If it was so long ago, then the details don’t matter now. It’s a story. I like stories.” I pleaded.

“He was… rough. He had a temper. I couldn’t stay. My father didn’t approve.” Her jaw was set. I had pressed as much as I could. That was all she would say, I could tell.

“So you met dad. I’ve heard that story.”

Dad had been traveling across country selling magazines in 1959, and one night at a diner in Portland, OR, waiting for a buddy who was trying to get a job in the kitchen, dad had struck up a conversation with the waitress, my mom. In the late spring sun, I saw my dad, wearing shorts and a t-shirt and flip flops, wearing out, graying hair, hands rough from a lifetime of pulling wire as an electrician.

“What did you see in him?”

“He was so charming.” Mom’s voice held a tiny note of surprise, and a tiny note of regret. “He was funny, and persistent. And dad loved him.”

“He asked you out, and showed up at your house.”

“And I wasn’t there.”

“You weren’t? Where were you?”

“I was out on another date. You knew this.”

“I did not! On another date? With who?”

“A dentist! I can’t remember his name now. But when I got home, there your father was, sitting in the front room with Grampa. ‘You’re going out with Bob tomorrow night,’ he told me. I was so angry. I never saw the dentist again.”

I tried to imagine dad as a charming young man. Although I can easily picture it now, at the time, our relationship was much more strained and distant right then. One of the reasons for that, which mom and I both knew but did not normally speak aloud, could be inferred by the staging of this scene: me and mom at one end of the yard, dad and Carol at the other end.

Mom was dying. I was, and am, an atheist. I know that there is no life after this one, and as a consequence, I know that every moment with someone else could be the last time I see them, or speak to them. If there is something I want to tell someone, I need to tell them, I need to not hide or wait, because the moment could be gone.

Mom and I watched dad and Carol for a moment.

“You know, right?” I asked.

“She’s my sister. Of course I know.”

“It’s awful. It seems so… disrespectful.” My eyes were filling with angry tears.

“I don’t have any interest in it, not anymore. I’m not going to be around forever.”

I was silent, my face hot. I couldn’t speak, and I couldn’t look at her.

“At least he’ll be with someone, and if it has to be someone, it’s better that it’s my sister.” She reached over and held my hand. Her voice was steel, not from meanness or teasing, but a simple statement of fact, aimed at her youngest son, hoping I could hear her.

“They won’t be lonely. They’ll have each other.”

It has taken me years to hear her.

I wrote this post on Mother’s Day, 8 May 2016. I didn’t post it right away because I wanted to run it past my family first, give them a head’s up, because I touch on some family issues. But my main point wasn’t to dredge up old secrets, it was to remember how clearly mom saw things (and to remind myself that I didn’t, and who does, one hundred percent of the time, really?)