My sister Anna Marie, the youngest in our family of six, just got married. Dad passed away a two years ago and left my mother, an aging woman of 63, to raise a high-spirited teen-age girl. Mother was 50 years old when Anna Marie was born. I remember that frigid Sunday morning in early March like it was yesterday. Dad gently nudged me at five o’clock in the morning to wake me up to tell me I had a baby sister. Wide eyed, my feet hit the floor and I hurried and got dressed. I could hardly believe it, a sister! I was so happy! I finally had someone to dote on and protect. I might even be the person someday she would look up to and turn to when she needed help. At that time, I was the one who looked up to my four older brothers being the youngest.
After mass that morning, Dad took me to the neighborhood florist to buy Mom the most perfect single pink rose in celebration of little Anna Marie’s birth. I could hardly wait for Mom to come home from the hospital. That long week being alone with only men in the house was strange and abandoned feeling; at ten-years old, I felt as every bit small that I was. I wanted to prove that I could help run the house with her absence, but all I remember feeling was absolute aloneness.
Mom 1933
Mom could liven up the dreariest of days with a song. Her voice is recorded on a wire recorder my parents purchased in the 1940’s. If anyone remembers Rosemary Clooney, my mother’s voice was so very much like hers that it was hard to tell the difference. Her soft voice always soothed away my fears of the thunder and lightning during the darkest and rainiest of days and warmed the frigid days of winter. “Rain, rain, go away, little Mary wants to play,” she would sing while my nose was pressed against the window. Then before you know it, together we were making little feet prints on the steamed windowpanes with our hands clenched against the glass, dotting little toes. Now, as I sit here and hum and stroke her forehead, I remember the many times I laid my head on her lap while she would softly sing An Irish Lullaby, “Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ra, Too-ra-loo-ra-li, too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ra, hush now don’t you cry.” How would I have known we would reverse roles twenty-six years later, and I would be the one stroking her forehead and humming the same tune she sang so many times before? How would she ever know that I am praying for her like she had for me so many times?
Mom 1953
I watch the deep furrows of her forehead soften with each stoke of my fingers, I sense she knows I’m here trying to reassure her like the countless times she comforted me when I was sick. I sit here beside Mom in her hospital bed observing her jaundiced, cancer ravaged body praying to our good Lord God to please release her from all this suffering.
“You know Mary, I don’t know if I can wear yellow, it’s never been my favorite color. But I have always prided myself at being different, and now, I certainly am!” We shared that strained moment of laughter at the doctor’s office when Mom made this comment four days after my sister’s wedding. Mom’s test results revealed what I’m sure she already knew. Cancer was imminent. What type of cancer would be revealed to us soon after the doctor entered the exam room. He delivered the dreaded diagnosis after a series of tests; she had cancer of the pancreas and liver. Surgery was scheduled and dreaded; we knew what the surgery would reveal. What we didn’t know was to what extent the cancer was that was devouring her, and how long would I have left with the woman who had become my best friend.
Mom & me 1956
How undeserving. This gracious woman who raised six, generally unappreciative children, including myself, was finally able to enjoy life when four days after the youngest leaves home she’s burdened with the knowledge she almost certainly has some form of incurable cancer. Three to six months to live was the most time the doctors at Mayo Clinic predicted Mom would have left after the first surgery. Time…the greatest healer? No. Not this time. All the sand was drained from this hourglass.
Tubes in her arms and tubes in her nose, her body ravaged with pain, she still smiled. Even when pain made her momentarily old, you could still glimpse the woman she had been, a great beauty, strong and proud, a woman ahead of her time. She had an endless spirit to help others. Ironically, as a child I remember sitting under her sewing table playing with the scraps of fabric she used to make ‘cancer pads’ for hospital patients. What started out as an individual way for her to ease someone’s discomfort ended up with her organizing dozens of women from our church to sew an array of assorted items for cancer patients and lap blankets for the Veterans hospital in our church’s activity room. Wherever she went to distribute I was with her. I had an insight how one small thoughtful word with a gift could brighten someone who is suffering from physical and mental pain.
My wedding day June 1972
My Mom adopted ailing plants the way some people adopt puppies or abandoned kittens, nursing them back to health. She could have gardened in old teacups and did. “Don’t throw away that cracked bowl,” she would say, “It’s just right for starting that philodendron slip, just turn it around and no one will ever see the crack.” On our frequent visits she always made sure there were some freshly baked cookies with a pot of tea. Mom was never too ill or too tired to fix her nails and do her hair. She had courage, the kind of courage I don’t know that I could have demonstrated if I was in her place. “I had a wonderful life, a good husband and six fine children who have their own families now,” she said at the end, “I’m ready to go. There’s nothing terrible about going.”
My self-seeking reasoning that maybe Mom’s entire life was raising children, and that life without Dad now with my sister married and gone would only be a lonely excursion. After all, her life was her family, but where was her fine children now? Each of my brothers living in different states, my oldest brother in the Merchant Marines somewhere on the other side of the world, my sister, a newlywed with her own hand of dealt problems, all consumed with their everyday issues. I couldn’t help but be angry and resentful when they did not visit her. Where were her brothers and her sisters? Where was her own mother? For all the people she cared for unselfishly, where were they now at her hour of need? This austere hospital room should be overflowed with more people than just her “Mary Sunshine.”
My Mom and my daughter, Danielle 1973
My unselfish reasoning is that Mom deserved so much more from life. She should finally be able to go on a date, a cruise, travel, and spend time with friends and family at her leisure. She should be able to grow old and have the love and attention of her children and grandchildren. Not lying here with this disease devouring her body and spirit, and her daughter singing her the same lullabies she so long ago sang to me as a child.
