Friday, February 12, 2010

I can't see; and I don't want to right now...

My Mother passed away this morning at 0630. When my phone rang at work, and I saw it was my Father, I knew. I held it together...for a good, twenty or thirty seconds. And now, I'll make the pilgrimage back to Michigan to say goodbye, so I'll be out of touch for awhile. I leave you with something I wrote a couple of years ago; a tribute to a loving Mother from an Arrant Son. It's better than anything I could come up with now, and woefully inadequate to show the depth of my gratitude and the wholeness of the emptiness I'll be feeling for...well...the rest of this ride.

I love you, Mom.

My Mother, Elizabeth (not Besty, or Beth, or God Help You, Liz), once said to me, "I don't think you'll ever settle down." She said it with an ache-inducing sense of sadness in her voice that I can still hear in my head after all these years. This pronouncement came about three years before I met my wife, and prior to that bolt of Motherly futility, she was always encouraging, saying the usual, "oh, there's somebody out there for you." And I would joke that I could see her across the street, oh, she's coming this way, oh, look out for that car, oh, damn. And she'd laugh a bit, and tell me to be patient. And then we'd argue with good humor about politics (she hated Clinton and loved Bob Dole) or who was the most beautiful Hollywood star (she always kind of leaned toward the young Hepburn, Bergman, and such).

One of the last things I can remember my Mother saying to me was, "She's beautiful." She was referring to my wife. And this wasn't the first time my Mother ever saw my wife....this was the third time my wife and I had visited her and my Father at my boyhood home in Michigan. But for my Mother, it was like the first time....because by the time I got married, my Mother was in the throes of Alzheimer's Disease, and every day was like a clean slate.

Now, in the winter of 2007, my mother spends her time in a very nice assisted care facility not far from the family home, where my Father visits her twice a day, every day. He sits with her, and he shares the events of the day, much like Cyrano would share his "Daily Gazette" with Roxanne. But if my Mother understands, she has no way of transmitting that idea, for the ability to articulate is now gone. She is reduced to sounds. And laughter. My Mother has a whooping kind of laugh that causes laughter, if you know what I mean.

My sense of humor was largely developed by the tastes of my Mother. She was the one that introduced her young son to the works of Danny Kaye, the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, and Abbott and Costello. This woman, so apparently staid and conservative would whoop with laughter and the most over-the-top slapstick comedy, and giggle girlishly at the whole, "The pellet with the poison is in the chalice from the palace and the flagon with the dragon holds the brew that is true" shtick from THE COURT JESTER. At a young age, I don't know which was funnier; my Mother or the movie.

She also loved the films of Doris Day, the music of Frank Sinatra, the dancing of Fred Astaire, and figure skating. She never got over the fact that Sonija Henie was a Nazi sympathiser. Or that Rock Hudson was gay.

My Mother made the best chocolate chip cookies ever.

She named me for my Uncle John, her older brother, who was killed in Korea. But in thirty eight years of my life, she never mentioned him more than a half a dozen times, and those times came in the early eighties when they reinstated the selective service registration, and her sons had to sign on the line, just in case of a draft. But the memory of the end of her brother's life outweighed the rest of his existence, and I never got to know about him.

That's what this is about, really.....I had every opportunity to quiz my Mother about the family history, or even where she kept that damned recipe for cookies, and I thought I had all the time in the world......and now, all I really would like is a day.

3 comments:

Misti Ridiculous said...

Oh my beautiful precious friend. i love you. peace. travel safe.

Kizz said...

Travel safely. Love you.

Reg said...

All my love to you and your family. You are in my thoughts and my heart.