I Remember Mama
I Remember Mama
Forty years ago today, my mother died. She was 57. Forty years hence, I am the same age.
"If only we can get through February," my Great Aunt Margaret used to say: all drawling Virginia, ironic wisdom. "It's the longest month."
The hardest snows. The coldest nights. The most painful memories. In my family, it always seemed to be that the most trying times were squeezed into 28 or 29 days.
1979 was a case in point: the culmination of my mother's two-year struggle with cancer. I remember around my 15th birthday getting the news.
“They found something on my shoulder," my mother said - breezily telling me with a smile to ward off teenage worries.
I can't recall exactly where I was when she told me, but I remember her demeanor: we'll take care of this. We were probably in the kitchen, or maybe in her car where she was teaching me to drive. Wherever we were, she wanted to make sure that I wouldn't worry.
So, I didn't.
A few months later, I remember where we were: the hospital lobby, and this time everyone was there. Cousins, aunts, friends.
"We couldn't get it all," the doctor told us. I remember Aunt Estelle pursing her lips and looking grave.
"So, just go back and get the rest," I said. At this, the others just turned away.
That night, I went to my after-school job: page at the Ginter Park Public Library. I asked the librarian for books on cancer. "Is it your Grandma?" she asked.
No, I replied. It's my mother.
I broke down crying, and the librarian sent me home.
Forty years ago today, my mother died. She was 57. Forty years hence, I am the same age.
I never called her "mother." To me, she was always "Mama": spelled that way, but pronounced "Mumma." To my Grandma, she was "Daughter." To her colleagues at work, “Ms. Perry." To everyone else -- and on her tombstone -- "Libby."
"Libby" Perry was that rare person: everyone loved her. I'm sure many people, if not most, think that about their mothers, and in my case, it was true. Having worked her way up from behind the switchboard she became an executive with C&P Telephone, one of the "Baby Bells" that comprised AT&T. She was whip smart and pretty, but most importantly, she was kind.
In my entire life -- 17 short years -- I only saw her lose her temper once. It was a morning between that first "we couldn't get it all" and that frozen February of 1979 when her slogging ordeal came to an end. Over those two years, there were many such mornings: coffee made, car warmed in the driveway, son / me to be dropped off at school, chemotherapy treatments to endure. On this day, all of that, I am sure, was on her mind. She had made the coffee, warmed up the car -- frosty exhaust wafting over the porch -- picked up her purse, and then realized: she had locked the car with the engine running, and she had also locked the house keys in the car.
"Goddamn it!" My Mama screamed: Angry, painful, frustrated tears barely held in check as she went from window-to-window so see if there was a way back into the house. I followed along meekly and helpless: a faithful puppy, scared and amazed.
"Goddamn it!"
Other than that, I never heard my mother raise her voice. Not that she didn't get angry -- she could. But high-pitched histrionics were not her style. Rather, a frigid curve of the lips worthy of Meryl Streep in "The Devil Wears Prada" or the special effects person from "Frozen" were her repertoire. When my mother was upset, her temper was not hot: it was ice.
It is a trait, I have since learned, that she passed along to me.
For 40 years I've been anticipating this date: the year in which I'd be the same age as was my mother when she died. Would I be as wise? Would I still be alive? During the AIDS era, I was convinced that I would not be, but here I am. 57.
"So young," everyone said at my mother's funeral - packed - largest crowd I was told ever for St. Paul's excluding Easter and Christmas.
"So young."
At 57 myself, I wonder. Young? Not quite old? "57 is the new 37"? Whatever.
The morning she died, I left. On Valentine's Day, just nine days earlier, the hospital had called. Mama was being released: for the umpteenth time, after the umpteenth treatment. It was a surprise, and I heard while I was in class. I rushed home - by now old enough to drive and with my own car - and called the florist, having arranged for flowers to be sent to my mother in her hospital room. I always sent her flowers on Valentine's Day.
"She's coming home! Send them there!"
By the time I got home, she was resting on the living room couch. In rooms beyond, aunts and cousins and my Grandma - Mama's Mama - were preparing her bed. She wouldn't be going back to the hospital again.
"Oh son," Mama said, carefully leaning up from her arm encased in a cast. She had fallen during the last stint at the hospital. "They're beautiful. Yellow roses are my favorite."
We sat for a few minutes in silence and then she said: "When am I going back for chemotherapy?"
I told her she was not.
"Then," she said with a sigh and attempted grin, “that means I'm going to die."
Forty years ago today, my mother died. She was 57. Forty years hence, I am the same age.
