Long ago I remember hearing my mother say, “Old age is not for sissies.” She was 84 and I was 45. When you are forty-five, you think you handle just about anything. In the twenty-four years after college, I moved to Canada where we farmed for ten years, and we moved back to the US. I had already been at Apple for over a decade.
While I was a very successful at Apple, my mother who knew nothing about computers knew a lot more about life than me.
She understood that families can get complicated, hard work does not always result in success, and most importantly she knew the value of continuing to work even when it was not easy.
She could accomplish amazing things, but she did it not through a flurry of activity but through methodically getting things done as she was able. When she was in her nineties, she was proud of still being able to dress herself even though it took her over an hour.
Her mother died during the 1918-19 flu pandemic. At the age of nine she became the lady of the house. She had to cook for her five siblings. Many times she told me the story of making biscuits in the morning for the family but having one of the boys put the heavy pan in the wood stove because she could not lift it.
She left home in her teens because the new stepmother and my mother did not see eye to eye. If I remember the story correctly, as she was leaving she told the stepmother that if it ever got to her that the stepmother had laid a finger on one of her sisters, she and her favorite cast iron frying pan would be back to deal with it. Mother had grown into being very proficient with a cast iron pan.
Blanche, after putting herself through cosmetology school, became a successful beautician running her own shop on Main Street in Mount Airy and later after I was born, she had one in the back of our house in Lewisville, North Carolina. It was the way she supported us.
As a single mom in the fifties, she managed to raise me and become a very popular Boy Scout mom who was considered a better driver than most of the men. I never lacked for love. I also learned the value of education and hard work.
Like all of us, mother had things in her life that challenged her, but she always rose to the challenge even if it involved a lot of false starts. She was someone you could count on when help was needed. We had a cattle field day at our farm in the late seventies. My mother who was in her late sixties got on an airplane and flew from North Carolina to New Brunswick which included switching terminals by herself in Boston to help with the 300 people who showed up.
Mother was in her mid-eighties before she gave up her driver’s license. When she did it, she told me not to worry, if there was an emergency, she could still drive. A few years after giving up driving, she had to give up working in her flowers. It was the stairs in and out of her house that put an end to the flowers. It was then that we realized the house was holding her prisoner.
When our good friend RJ who was living upstairs in the house died suddenly, mother had to move. RJ had been her legs, getting groceries and things that they needed. She had continued to cook for them as he continued to work for the local newspaper.
Mother moved in with us and we offered her our main floor bedroom. She wouldn’t hear of it. Every night, she would go up the stairs on her rear, one step at a time to one of our other bedrooms. It is appropriate to mention at this time that one of our daughters likes to she comes from a long line of stubborn. It is pretty easy to see the source.
Eventually we built mother her own room and bathroom but when it was time, mother reluctantly moved into an assisted living facility. In spite of declaring she could never make new friends, she made some of the best friends of her life in those last three years. It was only in the last few days of her life that she had to have help getting dressed.
Only after all her new friends passed away was she was ready to let go. Her mind was still clear but her body had worn out long ago. She was ninety-three years and six months old. She is still missed every day by those of us she touched and nurtured.
I have cousins who say that they would have never had Christmas if it wasn’t for their Aunt Blanche, my mother. Another claims that he would have gone down a bad road and likely be dead if my mother hadn’t forced him to go to military school.
She was a force of nature.
Comments