Memories of My Mom

I recently lost my mom. She was 97. In her final year she had some struggles. But the other 96? Healthy, happy and active. Not too bad at all. I will grieve but I will do so privately and it will not take long. It’s hard to mourn for someone who lived the long and bountiful life that she lived. My mother was the epitome of the phrase “a life well lived.” We should all do so well.

Mom at 94

These days, I mostly find myself reminiscing. I think about the things she accomplished and the times we spent together, both when I was a boy and as an adult. I think about how lucky I am to have had such a wonderful woman for my mother. And I really want to share some of my memories. I want people to know what a truly remarkable woman she was.

Something you should know, by way of preamble, is that I am adopted. My parents could not conceive children on their own and, after 8 years of trying, they adopted me. I don’t remember when they told me. I’ve just always known. They didn’t wait until I was “old enough to understand” or spring it on me on my 18^th birthday (SURPRISE!). It’s just always been a part of who I am. They always made it out as something special – that they got to choose me. They always made sure that I knew how special I was because, after years of being told that they would never have children, they finally got one - me. I was the answer to so many of their prayers.

But they didn’t just get me. I got them, too. And of the three of us, I think I am the luckiest one of all. I am the one who was, and still is, truly blessed. Some of my earliest memories are of lying in bed in the dark and looking up to Heaven and thanking God for allowing me to be with these people. My mom once told me that she and my Dad sometimes wondered if I really understood what adoption meant and if I was really going to be okay with it – until one day when I was 5 years old. She saw some other kids taunting me about being adopted and I yelled back at them, “Oh yeah!? Well my parents CHOSE me. Yours got STUCK with you!” She told me that, after that, they knew I was going to be fine with it.

One of my mother’s first jobs was during the war. She learned Morse Code at Hudson's Bay House and became a radio operator in Lac la Ronge, a small community in northern Saskatchewan close to the border with the Northwest Territories. The only way to get in and out was by bush plane on supply runs and she used to tell me stories about the pilots who would try to scare her on the trips up and back. There was no GPS back then so they would follow the rivers to get where they needed to go. And they would do crazy things like flying under bridges and skimming the treetops to try to get a reaction out of her. She told me that some of the trips terrified her, but she wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of letting on. “I’d just sit there in the passenger seat,” she said, “and hang on for dear life. But I never let on that I was afraid. I must have really been a disappointment for them.” My mom has been many things. I can’t say that “disappointment” was ever one of them.

La Ronge was in the news a couple of years ago and she saw the coverage on TV. She was so excited! “They have a traffic light there now! It must have really grown since I was there!” Yes, Mom.

Graduation, 1947, summa cum laude

My mother was a registered nurse and she saw it all. She worked in emergency rooms, operating rooms and on the wards. She saw life and death first hand, saw people’s insides opened up on operating tables and ambulance patients arriving at Emergency with severed limbs and who knows what else. In simplest terms, as a young boy, there was not much that I could have done to myself that would have had an impact on her. Like I said, she had already seen it all.

My mom was always the neighbourhood nurse. Once the neighbours discovered that there was a nurse living on the street, our kitchen became a convenient triage centre for every nick, cut and boo-boo any kid on our street inflicted on themselves. People would show up at our door with an injured child in tow, usually bleeding from some opening in their body – some of them original equipment, some of them recently installed – to ask my mother’s opinion and hopefully get some quick first-aid. Sometimes she would patch them up and send them home. And sometimes she would drive them to the hospital. Everyone, that is, except her son.

As I said, my mom had seen it all and nothing I did as a growing boy could ever make an impression on her. I used to tell people that I could come home carrying my head tucked under my arm like a football and my mom would have just plopped it back on top of my neck, put a Band-Aid on each side to hold it in place and then told me, “You’ll live.” It didn’t matter what I did. Two Band-Aids and a reassuring “You’ll live” was the standard treatment.

When I was 8, we moved to a new subdivision called Westwood on the outskirts of the city. It was great! They had just started building it and they were still paving streets and building houses everywhere. It was utopia for an 8-year-old boy who loved construction and heavy equipment. At the end of our bay there was a small forest and a farmer’s field separated by a barbed wire fence. I never met the farmer, but his reputation was well-known. Whether it was deserved or not, is another question entirely. Picture the old man who lived next door in the first Home Alone movie.

The word was, if he caught kids playing in his field, he would come out with his salt shotgun and……. well, we 8 and 9 year-olds really didn’t want to finish that sentence. So one warm summer day (I was 9 at the time) a bunch of us were playing in the forest and our play spilled over into the farmer’s field. I remember it quite vividly. We heard a shout and a man appeared from the farm house. He had something long and dark in his hands. It could have been a shotgun. It could just as easily have been a broom. We didn’t stick around to find out. We high-tailed it for the forest and under the barbed wire fence that separated the two as fast as we could.

I dove under the fence but halfway through I arched my back, caught a barb and tore a four inch gash in my back. I ran down the street and into my mother’s loving arms, tears streaming from my eyes and blood streaming from my back. She took a look at it, cleaned it up and then pulled it closed with her fingers, put some tape and Band-aids over it and told me, “You’ll live.” And I did.