That Valentine's Day - February 14, 1979 - was my last day at school for nine days. I didn't leave my mother's side, nor did our familial retinue -- all cooking and cleaning and combing my hair, and my mother’s wig. And then, it snowed.
I had forgotten about that part until this week when a "history alert" from my hometown paper, The Richmond Times Dispatch, reminded me of "The Great Blizzard of '79" -- one of the greatest snows of the last 40 years. So, we all were stuck: keeping watch over my mother. Unable to leave, and even if we could, not wanting to. The snow made everything outside quiet and clean. Inside, all was pain and morphine and the endless "death rattle" that permeated every inch of the house - every inch of my brain. I can hear it still. My dreams replay it too.
A priest came. The Last Rites were given. Everyone recited The Lord’s Prayer around her bed. Then, from the depths of her being my mother’s voice broke free, and prayed aloud too before once again lapsing into incoherent and grinding spasms of labored breath and delirium.
Then, it was that final day: February 23, 1979.
I awoke early -- in truth, I don't remember sleeping. The snows had melted enough so that normalcy had returned to the roads. I donned my uniform and made my way to the car. I knew — I hoped — that today she would die -- soon -- within hours — and I did not want to see her draw her last breath. We had said our goodbyes, our final "Ego Amo Te" that Valentine's Week.
Now, she was unconscious, and -- I hoped -- free of pain. Her mother, my Grandma, would hold her hand as she died.
And so, I went to school. Rather, I went to the church next door, St. Benedict's. It was early, before 6am, and the place was empty. I went to pray, but instead, I screamed. I screamed at God. I screamed at my mother. I screamed at poor Father Ambrose who came trying to shush me. I only screamed louder. Finally - 10 minutes later, an hour, I can't recall - the school secretary came and sat next to me. She said nothing. She let me scream. She let me cry. Finally, she led me back to the school where I went to class and fell asleep on my desk. At 9:20am, someone shook me awake, and I knew.
I remember walking into the school office, and the priests and my "church rescuer" looking at me with patient and painful eyes.
"Go ahead and make the announcement," I said to disconcerted stares.
"We usually wait for the Cadet to go home before we announce it," said my principal, Father Adrian. "It's easier on the boy."
Do it I now, I commanded, and he obeyed: “Dear Cadets. Please bow your heads as we pray for the repose of David's mother, Mrs. Perry, who has died this morning..."
Within minutes of that announcement, my friends came running and took me home. The rest is a blurry miasma.
"So young," everyone said at my mother's funeral - packed - largest crowd I was told ever for St. Paul's excluding Easter and Christmas.
"So young."
During the Mass, Mama’s closed coffin was inches away in the aisle from my pew. To keep myself under control, I bit my left palm so hard that my jaw print was embedded there for days.
I remember the Cadet Corps sending an honor guard. I remember my cousin Claire singing "Amazing Grace" and then, I heard, collapsing in grief. I remember other bits and pieces, like the photo on the box of a jigsaw puzzle, but inside finding most of the pieces missing.
On February 26, 1979, Mildred Elizabeth "Libby" Perry was buried. That day, there was a total eclipse of the sun. Thankfully, it rained that morning - washing away the last of the snow and leaving a blessed overcast pall. I am convinced that sanity stayed with me because of the clouds. If I had looked up to see a shadow blotting out the face of the sun...
The preceding is my memory of four decades ago. Every February, the memories or lapses in memory, return with a vengeance. In fact, they return every day.
The truth is this: everyone's mother dies. Everyone dies. In the intervening decades, my family has had more than its share of pain and heartache and cancer. Right now, another beloved mother in our family is battling it. My dear Meg, the strong shoulder and big heart of my high school years, died leaving behind two young sons. Barely a year ago, the bravest boy in the world, "Super Cooper", succumbed to the disease at age 10. Nothing I have described, or felt or remembered can come close to the scorching heartbreak of that. I feel almost ashamed still feeling loss and pain and memory of four decades ago.
Forty years ago today, my mother died. She was 57. Forty years hence, I am the same age.
"You never get over losing your mother," my father once told me. He was speaking of the death of his mother, much more than 40 years previous. At the time, I believed little my father said, but after 40 years, I have come to know that it is true. The grief of loss - no matter the cause of a loved one's death - is not something that "goes away". It becomes part of one's soul: even if that loss is something as "normal" as losing one's mother to cancer.
"Grief is the price we pay for love in this world," a philosopher once said, and it is true. Love is expensive and grief is a haunting payment. In my case, whole decades have gone by in which its sting seemed to lessen. And, then, there was today.
February 23, 2019: Forty years ago today, my mother died. She was 57. Forty years hence, I am the same age.
