posted December 3, 2008
) Judy Frank's mom with granddaughter, Katherine "Katey" Wright, taken in October at the nursing home |
We buried her beside my dad in a beautiful, hilly West Virginia cemetery just a couple of miles from the house where she was born more than 86 years ago. It was a small funeral; virtually all the family and friends she still remembered vividly from her youth were long dead.
Not to worry, her beloved oldest granddaughter said. “I’ll bet there’s a huge party going on in heaven.”
Much as it hurts, and it hurts a lot, deep down I know Mom’s death the day before Thanksgiving was a blessing.
But she went down fighting.
Her brain, when they did a CAT scan a few months ago, looked like Swiss cheese. At least a third of it was completely dead, the doctor told my stunned brother. And yet, until the day she died, she could look across the room at the clock on the wall and tell you what time it was. She knew what year it was, and who – to her horrified dismay - the current president was. A true believer, she could still tell you all about the long hard years during the Depression and how FDR finally got elected and “saved us all from starving.”
The folks in the nursing home tried to get her to eat her veggies and do her exercises and all the other things that would have been good for her, but she wasn’t having any of it. From the day she went in almost four years ago, she hated being there and lobbied long and hard to be taken back to the 50-year-old house in Pennsylvania my dad built for us right after he got a job working for the railroad.
In 1991, months before my dad died of lung cancer, Mom had given up cigarettes. “I just don’t want them anymore,” she said then.
But the decades she had spent smoking two and a half packs of cigarettes a day were unforgiving. Her respiratory system virtually quit working. Her clogged arteries led to major heart disease and a relentless series of small strokes that, gradually, took away her ability to take walks, crochet afghans and tend her beloved flowers.
Worse yet, slowly but remorselessly, they took away her hope.
Growing up, when I couldn’t find my mom anywhere in the house, I knew just where to look for her: out in the garden. She was tireless.
The evidence of her efforts stretched from the front of our property – which boasted a snowball bush at least 12 feet high – past the beds of daisies and iris and hyacinths and lilies, to the flowering shrubs that led to the wooded area behind us.
And those sloping banks covered with bright pink creeping phlox that made our front yard recognizable a quarter mile away! Total strangers used to park across the street, hop out of their cars with cameras and snap photos when the phlox was in bloom. One year, our neighbors brought their newlywed son and his bride, still clad in her white gown, over to pose in front of the glorious flowers.
Of course, the blossoms didn’t just happen. Each morning, as soon as the breakfast dishes and other chores were done, Mom headed outside. Often, she was still there – plucking weeds and spreading compost and dividing plants – at sundown.
Those grounds were sacred. Naturally then, when Mom’s beloved cat died, where else to bury her than beneath the babied mock orange bush? And a few years later, Tinker – the dog my dad mourned until the day he died – was put to rest nearby.
Eventually, her hands crippled by arthritis, her mind by vascular dementia, Mom was no longer able to work in her flowers. Still, until declining health forced her to move to North Carolina with my brother eight years ago, she could look out the window and admire them.
Finally, even that was taken away. She lived the last years of her life on the second floor of a nursing home, looking out the window at the back door – and garbage cans – of the kitchen which turned out hundreds of plates of limp vegetables and tasteless, finely ground meats my mom flatly refused to eat.
“I don’t guess I’ll ever see my house again,” she said sadly in September, the last time I went to visit her.
Even then, she wasn’t through fighting. “If I turn up dead in here, I want a full investigation!” she declared at least a half dozen times.
Finally, thankfully, her long fight is over.
Go in peace, Mom. You earned it.
Judy Frank
billy_clover@yahoo.com
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What a moving memorial written by Judy Frank about her mother. She painted a beautiful portrait, which made me laugh and cry.
I lost my own mother in June, on a Friday 13th, and she was buried on Father's Day, ironically the same day my father died 32 years ago. Mama fought the battle of cancer for seven years, and though she was ready to go, the body just wouldn't give up.
Two nights before Mama died, her sitter said that all of a sudden she perked up out of a coma and started calling out the names of my father, my grandmother, my two aunts and my uncle. It was as if they were in the room with her saying "come on and join us." Well, I hope there is "a huge party going on" for Judy's mother and that my family got an invitation.
If there is a heaven, it ought to be a fun place to be and filled with flowers like those that Judy's mother so dearly cherished and nourished.
Betsy Bramlett
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