Years later, when I was 18 or 19, we were talking about the barbed wire fence incident with some friends and my mother admitted, “Yes, we probably should have gone to the hospital. You could have used 6 or 7 stitches. But you were bleeding and I didn’t want to get the car dirty.” (heavy sigh) I love you, Mom.

My mom was one of those “I don’t want to be a bother” people. I think that’s fairly typical of her generation. She never complained about anything. Even in her 90s, she would have the occasional overnight in the hospital and when we would go to stay with her, all she did was fuss about us. “Did you have dinner? Go have your dinner. I’ll be fine....” “Did you find a place to park?...” It just went on and on.

This “never complain” attitude was never more apparent that when my parents were in their mid-80s. My dad was developing dementia but my mother hid the severity of it from us. My wife and I had no idea how bad it really was. We knew it was getting worse and we had started talking about a nursing home but my mother wouldn’t hear of it. “I can take care of him. It’s not that bad.” She hid it from us because she “didn’t want to worry us” (her words). One night one of their neighbours called to say that my mother was feeling very ill and my father seemed very dazed and out of it. The neighbours thoughtfully stayed with my dad while I took my mom to the hospital where they confirmed that she was having a heart attack. She was going to be staying in the hospital for a while. So I went home, packed a bag and moved in with my dad. It was very fortunate that I was on vacation from work that week (God provides). I moved in with my dad and then I didn’t sleep for the next 4 days. I couldn’t. He would get up and prowl around at all hours of the night. He would try to go for walks without telling me and get lost and confused 4 houses from home. I used to see my parents every couple of days, but I had no idea the dementia was as bad as it was. No wonder my mother had a heart attack. But she never complained and she never said a word. She explained it to me later. She had made a promise – for better or worse, in sickness and in health – and she was simply honouring that commitment. That was her way.

When my dad was getting close to retirement, my mother took up golf. Golf was my father’s passion. He loved the game and he loved being out at the club. So my mother took it up so they would have something to do together in their retirement. And they golfed together a lot. They went on golfing holidays all over North America and Europe. As I sit here typing this, I am looking at the first trophy my mother ever got for getting a hole in one. She got three over her lifetime. My father was an outstanding golfer but he only scored two aces. He was dutifully proud of his wife, as every good husband should be, even though there would be occasions when he could be heard muttering faintly under his breath (as husbands have also been known to do) if anyone dwelled on it for a little too long.

My mom was always a little feisty, but in a nice, polite kind of way (so typically Canadian). That only increased as she got older.

She celebrated her 90^th birthday in the hospital getting fitted with a pacemaker. During her 4-day stay, she slipped in the bathroom and needed help getting up. She pulled the emergency cord and a big, tall orderly arrived, opened the door and asked with a smile, “What are you doing down there?” My 5 foot tall, 95 pound mother looked up at this extremely large man and replied, “I’m checking to make sure that you clean the floor properly! NOW HELP ME UP!”

It was during that same hospital stay that she told me, “I know I must be getting better because I want to go home and I’m getting crabby about it.” That was my mom.

It was my mom who gave me the idea to make snowballs in the wintertime and put them in the freezer until July so I could “surprise my friends” (her words). It worked. They were surprised, alright. The following summer everybody had a stash in their freezer and you never knew from one day to the next when you were going to get nailed with an iceball. This is how traditions are born.

I vividly remember the day, back when I was 6, when my mom backed the car out of the garage. Unfortunately, my father had backed it in. It was 1961. The car was a 1960 Chevy Impala. In those days, there were no 5-MPH bumpers, just beautifully sculpted pieces of steel wrapped in chrome that you could hit with a sledgehammer without leaving a mark. So my mom backed the car out of the end of the garage that didn’t have a door and the back of the solidly-built, wood-frame garage fell right off, THUMP! The car didn’t have a mark on it. But the memory that I have retained for almost 60 years is the sight of my father, armed with a hammer and a bag of 6” nails, hammering the rear wall of the garage back on and my mother watching him out the kitchen window with a look on her face that was equal parts amusement, concern and embarrassment.

My mom was always the understanding one. My dad was the disciplinarian and my mom was always the soft shoulder. When I was 19 or 20, I was at my girlfriend’s apartment one Sunday evening and she and I and her roommate were watching W5 on TV. They were doing a story about adopted children who were going off and searching for their “real” parents. Let me be very clear. Gene and Ruth Mechler were, are, and always will be, my real parents. I may not have been biologically related to them but they are the only parents that I have ever known and, much more importantly, they are the only parents that I have ever wanted. Being a parent has nothing to do with who was in the room at the moment of conception. Being a parent has everything to do with investing the rest of your life in raising and caring for your children and doing everything you can to give them advantages that you never had. And I said as much as we were watching W5 that night. I thought that that was just about the ultimate slap in the face. “Thanks! I appreciate all the time, effort, money, meals, clean clothes and education (it’s a much longer list than that) that you’ve invested in me. You’ve been great stand-ins but now I need to go and find the real thing…” Uh-uh. No way. I could never do that.