Forty years ago today, my mother died. She was 57. Forty years hence, I am the same age.
"If only we can get through February," my Great Aunt Margaret used to say: all drawling Virginia, ironic wisdom. "It's the longest month."
The hardest snows. The coldest nights. The most painful memories. In my family, it always seemed to be that the most trying times were squeezed into 28 or 29 days.
1979 was a case in point: the culmination of my mother's two-year struggle with cancer. I remember around my 15th birthday getting the news.
“They found something on my shoulder," my mother said - breezily telling me with a smile to ward off teenage worries.
I can't recall exactly where I was when she told me, but I remember her demeanor: we'll take care of this. We were probably in the kitchen, or maybe in her car where she was teaching me to drive. Wherever we were, she wanted to make sure that I wouldn't worry.
So, I didn't.
A few months later, I remember where we were: the hospital lobby, and this time everyone was there. Cousins, aunts, friends.
"We couldn't get it all," the doctor told us. I remember Aunt Estelle pursing her lips and looking grave.
"So, just go back and get the rest," I said. At this, the others just turned away.
That night, I went to my after-school job: page at the Ginter Park Public Library. I asked the librarian for books on cancer. "Is it your Grandma?" she asked.
No, I replied. It's my mother.
I broke down crying, and the librarian sent me home.
Forty years ago today, my mother died. She was 57. Forty years hence, I am the same age.
I never called her "mother." To me, she was always "Mama": spelled that way, but pronounced "Mumma." To my Grandma, she was "Daughter." To her colleagues at work, “Ms. Perry." To everyone else -- and on her tombstone -- "Libby."
"Libby" Perry was that rare person: everyone loved her. I'm sure many people, if not most, think that about their mothers, and in my case, it was true. Having worked her way up from behind the switchboard she became an executive with C&P Telephone, one of the "Baby Bells" that comprised AT&T. She was whip smart and pretty, but most importantly, she was kind.
In my entire life -- 17 short years -- I only saw her lose her temper once. It was a morning between that first "we couldn't get it all" and that frozen February of 1979 when her slogging ordeal came to an end. Over those two years, there were many such mornings: coffee made, car warmed in the driveway, son / me to be dropped off at school, chemotherapy treatments to endure. On this day, all of that, I am sure, was on her mind. She had made the coffee, warmed up the car -- frosty exhaust wafting over the porch -- picked up her purse, and then realized: she had locked the car with the engine running, and she had also locked the house keys in the car.
"Goddamn it!" My Mama screamed: Angry, painful, frustrated tears barely held in check as she went from window-to-window so see if there was a way back into the house. I followed along meekly and helpless: a faithful puppy, scared and amazed.
"Goddamn it!"
Other than that, I never heard my mother raise her voice. Not that she didn't get angry -- she could. But high-pitched histrionics were not her style. Rather, a frigid curve of the lips worthy of Meryl Streep in "The Devil Wears Prada" or the special effects person from "Frozen" were her repertoire. When my mother was upset, her temper was not hot: it was ice.
It is a trait, I have since learned, that she passed along to me.
For 40 years I've been anticipating this date: the year in which I'd be the same age as was my mother when she died. Would I be as wise? Would I still be alive? During the AIDS era, I was convinced that I would not be, but here I am. 57.
"So young," everyone said at my mother's funeral - packed - largest crowd I was told ever for St. Paul's excluding Easter and Christmas.
"So young."
At 57 myself, I wonder. Young? Not quite old? "57 is the new 37"? Whatever.
The morning she died, I left. On Valentine's Day, just nine days earlier, the hospital had called. Mama was being released: for the umpteenth time, after the umpteenth treatment. It was a surprise, and I heard while I was in class. I rushed home - by now old enough to drive and with my own car - and called the florist, having arranged for flowers to be sent to my mother in her hospital room. I always sent her flowers on Valentine's Day.
"She's coming home! Send them there!"
By the time I got home, she was resting on the living room couch. In rooms beyond, aunts and cousins and my Grandma - Mama's Mama - were preparing her bed. She wouldn't be going back to the hospital again.
"Oh son," Mama said, carefully leaning up from her arm encased in a cast. She had fallen during the last stint at the hospital. "They're beautiful. Yellow roses are my favorite."
We sat for a few minutes in silence and then she said: "When am I going back for chemotherapy?"
I told her she was not.
"Then," she said with a sigh and attempted grin, “that means I'm going to die."
Forty years ago today, my mother died. She was 57. Forty years hence, I am the same age.
