My Mom's Lessons

My Mom’s Lessons

Grief

At five-years-old my best friend was a cat. I named him Blackie despite his white bib and paws. He never scratched or bit, not even when I dressed him in baby clothes and paraded him around the yard in a baby carriage. We lived on the main road through town, a long, straight road many used as a speedway. Indoor cats unheard of back then, Blackie took his chances with that road and lost. We found him dead under a neighbor’s house.

We were not a hugging family. I still remember the feel of the start of surprise that ran down my mother’s rigid body as I flung my arms around her waist. Stepping back, she bundled me into the family car and took me out to dinner, just the two of us, something she had never done before. This marked my first experience of loss with solemn importance. I cried off and on, and she never told me to stop or to move on. She let me grieve at my own pace, a lesson especially remembered as my family went through my dad’s death and now hers.

Even Adults Need Play  

My mother often shooed my brother and I outside and locked the door against constant childish demands. One day she forgot the lock. I went in, I don’t remember for what. Mom, in her late twenties, her hair in a ponytail, stood in the middle of the living room, yardstick in hand, conducting to a classical record playing on our record player that looked like a suitcase. She saw me, standing in the doorway, mouth open, and the yardstick drifted down to her side. Face red, she asked what I wanted. I felt bad interrupting her pretend time but was delighted that, even though a grownup, she still found time to play. It’s one of my favorite lessons.

Determination

My mom’s biggest regret throughout my childhood was that she didn’t have a house. We rented. She decided to take the matter into her own hands. In all but the most extreme weather, my dad helping her to set up, she stood weekend after weekend under an awning, behind a rented table filled with her shelves of cats, dogs, and clowns made from yarn, which she sold at New Jersey’s Englishtown Flea Market, the largest market on the east coast.

Mom had gone back to work, after we three kids entered school, as a third-shift aide at a rest home where, while the residents slept, she finally found a few hours of peace and quiet to dream and create. She took orders and produced people’s beloved pets from photographs or matched the color of crocheted tissue covers topped by her unique animal or clown heads to their décor. My mother saved enough from this second job to send us girls to college and to buy my parents’ retirement home.

At the assisted living facility where she lived the last half year, they had a craft fair and my mother spent hour after hour making large bed cats and smaller kittens for it. No longer able to stand, she sold from her wheel chair and made a few hundred dollars, as good a day as any at the NJ flea market.

Mom lived longer than anyone believed possible with her severe heart disease and diabetes, mostly, I suspect, on sheer will power. Even the day before she died, she said, “Am I dying?” My sister said, “I don’t know, Mom, are you?”

“I don’t want to,” my mom said. She still had things to do, crafts to make. I wonder if there are craft fairs in heaven. It would make her happy.

A Parent's Death

Waiting for a Parent to Die

I understand now why people say that no matter how long a loved one has been sick, their death comes as a surprise. My mother was put on hospice with cancer and severe heart problems almost seven months ago. In that time she has weathered numerous infections and ups and downs in her ability to be independent in dressing herself and getting herself to the dining room of the assisted living facility where she has been living, and taking her medications with prompting as to the times.

Tomorrow she will go to a nursing home where there is more nursing staff who can give her medications themselves and help her with daily living chores as her strength and memory fails. There has been several times when we thought the end might be coming, but she always rallied—to the point we began to call her the ever-ready mama. Her decline is obvious from the beginning of hospice to now, yet those continuous rallies give you a false sense of security that she will continue to come out the other side.

I think this is where the surprise comes in when your loved one finally succumbs to their ailments. Not one of us three kids wishes my mother to continue in pain and the anxiety or outright fear her confusion often causes her, yet we naturally dread our own angst and grief when she does die. Knowing she will be better off joining her parents, brother, sister, and our father who have already passed is comforting, and isn’t. This ambivalence about death is part of the human condition.

What Next?

The death of our parents obviously means we are the next in line. In my case—my mother is only twenty-one years older than I am—my being in her place doesn’t seem far enough into the future. And my generation started having kids later in life. I am thirty-four years older than my first son, thirty-nine years older than my second son. I have to wonder what stage they will be in when I start to need help or if they will be available or willing. Neither has a girlfriend at the moment. I may be too feeble to hold my grandchildren by the time I get any.

Obligations

I’ve never been of the opinion that parents shouldn’t be burdens on their children. I think part of the breakdown of society is the current fashion of family members being independent of one another, especially with the economy not on the side of the middle class. Children used to stay with their parents until they married, though I really think being on their own before marriage helps them to grow up. Grandparents used to help young parents take care of their children and middle-aged kids took care of their aging parents.

I wanted my mother to move in with my family after my father died but she felt my house was too small and wound up at the facility when she became ill, though we three kids have certainly been there to help her when needed. I suspect families may have to go back to this old-fashioned model if the cost of living continues to outstrip incomes.

Divine Relationship

Soul Change

I read a Facebook post the other day that said Christianity isn’t a religion, it’s a relationship. I hadn’t thought about that aspect in a while. Then another friend asked everyone to post a brief account of how he or she came to God. Many had dramatic stories of being saved from destructive lives and set on healthier paths.

My story has little drama, though ironically, it began with my attempt to write a Christmas play for my church’s youth group. None of the kids liked the play and I withdrew a bit to pray and ask God to use it as He would. I had sincerely offered it as a gift to Him, not as a vehicle to win praise for myself. The play wasn’t used but I received the greatest gift in return, the Holy Spirit.

