My Mother died last week 20 days short of her 90th
birthday. It was a sad time for my
two sisters, Joyce and Carol, and me but at the end it was almost a
blessing. She had broken a number
of bones in a fall and her quality of life was bleak at best. She may be better off; but I will miss
her strength and her humor. In the
face of her mounting health problems, the one thing she wanted was to hold on
until the election. In her words,
“I just want to do my part to help throw the bums out”. She used to call Bush, “that
shithead”. She was not a
particularly profane woman and the only other time I heard her use that term
was to describe one of her tablemates at the retirement home. From that I could only conclude that
her eating partner must have been a particularly nasty old lady.
My liberal leanings may be genetic. Mom admitted to me once that one of the
biggest mistakes she ever made was voting for a Republican for President one
time. (Eisenhower the first
term) She was proud of never
repeating the mistake although it meant that she had to vote for some real
losers along the way. When Mom was
born, women did not have the vote but once she got it, she used it with a vengeance. She never missed an election and was an
active worker and volunteer in many.
She grew up as one of the youngest of five sisters and two
brothers on a hardscrabble plot of land in southern Missouri. Her father was killed in an accident
when she was quite young and she never really knew him. The family existed on what little they
could grow themselves but mostly on the support of their large extended
family. She knew everyone in the
region who was the least bit related.
I remember when I was a boy her introducing me to someone who she said
was my fifth cousin, twice removed.
I still do not know exactly what that means. As she was growing up, nobody they knew had any money and
few possessions but they got by.
And I believe she thought she had a very happy childhood.
She particularly remembered her mother’s father. He had moved the family from Tennessee
to Missouri after the Civil War and homesteaded a particularly picturesque but
marginally productive piece of land near the village of Peace Valley. The hilly terrain and rocky soil of the
region never allowed for any really productive farms but her Grandfather had
the full complement of domestic animals.
According to Mom he kept cattle, sheep, ducks, geese, turkeys, chickens,
goats and bees. The homestead was largely
self-sufficient and he had built a water-powered sawmill that cost him the four
fingers on his right hand but which also brought in a little ready cash. Mom remembered her Grandmother spinning
wool at night by firelight. They
made all their own clothes and I do not think Mom had a store-bought dress
until after she left home. I just
finished going through all her effects and she made up for the early lack of
clothes in later life. She could
relate to me the first time she ever saw an automobile and her amazement at seeing
her first airplane, as barnstormer at the local county fair.
Her Grandfather had brought one of the family’s old slaves to
Missouri with him and she was sill alive when Mom was a girl. Mom remembered her Grandfather as
particularly clever but totally ignorant.
He told her once that he liked Negros well enough but that they just did
not have souls like white people.
It was a point of pride with her that she had come to know better and
she was looking forward to voting for Obama.
Mom was always an intelligent, inquisitive, ebullient, and adventuresome
individual. She was the first and
only one in her family to every graduate from High School. She finished first in her class. Although there were only eight and all
girls: the boys were needed on the farms.
At the urging of her teacher, she took the bold and nearly unimaginable
step of moving the 100 miles to Springfield to enroll in college. When she was
there she met and married my father and graduated with honors. Dad was an impoverished Minister’s son
who was working two jobs while attending classes and waiting for his spot in
Officers Candidate School to open up.
They were married for over 50 years.
While Dad was in Europe my Mom moved to Washington DC to
work in a government office where she fell under the spell of Franklin
Roosevelt. He was her hero and she
credited him with saving the country from the Depression, winning the War and
through such agencies as the Rural Electrification Administration and the Tennessee
Valley Authority, changing the face of the rural America she had come to
understand was so desperately poor.
She remembered standing on the sidewalk of Pennsylvania Avenue when they
brought FDR’s body back to DC from Warm Springs and standing in the same spot
as his funeral procession passed by.
She remained a life-long Democrat.
Mom could also be tough as nails.
At a time when divorce was largely unthinkable, she told my father that
if he did not find a way to come home from Germany by the end of 1946, he could
find a new wife. She correctly
suspected that he was having way too much fun as the military governor of a
provincial capital town in Bavaria.
Lucky for me he did: I was born in September of 1947.
My parents were never rich but their lives allowed them to
ride camels in the shadow of the Pyramids and elephants in rural India. They had seen enough poverty, here and
abroad, to appreciate the relative affluence they enjoyed.
Mom always had a zest for life. She was an inveterate golfer until well into her eighties
when a broken shoulder put an end to her carrier. She never had a handicap below 30 but still managed to bag a
hole-in-one and her strokes were always in high demand as a tournament partner. She took up skiing when she was nearly
50 and went practically every weekend when she lived in Colorado. The family moved quite often and lived
in Missouri, Texas, Washington DC, Michigan, Colorado and Arizona. Mom made life-long friends wherever she
was.
Her life spanned an incredible time in history. She saw the emergence of the USA from a
largely agrarian society to the world’s leading industrial power and the
beginnings of our decline. She saw
the rise and the fall of the Berlin wall, experienced the fear of nuclear annihilation
and the end of the Soviet Union.
She experienced both the jubilation and the tragedy of World War
II. My father was with one of the
army units that liberated one of the Nazi concentration camps and experienced
at first hand the depths of man’s cruelty. Dad took pictures of the victims and survivors, which Mom
showed to us kids when we grew old enough. They came along with an admonition to do whatever we could
to ensure something like this, did not ever happen again. She rejoiced in the triumph of the moon
landings and could never get enough of the Air and Space Museum. She always harbored doubts about
Vietnam and became an early, if not active, opponent of the war. She marveled at the computer age and
the incredible skill the young showed in its adoption. After 9/11 she was ready to do her part
in supporting the war and could not understand how we could expect to win a war
without asking our citizens to make a sacrifice to ensure its success. She never doubted that America was a
force for good in the world and despaired for the damage that Bush had done to
our reputation internationally.
She loved her country and her friends but most of all she
loved her family. She was a good
woman. The world is a better place
for her having been in it. We will
miss her and will try to keep her spirit alive.
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