That Valentine's Day - February 14, 1979 - was my last day at school for nine days. I didn't leave my mother's side, nor did our familial retinue -- all cooking and cleaning and combing my hair, and my mother’s wig. And then, it snowed.
I had forgotten about that part until this week when a "history alert" from my hometown paper, The Richmond Times Dispatch, reminded me of "The Great Blizzard of '79" -- one of the greatest snows of the last 40 years. So, we all were stuck: keeping watch over my mother. Unable to leave, and even if we could, not wanting to. The snow made everything outside quiet and clean. Inside, all was pain and morphine and the endless "death rattle" that permeated every inch of the house - every inch of my brain. I can hear it still. My dreams replay it too.
A priest came. The Last Rites were given. Everyone recited The Lord’s Prayer around her bed. Then, from the depths of her being my mother’s voice broke free, and prayed aloud too before once again lapsing into incoherent and grinding spasms of labored breath and delirium.
Then, it was that final day: February 23, 1979.
I awoke early -- in truth, I don't remember sleeping. The snows had melted enough so that normalcy had returned to the roads. I donned my uniform and made my way to the car. I knew — I hoped — that today she would die -- soon -- within hours — and I did not want to see her draw her last breath. We had said our goodbyes, our final "Ego Amo Te" that Valentine's Week.
Now, she was unconscious, and -- I hoped -- free of pain. Her mother, my Grandma, would hold her hand as she died.
And so, I went to school. Rather, I went to the church next door, St. Benedict's. It was early, before 6am, and the place was empty. I went to pray, but instead, I screamed. I screamed at God. I screamed at my mother. I screamed at poor Father Ambrose who came trying to shush me. I only screamed louder. Finally - 10 minutes later, an hour, I can't recall - the school secretary came and sat next to me. She said nothing. She let me scream. She let me cry. Finally, she led me back to the school where I went to class and fell asleep on my desk. At 9:20am, someone shook me awake, and I knew.
I remember walking into the school office, and the priests and my "church rescuer" looking at me with patient and painful eyes.
"Go ahead and make the announcement," I said to disconcerted stares.
"We usually wait for the Cadet to go home before we announce it," said my principal, Father Adrian. "It's easier on the boy."
Do it I now, I commanded, and he obeyed: “Dear Cadets. Please bow your heads as we pray for the repose of David's mother, Mrs. Perry, who has died this morning..."
Within minutes of that announcement, my friends came running and took me home. The rest is a blurry miasma.
"So young," everyone said at my mother's funeral - packed - largest crowd I was told ever for St. Paul's excluding Easter and Christmas.
"So young."
During the Mass, Mama’s closed coffin was inches away in the aisle from my pew. To keep myself under control, I bit my left palm so hard that my jaw print was embedded there for days.
I remember the Cadet Corps sending an honor guard. I remember my cousin Claire singing "Amazing Grace" and then, I heard, collapsing in grief. I remember other bits and pieces, like the photo on the box of a jigsaw puzzle, but inside finding most of the pieces missing.
On February 26, 1979, Mildred Elizabeth "Libby" Perry was buried. That day, there was a total eclipse of the sun. Thankfully, it rained that morning - washing away the last of the snow and leaving a blessed overcast pall. I am convinced that sanity stayed with me because of the clouds. If I had looked up to see a shadow blotting out the face of the sun...
The preceding is my memory of four decades ago. Every February, the memories or lapses in memory, return with a vengeance. In fact, they return every day.
The truth is this: everyone's mother dies. Everyone dies. In the intervening decades, my family has had more than its share of pain and heartache and cancer. Right now, another beloved mother in our family is battling it. My dear Meg, the strong shoulder and big heart of my high school years, died leaving behind two young sons. Barely a year ago, the bravest boy in the world, "Super Cooper", succumbed to the disease at age 10. Nothing I have described, or felt or remembered can come close to the scorching heartbreak of that. I feel almost ashamed still feeling loss and pain and memory of four decades ago.
Forty years ago today, my mother died. She was 57. Forty years hence, I am the same age.
"You never get over losing your mother," my father once told me. He was speaking of the death of his mother, much more than 40 years previous. At the time, I believed little my father said, but after 40 years, I have come to know that it is true. The grief of loss - no matter the cause of a loved one's death - is not something that "goes away". It becomes part of one's soul: even if that loss is something as "normal" as losing one's mother to cancer.
"Grief is the price we pay for love in this world," a philosopher once said, and it is true. Love is expensive and grief is a haunting payment. In my case, whole decades have gone by in which its sting seemed to lessen. And, then, there was today.
February 23, 2019: Forty years ago today, my mother died. She was 57. Forty years hence, I am the same age.
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