Today is the 25th anniversary of my mother's death. She was younger than I am now when she died. She was a complicated mix of wounded child and responsible adult. She was brave about the many things she feared. She conquered cancer twice. Both times the doctors said she wouldn't survive. She smoked and drank and abused her body in that way a lot of people did in her era and by the time she knew they were bad for her, she couldn't stop. She was funny and kind, yet a gossip and judgmental. She had a big heart, and a soft spot for other people's suffering. She had trouble when visiting India, because of the poverty and people on the streets. She had lived that kind of poverty herself. She had no education, but many friends with degrees and charmed lives. There was something genuine about her that people were drawn to. She could do anything with her hands: paint, draw, sew, crochet, knit, needlepoint, upolster, arrange flowers and furniture. She looked like a millon dollars in her suits and cocktail dresses she made herself.
She loved a boy and he died in the war, then she married my Dad at nineteen, and they fought and worked side by side until she died. She never had a life of her own. She had worked up until she married, but never again. For her work meant a factory with cotton dust in her lungs and long hours with no holidays. Her beloved sister got trapped in that work for fifty years, then retired without a pension.
She loved us unconditionally - she used to say she'd love us even if we were murderers. That was a strange thing to say, but she meant it. When she got cancer the first time, she later told me, she decided she was not going to die because we were eleven and fourteen. And she didn't. She was written up in medical journals. She fought to be there for us. But she lost something in the fight - part of her heart, maybe some damage (it was a brain tumor and she had to have surgery, as well as radiation and chemo) that didn't heal - and she was often not her vivacious self afterward. Depression knocked her for a loop, and nobody addressed it. She got nasty when she was drunk, and her words were deeply wounding so we backed off, and in a way she lost my brother and me.
I remember her as a woman defined by her attachments to so many people. Her huge family, her countless friends, the younger people she mentored. She was at her worst with her children, often, and her best with her grandchildren. I wish she'd lived to see them grow up.
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