When I graduated from high school, my mother surprised me with a gift. She gave me a (size??) portfolio that I could use to carry my artwork. I was an artist and planned to attend the Art Institute Of Pittsburgh after graduation. I still do not know how my mother decided on that portfolio as a gift for me, but 56 years later, I still have it.
My mother was a quiet advocate for her five children, and in her dying days, was living with my sister and being chauffeured to her dialysis appointments by her granddaughter. She lived longer than the father of her five children and outlived two of her four sons. She got to meet all three of my children, and two of my grandchildren, who called her “GG.” She wrangled a job for me when I was below the legal age for employment and from the closed stacks of the library at the University of Pittsburgh, I brought home every book that I was allowed to. Though I have no memories of my mother reading to me as a child, I remember when she called me to the door of the bathroom to show me how she could curl her toes.
My sister brought my mother from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to the apartment in Maryland that she had rented to accommodate the two of them. My mother had diabetes and had lost the toes on one foot and her leg to the calf on the other. She referred to her amputations as her “nub and stub.” My son came with me to Maryland to see her in a nursing home; we arrived as my mother was trying to climb from a wheelchair into her bed. My son swept her from the chair and gently placed her in the bed, even as she cautioned him, “watch my leg.” Later that year, Chris was with me on my drive to Maryland to spend time with my dying mother. My sister called me while I was on the road and told me, “She’s gone.” I stood beside my car and cried; my son held me in his arms.
My mother, beaten and abandoned by her husband, sent her children to get the “gummint cheese” and powdered milk as part of the welfare benefits instituted in the 1930s during the Great Depression. She also cleaned the houses and toilets of those who could hire someone else to do so, until she was able to become a nurse, caring for the wounded babies in the pediatric ER of a hospital in Pittsburgh. When my duodenum burst and I was confined to a hospital in St. Louis, Missouri, my mother took a Greyhound bus from Pittsburgh to St. Louis to stay with me and nurse me back to health. I told my sister to stop her; she replied, “You try.” My mother took care of her 50-year-old son, and my friends from work took care of her. She never forgot the way my friends cared for her, and for me.
Everyone has a story of loss; mine is unique only in that I have a forum for publishing it. But I remember, still, that moment when grief brought down my sister and I heard her muted cry: “I thought I would have more time.” My mother died on June 6th, 2010. My eldest daughter called me to ask if I was “Ok,” knowing that I was not. Though I never thought that I would “have more time,” as my sister did, I still miss her. My black leather art portfolio tells me that she loved me.
Bye, mom.
cjon3acd@att.net