Mom
1992–1993
She first got sick on the drive back from Maine. We’d gone with the Schaut family that summer — a trip that deserves its own telling — but on the way home, Mom was in extreme pain. She couldn’t do anything but lay in the back seat, wincing and moaning. We were worried but didn’t know what we were worried about.
As soon as we got back she went to the doctor. He was concerned. She had broken ribs with no explanation for why. He expedited some tests. Leukemia.
I somehow didn’t worry too much. Some magical thinking had me believing she would get better. I was still religious, still naïve enough to think faith was a treatment plan. She started with outpatient chemotherapy, and I’d drive her in our big Bonneville. On the way home she’d make me pull over so she could vomit on the side of the road. This was hard to watch. She was the stalwart center of our family. She cared for us — not the other way around. She brought us to our appointments, our games, our everything. Now I was the one driving and she was the one in the passenger seat with her eyes closed.
I have a photo of her coming to one of my basketball games in her turban — she’d lost her hair — and the other families at school swarming her with love. She was like that. People gravitated to her warmth and were shattered to see it dimming.
It didn’t seem too long before she had to be admitted to inpatient. The ninth floor of St. Vincent Hospital. Me, Dad, and Helen all got parking passes and visited every day — Dad after work, us after school. The hospital wasn’t new to Helen and me. Mom, the perpetual caretaker, had been dragging us to visit sick and dying people our whole childhood — bringing them food, hope, helping them clean their houses, doing their hair. We were used to tagging along and keeping ourselves occupied. But being on the inside this time, I saw things differently. The chaplains. The nurses we got to know by name. The cafeteria I learned to navigate in a way I never expected. All the positive visits from friends and church acquaintances. Mom was such an inspiration that they all took it hard and were impressed by her attitude, and some believed that positivity alone would heal her. There was a lot of talk of battling and healing. A lot of prayer. A lot of sympathy directed at me and Helen that we were embarrassed to accept.
We thought she would get better.
I remember sitting in her room watching movies with her. She liked old wholesome movies, classic television. Those were quiet hours.
That fall I had trouble getting to homecoming. Mom, in her evangelical ways, wasn’t a fan of dances, but somehow we got permission. I blew up the Bonneville trying to get there too fast — I was late. Steve, who lived near the breakdown, helped me discover I’d left the old O-ring on when I changed the oil, and two O-rings don’t work. I didn’t trust the dummy light because I’d just changed it. Back then I had to have everything perfect: a fresh oil change, the car cleaned inside and out, a new suit, polished shoes, a new haircut. All of which probably made me late. And when I finally got there, I wasn’t really there. I don’t think I was too gloomy, but it was enough. My girlfriend at the time broke up with me soon after. I was devastated, in the way you can be devastated by something small when the big thing is too large to feel.
I showed up at the hospital after graduation so she could see me in my gown and tell me she was proud. Her children were her greatest joy. I never wanted to disappoint her.
Sometime in June, she got to come out for a day. She had to stay away from people and wear a mask, but we visited her brother — they were close — and then she came to see her farmstead. The dream she’d built over twenty years. It was more than a home. She couldn’t go close to Troy, her horse since she was sixteen, because of germs. Troy was whinnying so loud, not understanding why she was across the yard, only able to wave and tell him she loved him.
A little over a month later, she died.
She was in an uncharacteristically chipper mood that day, talking about good dreams she’d had. I was tired from working at the factory and was napping on the couch in her room when I was woken by choking. Dad called in the nurse. She seemed to know something was wrong and had us leave. I didn’t understand why — I thought it was just another thing among all the other things that had happened over the past year. But when the light outside her door started flashing and all the nurses from the floor — the ones we’d come to know — started rushing into her room, the tight chest came. The punch in my stomach.
They took us to the waiting room. The doctor came in and told us she had died.
