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I received the call at 2:15 A.M. last Saturday morning that my ninety-one year old mother had passed away. We are about seventy miles away & had just been to see her a couple of weeks before. She suffered from dementia but that day she was wide awake, alert & communicating surprisingly well. Many have since told us that they have experienced the same phenomenon of a friend or relative suffering from this disease being near normal & completely coherent one day & then suddenly being gone in the next week or two. After months or even years of not even recognizing their own family members.
Mom was born in 1927 & grew up in a very hard scrabble environment with six brothers & sisters, a mother that died young & growing up in the heart of the great depression. The real one of the 1930's. No food stamps, no welfare, and she said many times that they would not have eaten if not for the Salvation Army. She met my dad when he came home from the Pacific after WWII. They were married August 13th, 1949 & my father always joked that it was a Friday. We lost him in 2001. Between the three of us kids many things came out at the meeting with the Minister & the gentleman in charge of the service. We all had mostly forgotten that there were few times that we could remember her not working.
When she retired at about seventy she took a job in the local middle school cafeteria just to ward off the feeling that she was not contributing anything towards her own support. Pension be damned. Probably a by-product of growing up during the depression. She talked many times about how shocked she was to see the amount of food that the kids at the school wasted. There again was probably that depression experience. She worked that job well into her eighties & spent the last half-dozen years of her life in a nursing home where she could not leave unaccompanied. And yet we all felt like she had led quite a full life. With many experiences that we had no particular desire to personally have to endure. But she had been healthy all of her life, able to work as long as she wished & died in her sleep. While that may sound insensitive to some, it could have been much worse. Rest in peace Mom.
Mom was born in 1927 & grew up in a very hard scrabble environment with six brothers & sisters, a mother that died young & growing up in the heart of the great depression. The real one of the 1930's. No food stamps, no welfare, and she said many times that they would not have eaten if not for the Salvation Army. She met my dad when he came home from the Pacific after WWII. They were married August 13th, 1949 & my father always joked that it was a Friday. We lost him in 2001. Between the three of us kids many things came out at the meeting with the Minister & the gentleman in charge of the service. We all had mostly forgotten that there were few times that we could remember her not working.
When she retired at about seventy she took a job in the local middle school cafeteria just to ward off the feeling that she was not contributing anything towards her own support. Pension be damned. Probably a by-product of growing up during the depression. She talked many times about how shocked she was to see the amount of food that the kids at the school wasted. There again was probably that depression experience. She worked that job well into her eighties & spent the last half-dozen years of her life in a nursing home where she could not leave unaccompanied. And yet we all felt like she had led quite a full life. With many experiences that we had no particular desire to personally have to endure. But she had been healthy all of her life, able to work as long as she wished & died in her sleep. While that may sound insensitive to some, it could have been much worse. Rest in peace Mom.
, 2013 LH, 2014 LH
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