"What's your idea of a perfect date?"
"April 25th. It's not too cold, not too warm...all you need is a
light spring jacket." (Silly airheaded contestant answering a question
in Miss Congeniality)
We were standing around my mother's bed, my sisters and my dad, waiting for the people to come from the mortuary to take her away and dad said, "April 25th." We needed to write down the date and the time of death for them for the death certificate I suppose, but he said the date and that silly line from that silly movie popped into my head. Of course, it popped out of mouth...providing comic relief to what had been a long, long night of stress and tears. Actually, many months of stress and tears, interspersed with other moments of comic relief, because that is one lesson I learned from my mom. Scream, cry, rage for a however long you need to in order to get it out of your system--then find something to laugh about. You'll feel better.
Here are a few other things I have learned from mom:
- It's better to stop what you're doing and use the bathroom before the urge to go becomes desperate, because you never know when someone is going to tell you a joke that is going to make you laugh so hard you pee your pants.
- Never underestimate the power of good food to make people happy.
- We have two responsibilities toward others; the first is to try not to offend, and the second is to not take offense.
- Nothing good happens after midnight. Make sure you're safely in bed by then.
- It's better to do something, even if it's the wrong thing, than to do nothing and complain about your circumstances.
- There's no substitute for elbow grease.
- Answer the phone with a smile in your voice, no matter what your mood was before the phone rang.
- Always buy two candy bars, just in case you inhale the first one so fast you need the second one to really enjoy the taste of chocolate.
I consider all of these lessons vitally important to my life now. However, these are not the most important lessons I learned from my mom. The most important thing that I learned from my mom is to do my best, whatever it is I'm doing. She truly lived the maxim: "Anything worth doing is worth doing well." Quality was a way of life for us when we were growing up--not that we had a lot of money or fancy stuff, although we certainly had plenty and never were wanting for anything. The "quality" I remember was in the excellent meals, the tidy home, the well-prepared lessons, the excellent baking, the precisely sewn clothes and the neatly folded and pressed laundry. I also remember quality service to neighbors and friends in the form of meals delivered in times of illness and new babies, and warm loaves of freshly baked bread delivered all over town to express warm thoughts of friendship. I recall hours of devoted community and church service.
I wish I could detail the many examples of service that have impacted me. Certainly the one that should not go unmentioned are the years that she cared for my father through a serious illness and stayed by his side while he recovered his health, and regained physical and financial stability after what amounted to a devastating reverse of lifestyle for them. For the next 10 years, she worked as a cook for the Senior Citizens in our small hometown. It was hard work, and she did it with diligence and with love. The Senior Citizens had never eaten so well before, nor have they since, I'm sure!
When mom was diagnosed with ovarian cancer at age of 59, our grieving started immediately. We could not believe that our strong, resilient mother would be taken from us at so young an age, and after weathering so much adversity. She and Dad were finally getting to a point of thinking they might enjoy a retirement in a few years. Eight married children, a couple dozen grandchildren...life was pretty good, after being pretty bad for a few years. In one of life's ironic twists, we knew Dad could have gone at any time, but thought Mom would live forever. She didn't give up easily. She worked as hard at beating cancer as she had worked at everything else in her life, and finally said that dying was the hardest work she had ever done.
After Mom's death, life seemed to get very hard for a while. Our daughter, Elaine, started going through some health and hormonal problems that worsened her behavior. After a couple of very hard years, people started saying things to me like, "How much longer will you keep her in your home? Isn't there a place where you could put her where people would know how to take care of her better?"
We started to struggle a bit, wondering if these people were right. Were we really not going to be able to keep Elaine with our family? Perhaps you can imagine our distress, as she was barely 10 years old at the time! One day, I was talking to a friend on the phone. She asked how my sisters and I were getting along without our mom. I said, "Well, you know, we are all doing okay. We just have these moments when we realize that there's no substitute for your mom. Some days, everything just seems harder if you don't have your mom to give you a hug at the end of a hard day, or you can't hear her voice at the other end of the phone, and most of all, when she's not there whenever you need her. Sometimes, there's just no substitute for Mom." As those words came out of my mouth, I knew that was the answer I needed, and the one that would get me through my hardest days to come with Elaine. Other people might know more about medication, or behavior programs, or diet, or augmentative communication, or service programs, or service dogs, or social skills programs, or hormone therapy, or biofeedback, or any of the other myriad things we were looking into at the time. But no one else--not one other single solitary individual on this planet can be Elaine's mother except me. And if the only thing she learns from me is that she is loved, she is cherished, and that I expect her to do her best, that is good enough for me.
Thanks, Mom. It's hard every day to be without you, but I wouldn't know what I needed to know without every day of the life you lived, and all the days that you couldn't live, too. And when it's time for me to let go of Elaine--whenever and whatever that means--I can do it, knowing that we will both survive with our memories, just like I survive with my memories of you to keep me going.