My dad started to cry. I don’t think I’d ever seen him cry before. He called our pastor, Howard Young, who’d been guiding us through the year, and he was there soon. Pastor Young sat with us, offering what words he could. I didn’t know what to think or feel. But seeing Dad cry hit me hard. He was the provider, the solid one. But his wife was the love of his life, and he was destroyed.
He had to go back to her room to confirm. He came back and sat with us. I don’t know how long we were there. Eventually we went home with a bag of her belongings.
I didn’t know what to do. I don’t think any of us did. I don’t remember what Helen and Dad did, but I went outside — I always went outside — and it was very windy, like a storm coming in. I stood in the wind and let it blow me around. I cried. I didn’t know where to go in life. Mom was my guide. She made our family what it was. Now it was gone.
I called Anne later that night. Eventually everyone knew. Debbie Schaut came over the next day — Mom’s best friend — to show her love. Then the inner ring of friends came that first week, and the next ring the week after, and so on, each wave bringing food and sympathy until the whole community had passed through our kitchen.
The wake was at Malcore, where my grandpa’s funeral had been, where so many family members on both sides had been laid. A familiar place, unfortunately. A lot of people came. Everyone loved Mom, even though she would lovingly argue with them over some piece of Bible dogma — Christian rock, divorce, whatever hill she’d chosen that week. Aaron and I were in a less gloomy mood than we should have been, and my cousin Jimmy — who was distraught, because Mom had partially raised him — left the room in disgust. “What is wrong with you guys?” I don’t know about Aaron, but I think I was trying to keep the status quo. Not showing grief to soothe myself. Or maybe I still had faith and believed she was in heaven. Jimmy might have been right.
The funeral was at Central Assembly of God with Howard Young officiating. Someone convinced Dad to allow an open casket. Mom hadn’t wanted that. I don’t understand how it happened and I was distraught. I stood next to Dad in the front row as the preacher did what preachers do.
And then we went home to live the rest of our lives. How were we supposed to do that?
Dad went back to work. I took five days off from the factory. I started hanging out with friends — to get lost in their company, playing games and driving around to drown out thinking about her.
While she’d been well enough, Mom had cooked meals and frozen them. She was a consummate cook, and so much of her warmth centered around food. I remember eating her chili — just the three of us at the table, not talking, probably not knowing what to say. A home-cooked meal from her, what she was known for, but she wasn’t alive anymore. It felt wrong. Like borrowing from a life that was already over.
Dad had me throw out the rest of her canning jars that had gone rotten. I took them in boxes to the back junk pile. I remember throwing them in and the glass smashing, and crying, thinking each jar was a memory of her. Her life was interwoven into that farmstead — the life she and Dad had built. It was perfect, and she had made it that way. Warm and with purpose. Now what was the point of Christmas, or any gathering? She orchestrated all of it. Now we’d just be faking it.
The animals were still there, the ones she’d tended. Troy didn’t know. Or maybe he did. He died about a month later. It is surprising he outlived her. They pull a dead horse out of his stall with a winch on a cable — sliding him out and around corners, his body bumping and catching, eyes still open, flies buzzing. They slide him up the ramp into a trailer. I remember watching that and feeling like it was Mom going away again. Piece by piece she was being taken from the world. The garden grew over. Friends of the family volunteered to weed it, but eventually they gave up. It was hard to be there knowing her memories were in every corner.
The final grief was when Dad sold the farm in 2007. I was thirty-three. I don’t know how he could let it happen, yet I understood he had to move on. He was remarried by then, and he moved to the suburbs — into exactly the kind of house him and Mom used to make fun of as the four of us drove around, telling me and Helen how good we had it living the life on the farm. We didn’t understand it as kids. But by the time he sold it, I understood everything he’d traded away. I would have bought it if I could have afforded it.
Losing the farm was losing a big piece of Mom. She will always live in my memories. I’ll tell my kids about her, show them the photos of her riding horses and playing guitar and making our childhoods extraordinary. But knowing someone else lives there now breaks my heart.
They don’t know all that happened there.