(Mom & me, some Christmas in the mid-2000s)
My mother died on Sunday. It wasn't a surprise, there was time to prepare for it. She was suffering from Alzheimer's, which had dramatically worsened since last I saw her, in May of 2019, right before we moved to Portland. She died in her sleep, which is how she wanted to go. I know this because she talked a lot about her death.
But I confess I find grief baffling, inscrutable, unpredictable, subtly cruel. Last night I needed to sleep a couple of hours before doing a live remote radio show in the early morning, but my brain kept having a conversation with me about her. It wanted me to write something about my mother. Although I suspect I will be writing about her for the rest of my life.
When I was young, I was extremely attached to her. I used to have nightmares that placed me on one side of a chasm, or river, or some uncrossable mass, & her on the other. The dream would move her farther away from me, the distance increasing exponentially, & I'd awake frightened & alone. I remember in the presidential campaign of 1980, when Reagan talked blithely about nuclear war, I'd be terrified that I wouldn't be with her if we died when the bombs finally rained death from the sky. But I grew out of that. My mother was stubborn & slow to trust me, & we fought constantly in my teen years. I was very glad to get out of the house & go to college to get away from living under her roof & her rules. There was something about me she didn't understand, & maybe didn't want to understand. & I'm sure I felt the same.
In my adulthood, I began to feel something like an obligation to both help her & to be in touch with her. She retired around the time of the OJ Simpson trial, & she watched that spectacle night & day. When it ended, she found the remaining broadcast television wasteland uninteresting, so I had cable installed in her little apartment, & I guess I paid for it for over a decade, maybe two. For a time, until she told me to stop, I would send her fifty dollars a month - she had very little money. Maybe I felt I had to pay her back for something? A debt I could never entirely repay?
& I started calling her every week. This became more important after I moved from Texas, when I couldn't see her regularly - the visits dwindled in the last decade to one a year until we lived in Texas again from 2016-2019. My mother was a gossip, so I was kept informed about the rest of my family through her narratives - & when my sister Pat was alive, I'd ask her about what my mother told me, to see how my mother would alter some tales (& the same with Pat!). While my mother often expressed disappointment about her children - I was told by Pat about the times I disappointed her - she always took their side during conflicts or disagreements. Well, she took her boys' side, anyway. Mom was harder on her daughters because she felt they were stronger than her sons & could take the criticism.
Everything I write seems to need some other explanation of my mother's world view. She was raised in Nazi Germany by a very superstitious mother & a fun-loving father. I believe this is why she thought women were really in control of the world & men were lovable goofs, who only appear to run things because women let them think that. She married an American who had joined the army to both fight in World War Two & escape from the awfulness of his life in Texas. Their first child, my brother Eddie, was born in Germany, but postwar Europe had little opportunity for them, & the family was brought back to Texas. Settling in Garland, my mother had more children - Pat, Steve, James, Karin, &, in 1968, both me & my little brother Chris. (Yes, we were born in the same year, me in January, he in December.)
My birth was unexpected - my sister Karin is six years older than I am & was the proper stopping place for the family. My father was very deep in the cups by then, & probably wasn't going to get better any time soon. My mother despised him for his drinking, for his weakness, for the privation his disease caused - although she kept it well-hidden for most of my life. When she would unload on him - long after he was gone - I was somewhat shocked - she really never showed the anger that she kept inside, at least not to me. Her obituary - which you can read here - doesn't mention my father at all - & that's exactly how she would've wanted it.
The mother I grew up with worked to support five children living at home. & she worked hard. & she wasn't around a lot. Some might have thought it was something like neglect - though she always made sure we were fed, & had clothes, & had a place to live - none of the evictions she had to deal with with my drunken father! - it actually turned out to be very good for me. I was introspective by nature & left alone I read, & listened to music, & drew comics, & even pretended to have a radio show. Mom the housewife might have forced me to go outside & attempt to play sports or other such horrors.
It really does seem like I'll be writing about her for the rest of my life.
My mother was a fearful person - one time on the phone with me, she paused & said thoughtfully, "I guess I'm just afraid of everything!" (I laughed out loud) - & her greatest fear was death. Raised by a Catholic mother (who really must've had a fascinatingly complex superstitious understanding of the world) & a Lutheran father (who mostly seemed a bit Epicurean), she somehow synthesized a good guess of what comes after death: She believed there was a god up there, who doled out punishments & rewards, & whose approval or disapproval was demonstrated in how one's life was going. In the past few years she told me these two contradictory things: she told me that this god had definitely favored her because she had been blessed with her own health, & healthy children & grandchildren; but in moment of unhappiness, she would wonder how she met his displeasure - "What have I done to deserve this?" she would ask me. Hedging her bets, my mother kept herself as healthy as she could - she was in no hurry for confirmation of this afterlife hypothesis.
She also feared being put in a nursing home, where obviously the poor elderly people were treated abominably - terrorized, even - by a naturally sadistic staff. This was the impression she got when my father's father was put in one before I was born - an impression she simply could not nor would not shake.
It was therefore a difficult irony that her worsening mental state required that she be in a place where professionals could look after her. It's hard to know how much of her was left in her brain at that time - our weekly conversations were getting shorter & shorter, & at least once she didn't know who she was talking to, as she kept referring to me in the third person & seemed to think that Gary was still a child. But I suspect enough of her knew where she was & attempted to fight it by using her super-power, which was stubbornness. She thought if she were uncooperative, she might be made to leave. & believe me, if she had been mentally well, she might have succeeded.
Unfortunately, she wasn't. She stopped eating & drinking. The staff told my sister she had the demeanor of one who had simply given up. My sister & oldest brother got to see her in the end - the pandemic made it impossible for anyone else to visit except for window visits - & she was very weak, she didn't open her eyes, she would only talk in German. She went for ten long weeks in this manner - a testimony to how strong she was, how well she kept her heart & lungs & other organs healthy despite being diabetic. If her brain had been unaffected she'd be with us still.
She died seven days before she would turn 91. My sister & I talked the day she died, we remembered that our mother kept moving her age up in conversations. Before she turned 90, she was 91. This year she was 93 or 94. She marveled at how long she'd lived at the same time she expressed that she didn't want to live all that much longer.
Well. Writing all this hasn't really helped me much - I had hoped this would be a kind of therapy for me - it may be that I miss the Sunday phone calls or at the very least am in denial that I will never speak with her again. It may just be that I have so many more things to say about her. She was my mother, after all.
She asked me to give the eulogy at her funeral. She's being cremated & the pandemic would make it impossible for us to gather, so my sister is planning a memorial service in the spring. Maybe these thoughts are rough drafts for my final obligation to her: to try to tell her story in the way she deserved at the last gathering of her family for her.
It may seem weird to write this on my radio show's blog but I share my personal stories here too. My mother liked listening to me on the radio - she listened live to my KNON show in Dallas & called me right after it to tell me what she liked about it (she always kinda wished I'd get paid for it though). She thought I wasn't ambitious enough. Another thing I couldn't entirely explain to her.
Gosh, Mom. I don't know if it's time to say goodbye yet. Let me write some more about you later. You'd probably find all this very flattering. Even if you'd think I ought not to share some things. Don't worry, I can anticipate your disapproval & your embarrassment when I get to those stories. & I know you'll love me anyway. We never quite got each other entirely, but we did love each other. That was a pretty solid arrangement.
