Old Age Day by Day November 17, 2013

There is so much in the media right now about JFK's assasination, and while it holds a lot of emotional resonance for me, as I was a freshman in college when it occurred, November 10 is the day my mother died, and it was a shock of a different magnitude.  I had just turned forty, and was head counselor at a safehouse for battered women, and I was seeing the decade of my forties as hopeful and empowering.  I was having brunch with my friend, a girls morning out, as we had toddlers at home, and I remember saying my period was off by a couple of months.  I didn't think I was pregnant, but something was up.  That afternoon my father called.  My mother was dead.  She had been shopping the afternoon before with a friend, returned and had dinner and watched TV with my dad.  The next morning she came into the kitchen, went to the sink, and said she had to "upchuck".  She collapsed in front of the sink, and when the paramedics arrived she was dead.  For so many years she worried about cancer, as she'd had it twice, but she died of a massive heart attack.  That evening, my period began, and I felt as if my body had known all along and tried to warn me. 

I'd last seen my mother in late August, as we lived in another state.  In my last phone conversation with her, she'd joked about my dad painting the house; said she had nowhere to hide to even get dressed.  She smoked like a chimney, and probably had since she was ten (she left school after third grade) and drank too much, self-medicating the dread she felt about cancer.  She'd been told twice she would die of it and both times she refused to cooperate.  The autopsy said her arteries were like cement.  If only there had been a warning, and she'd gotten on heart medication or had an angioplasty or something.  She was sixty one years old. 

I begged my dad to wait for me to see her body, but he and my brother talked me out of it, because of the autopsy.  I wish I hadn't listened to them, and had been able to see and touch her.  She was cremated, gone and absent so suddenly and swiftly.  My kids lost a terrificly devoted grandmother, their only one, and the youngest can't even remember her.  Now it's been almost thirty years.  She and I did not get along at times, but I see myself as more like her than my dad.  And even though I used to look like his spitting image, nowadays I look like my mother.  I see her every time I look in the mirror.  Hi, mom.