Speaking of my grandmother, why wasn’t she there for the one time her daughter needed her most? Mom slipped fast when she was taken to the hospital. She looked up at me wide-eyed and scared, her eyes brimmed with tears, “Mommy, I have to go potty, I have to go potty now.” For a short moment, I became her mother. I stroked her forehead with reassurance like she did numerous times when I was young and said, “Shh, Louisa, everything will be all right,” I whispered in her ear. “Shh, everything will be all right, Mama.” Those were the last words she spoke. The words that resonated anger within my heart for years for her family.
My grandmother carried my mother for five months before she married my grandfather in a civil ceremony outside the Catholic Church. Mom always wondered if she was truly wanted or just a mistake made in the heat of passion. Grandmother worked as a maid for one of the wealthier Lake Erie families when she met my grandfather who delivered fish to the home where she was employed. At 12 years old, my grandmother, the eldest girl out of ten children, lost her own parents within three months of each other in 1910. All ten children were placed in an orphanage 200 miles away in Grand Rapids. I can understand the lack of affection she had growing up. Only two of her siblings were adopted, the others left when they were old enough to work at sixteen years of age, including my grandmother.
Mom lived a rough life on a houseboat, while her father fished during the day and ran boot-legged whiskey up the Detroit River under the moonlight during the prohibition days of the 1920’s. River Rats they were named during that time, scurrying around in the dark hidden away from the authorities. My grandmother kept a low profile with her children while my grandfather was in and out of jail. Before Mom was old enough, she tended to her younger siblings needs. She scrubbed the wooden floors of the houseboat with lye until they appeared to be bleached and as reward, she could bathe when the younger sisters were finished, in usually cold scum crusted water. Mom took sanctuary when she visited her Mimi and Pippi, her father’s parents. She spoke of the many times she would sit at her dear Mimi’s side while she read to her and threaded needles when her eyesight was diminishing. She knew at each and every visit she was loved and didn’t want to leave and go back to the damp hurricane lamp lit boathouse where it was dark, and she was unloved.
My mother holding her brother and her two sisters 1924
This year and every year from now on I will send no flowers on Mother’s Day. My mother died young. I will always remember her gifts to me. My mother was my first and best teacher. She would be gratified to see how well her lessons took. Just yesterday I made several mistakes on a project at work, I redid it over and over and still the outcome was the same. I put it aside for a while and begin again. My mother moves in me still. “Is this your best work?” she would ask. Whether the object was an English composition or sewing a simple doll’s dress, she rarely criticized directly. “If you used a ruler, you could keep the columns straight.” Or, fingering a rumpled garment I sewed, “This seam is puckered; maybe you could baste the pieces before you use the sewing machine.” The pressure was subtle, a combination of this is how it’s done and I’m sure you’re not satisfied with that, and so I discovered, by degrees, the singular pleasure of work well done. A beautifully finished garment, a perfect German chocolate cake, a beautifully set table, flowers planted in a garden so that the colors off set each other in harmony. Joy in rightness is my mother’s legacy.
What else did she teach me? Practical things, like how to slip a plant and know whether the cutting would root better in water or soil. How to lay out and create a pattern when there isn’t quite enough fabric. Whenever I cut shortening into flour for pie crust or bathe my children, her hand guides me.
My mother had no conscious philosophy of life or child rearing. But her attitude and beliefs were so consistent, so strongly expressed in her actions that I followed as if reproducing the steps of a dance. I learned from my mother that there is always something to do, the ideal being two things at once. When Mom waxed the basement floors, she wrapped old towels around her shoes, a little extra footwork kept them shining. She watered plants and emptied wastebaskets on the way to other tasks. If a friend stopped to visit, she reached for her crocheting. Until the last days, I have no image of mother just sitting. Is it any wonder that I, stretched out on the lawn, always find weeds to pull?
I learned from my mother to improvise, make over, and make do. She would create a table out of an old fruit crate and make small stools out of juice cans. She bought flour in sacks and used to bleach the sacks to make dish towels so strong that I still have them. When sheets were worn, she made me soft camisoles with lots of lace out of the good spots and new iron board covers out of the old. What was left, she saved for dust cloths. She could extend by years the life of a special garment, by taking in, hemming, or adding special added touches. When the garment was beyond extending, she removed everything salvageable, zipper, buttons, bias binding. My mother saved not just because we were hard up, but because waste was detestable to her.
My mother’s most powerful lesson was a distillation of all the others. Life is doing. I still, most mornings make a list of things that must be done, people to contact, work to complete. Often, as I do so this, I have a vision of my mother in old age, visiting me and staying in bed to avoid interfering with my morning routine. When finally, when I would appear with her morning coffee, she would ask, “What my dear have you accomplished?”
Beyond all lessons, beyond the model she provided, my mother gave me a parent’s ultimate gift. She made me feel loved and good. She taught me to pray and not be afraid of dying. She paid attention, she listened, and she remembered what I said. She did not think of me as perfect, but she accepted me without qualification. Today’s books concerning parenting emphasize the importance of telling a child he or she is okay. No doubt that is helpful, but when I think of how my mother made me feel okay, I realized it was not what she said. It was her pleasure in me, visible as “sunshine”. It was the way she brushed my hair around her fingers to make the ringlets that were my six-year-old pride. It was in her radiant look when I ran in from school, and in her touch when I snuggled close to her.
A quarter of a century later, in a hospital room, waving away the food a nurse urged her to eat, she said, “I’m not hungry. I look at my daughter and I am full. She is my sunshine and is what keeps me going.”
I am no one’s daughter, only a mother now. Carrying her gifts, I think about my mother, my children and grandchildren with love, gratitude, and resolve.
Such a beautiful tribute! Sounds like you and your mom "showed your best work" in your relationship with each other. I am glad you were able to be together so much as she neared the end of her Earthly journey. To be her Sunshine is a great honor. ❤