A Relationship with God

Explaining this relationship to someone who hasn’t experienced it can be difficult. You simply know God’s presence lies within you and will never leave you to cope alone. Not to say you can’t ignore or forget that presence for even long stretches of time. The bond requires attention to strengthen it, the same as any human relationship.

In having, feeling that bond, I can prove to myself the existence of God but cannot share more than personal thoughts and feelings on it. That’s why it’s called personal, an individual rather than a group experience, and unique in the pantheon of religions. I tried to explain it to a Muslim friend once, and she had no clue what I was talking about. The Jewish religion includes the Old Testament, where God’s spirit came upon people as needed to impart God’s instructions but wasn’t free to all as Jesus made possible in the New Testament.

To put my story in perspective, that night of my youth group meeting—my parents picked me up and on the ride home we had a fight. I can’t remember about what. I hid a smile. Externally, my life had changed little. Yet I knew everything had changed, no matter how long it took to show on the outside. Forty-five years later, God has never deserted me despite varying degrees of faith on my part, and I know when He has intervened to teach me something or help me in mostly but not always subtle ways. I have never doubted His existence.

When Views Clash

Being personal, that relationship can be guided by learned people, wise in the nature of God, but not dictated. One size does not fit all. I don’t believe the Bible is God’s infallible word. Fallible, prejudiced people wrote it, though I believe their relationship with God inspired the writers. I love to read it and learn a lot from it. God gave us free will so why would He take it away in the forming of the Bible? Personally, I suspect needing an infallible source outside of God for your beliefs shows fear and perhaps a lack of faith.

Certainly fear underlies the vitriolic anger I’ve seen many a self-professed Christian throw at challenges to their beliefs. Jesus had some angry outbursts at people but never simply because they disagreed with him. They were using God’s teachings for their own gain or deliberately leading others down the wrong path. Jesus’s was a righteous anger in concern for others.

Stephen King on Vietnam

Stephen King on Vietnam

In his novel Hearts of Atlantis, Stephen King tackles the subject of the Vietnam War. Okay—to say the book was strange in the same breath as Stephen King is redundant, but this was strange more in the manner of the book’s presentation than its content. Written in five parts, each focusing on one character, the first part introduces an eleven-year-old boy in 1960 who befriends a new neighbor, an older man who introduces him to more adult literature such as The Lord of the Flies and is a being from a different dimension running from still other beings. King does a wonderful job of portraying a young boy coming to grips with the more adult concepts of parental fallibility and forgiveness.

The second part switches to a college freshman dorm filled with foul-mouthed males—sexes were kept separate in the sixties. It also switched from third person (he did, he said) to first person (I did, I said), the story told by a boy who had nothing to do with the beginning of the story. Moving to 1966, the abrupt change threw me, and it took a while to get back into the story. Most of the boys attended college to avoid the Vietnam War, more from a personal standpoint than in objection to being in Vietnam.

The Innocence of the Fifties Dies

The freshmen are introduced to the peace sign, demonstrations, and clashes between those who opposed the war and authority figures. The next two parts went back to third person and focused on two vets, both from the first part, one who used his war injury to beg and give the money to those in need to make amends for taking part in violence against a little girl from the first part of the story. The other vet was a friend of the girl in the first part and the boy who was the focus of that story.

The last part went back to the boy from the beginning and brought the events full circle. Stephen King relates the era to the fall of Atlantis, a time when great changes could have been brought about but people missed the boat and ended with a generation dying of booze, drugs, depression or Agent Orange. I didn’t understand all the references. The sixties were a bit before my reaching the age of reason. The aliens in the first part were unnecessary—the point could easily have been made with regular people—and seemed like an ad for his series The Dark Tower, which I couldn’t get interested in. Otherwise, the dangers of allowing oneself to get sucked into a mob mentality or following authority’s dictates when the policies make no sense come across clearly. Not such a bad allegory for today’s politics.

Star Trek Voyager

Star Trek Voyager

BBC America is having a marathon of the mid- to late-90s Star Trek spinoff New Year’s Day and today. I grew to appreciate Kate Mulgrew’s work back in my college days in her acting debut on the soap opera Ryan’s Hope. Seemed I mostly had the midday hour when it aired free of classes and watched while eating lunch in my college’s commuter lounge. The show was obviously popular since no one objected to that channel being on every day.

Ms. Mulgrew was the first starring female captain of a Federation ship and did a masterful job, in my opinion, of finding the line between a tough, strong authority figure and an intuitive female, closer to and more comfortable with her emotions, able to show compassion in a more empathic manner.

The Star Trek Family

In interviews with the cast of Star Trek, The Next Generation, the actors said their show was cancelled to better launch Voyager, which they regretted since they felt the show had at least a few more seasons worth of stories and character development to give.

Star Trek, Deep Space Nine aired while The Next Generation was still going but didn’t pull in equal ratings, though many considered it the superior show. With two Star Trek shows already airing, Voyager may well have been overlooked, though having a female captain and being set in a different quadrant with different species and problems may have offset that.

The Next Generation crew got to do several feature films, which I’m sure gave them more exposure and opportunities than the TV show alone would have.

Acting Futures after Star Trek

Patrick Stewart and William Shatner still have ongoing careers. I saw many of the men in various shows in the following years, not so much recently. Few of the women have done more than an occasional guest spot in a TV series or movie, nothing recent, except for Whoopi Goldberg, who was famous before her Next Generation stint, and Kate Mulgrew.

Often compared to Katherine Hepburn, Kate Mulgrew played the older actress on stage in a one-woman performance that received good reviews. She now plays a Russian prisoner on the cable TV show Orange is the New Black. Seems being captain of a Star Fleet vessel is good for the career.