My mother was a class act. I’m not 100% sure all that goes
in to that. I just know that she was.
As soon as I thought it, I told her so. “Mom, you
are a class act.” She looked at me quizzically, as if to say, “What brought
that on” and “Who, me?” all in the same thought. I would tell her that again and again, whenever
the overwhelming feeling welled up inside me. I told my sister and my daughter
that I thought this way, too.
It wasn’t that my mom was perfect. She could be very
stubborn. She was kind of a perfectionist. She could be a bit of a martyr. Just a bit. She didn’t have a great sense of
humor and she hated socializing. She was
not an intellectual and she was a teensy bit on the prudish side.
My mother should have hated my father. She had every reason
to do so. My father was charming and
talented, smart and hugely fun-loving. He was also seriously narcissistic, arrogant,
impulsive, and reckless. He was
unfaithful to her again and again throughout their just-about thirty year-old
marriage. The cheating started before I was born – of course I did not know this
until I was an adult. The woman lived in the trailer park my parents owned –
she cut my sister’s and my hair. He cheated again when I was in my teens. This
time it was a woman from the Eastern Star – a Masonic lodge my parents were
long active in. And he cheated when I was in my early twenties, newly married –
this time with a woman who worked for him at his regional newspaper. He would leave my mother for that woman, with
whom he lived until she passed away from lung cancer. There could have been
others – there probably were others.
Those are the ones I know about.
My father wrecked my mother’s life financially. Never one to
be fiscally responsible, he was less so without my mother to keep the checkbook
balanced. A series of missteps combined with some bad luck and terrible timing
after he left her resulted in my father losing his property which included the
house I grew up in – the house in which my mother and brother still lived. The house was to be sold by the bank. My
mother was facing homelessness. My aunt and uncle kindly stepped in and bought
the house. She would have to pay them back. She was already 60 years old. My
mother squared her shoulders, lifted her chin, and spent fifteen years letting
college kids live in her upstairs in order to pay her debt back. My mother. Class act.
My father, meanwhile, had no money of his own. Never one to
let reality interfere with his plans, however, he moved in to an old decrepit
mansion in our town. Why? He’d always wanted to live there and now he didn’t
have my mother’s boring practicality to hold him back. It didn’t look run-down
on the outside – but on the inside – holy cow. Plaster falling down, pipes
exposed, holes in the floor, erratic electrical outlets, bare lights dangling
from the ceiling. But hey – he was
living in a mansion – with his girlfriend and two of her four children, who
were 12 and 14.
My mother worried about those kids. It was Christmas. It was western NY cold. She
knew they didn’t have much heat and that there also wasn’t much food. She went to the grocery store and bought bags
full of groceries. “They can rot in hell,” said my mother, about the two supposed
adults. But she sent me with those bags
full of groceries to that mansion so those kids wouldn’t suffer any more than
she imagined they already had. “Don’t tell him I bought them,” she said. Like
hell I won’t, I thought to myself. My
mother. Class act.
Many years later, the girlfriend passed away. By then, my
father had pulled himself together. He was no longer living in the
falling-apart mansion. He’d dusted off his engineering skills and went back to
work. He was no longer living hand to mouth.
But now he was alone and very sad.
Christmas was coming. “Tell your
father he’s welcome to come for Christmas if he wants to,” my mother said to
me. I looked at her incredulously. “Really?”
“I imagine he’s feeling lonely – and it’s Christmas,” she said. And just like
that, my father was invited back in to her home – which was not yet fully paid
for – given a seat at the table, and in front of the fire, and made to feel
comfortable and welcomed. My mother. Class act.
More years passed. My father was dying of esophageal cancer.
Now he was living with another woman – this one had insisted, however, that my
father actually divorce my mother. So she was his wife. He was in hospice care
at home and though his wife had promised the hospice administrators that
someone would always be there when the nurses or aides were not, she disregarded
that direction regularly and left my father alone in bed for hours. It did not
matter that he was getting weaker by the day or that no one would be there to
get him some food or help him to the bathroom. My mother fretted. “He should NOT be alone,”
she’d tell me.
My mother also had cancer at the time and was in the middle
of her own four-year battle for life. She endured one round of chemo after
another which brought on horrible mouth sores, incredible exhaustion, and some
serious kidney problems. One gray and cold morning in January a few weeks
before he died, my father called my mother. It was just 7:30. “Are you doing anything?” he
asked her. “Do you think you could come over?”
The last thing my mother wanted to do was dress, summon the energy to
scrape her car of snow and ice, and drive the few miles to my father, who was
lying alone on the couch in his house. But she did. She sat with him for hours until
the hospice nurse came while he alternately dozed and roused. Later she would
tell me that she thought he had been afraid he was going to die that morning
and he was afraid to be alone. My mother. Class act.
During the last weeks of my father’s life, he asked for
parsnips. My angel mother scoured the grocery stores in town for some to make
him. He reminisced about the macaroni and tomato juice soup he used to love.
She made that too. I helped her with the oyster stew he asked for.
She
wasn’t feeling well but she directed its making from her couch in the living
room. I delivered it to him and watched him slurp it down, grateful to my
mother for being who she was. Class act.
After he died, my sister and I arranged for the funeral that
his wife said she could not afford. We could not let him leave without a proper
send off. My mother offered to host a buffet lunch afterwards. Of course his wife was welcome. His wife, I might add, is not a class act.
Most people aren’t.
I think it all comes down to this. My mother was a class act
because she was full of humanity. She acted consistently from a position of
kindness and compassion even if she had plenty to be angry about. My mother
simply did the right thing. Always.
I miss you, mom, every day. But the things that you did, the
example that you set, guide me every day. Happy mother’s day to my mom, the class act.