But even though I had no interest in meeting my biological parents, I had to admit that I was curious about some things. To give you an idea of how “real” my parents were to me, I was 11 or 12 before I realized that, when the school nurse asked if there was a history of cancer in my family, I couldn’t use them as the basis for my answer. They were my parents. Period. Natural or adoptive, it didn’t matter. They were my parents in every meaningful sense of the word. But I did wonder about my medical history and other things like that.

My girlfriend’s roommate, Shirley, was studying Social Work at UofM and she said, “Why don’t you do a ‘Who am I’?” I had never heard of this so she explained that you made an appointment with Family Services and they told you what was in your adoption file. No names or places but things like medical history, lineage and so on. It was food for thought and would answer some questions without having to make any connections that I wasn’t sure I wanted to make.

I told my mother that I was thinking about doing this and she was very understanding. She said, “That’s fine. Just don’t tell your father.”

Huh?

She explained. It seems that my father had lived the last 19 or 20 years afraid that one day I would turn to him and say, “How did I ever get stuck with a father like you!?” I was stunned. My dad and I had had our “moments” over the years just like every father and son do, but never, ever had I felt like I had gotten stuck with anything. My mother understood that and, ever the peacemaker, she made sure that everyone got what they needed. I got the information I was looking for and my dad got the peace of mind of never knowing what I had done.

My mom’s feistiness and her deep, deep desire to not be a burden on anyone would occasionally combine in some interesting ways. After she turned 90, my mother became adamant that she did not want a funeral. “NO FUNERAL, ALAN!” She explained it to me like this, and her logic is unassailable. She said, “I’ve outlived all of my friends and I don’t want you to have to go to all the trouble of writing a speech about me and then deliver it to an empty room!” LOL!!! Oh, Mom, you could always make me laugh. And so, Mother, you shall have your wish. There will be no funeral. I suppose that, in a manner of speaking, this post is the eulogy that I will never get to deliver “to an empty room.” There will, however, be a celebration of your life. We are going to go to a nice restaurant, have a really nice meal and tell stories about you. We will make each other cry and we will make each other laugh until our sides ache. And you’re buying!

Even though I feel a tremendous obligation to honour my mother’s wishes regarding a funeral, I have to admit that I took great pleasure in delivering my father’s eulogy. I really enjoyed standing in front of that room full of people (it wasn’t empty) and telling them about my dad, the life he had led, the hardships he had overcome and, most importantly, our relationship with each other and just how much he had meant to me. It was very cathartic. I think that that is why I had such an intense need to write this. I want people to know what a fascinating woman my mother was and what an incredible mom and grandma she was to me and Debbie and our children.

And that brings me to the last two memories that I want to share.

These anecdotes have been just a sampling of the things that went on in our family over the years. But there are two memories of my mom that I will treasure above all others.

The first one happened on my parents’ 42^nd wedding anniversary. My wife and I had taken them out for dinner and part of their gift was some information we had recently received. A few weeks earlier, we had learned that Debbie was pregnant with our first child. While we were having dinner I told my parents that I had a question for them. They both looked at me expectantly and I asked, “How do you feel about the names Grandma and Grandpa?” My mother stared at me for several, long seconds. Then she looked at Debbie and asked, “Really?” Debbie smiled and nodded and my mom let out a squeal that stopped every conversation in the restaurant dead in its tracks. It was priceless!

But what makes this so much more poignant are a couple of additional facts. You see, I am an only child and this is not my first marriage. Several years earlier, my first marriage had ended quite abruptly. It also ended without children which, in the clarity of hindsight, was definitely for the best. Many years after our children were born, my mother confessed to me that, after that first marriage ended, she and my dad had given up on the idea of ever having grandchildren. They never let on (because they didn’t want us to worry, of course) but apparently the disappointment ran pretty deep. The squeal in the restaurant that day was not just the excitement she felt for us, but the realization that a dream she had thought might never happen was going happen after all. And over the succeeding years, they loved their grandchildren more than I will ever be able to put into words.

And finally,

The last thing that I want to share is about the day my father died. My dad was suffering from dementia. He had spent the last 2 years in a nursing home and in the final few months he had begun slipping away faster and faster with each passing day. He was just a husk of the man he had once been. He was now so weak that he could barely move and he was completely unable to speak. When you went to see him there was always recognition in his eyes but he was fading and we knew that the end was getting close. So it wasn’t a surprise that Sunday afternoon when the nursing home called and told me that I needed to come right away. My mom was already on her way and we met at the nursing home. And my father waited for her. He waited until she got there so he could gaze at her one last time. His eyes shone. She sat down on the bed and took his hand. He gave her hand one last, good squeeze, smiled up at her and then he was gone. They had just had their 60^th wedding anniversary a few weeks earlier. She was the love of his life and he refused to go until he saw her one last time. He died with a smile on his face and love in his eyes. My mom could always bring out the romantic in my dad. And now she is gone too and they are together again. How could I possibly be sad about that?

Thank you, Mom. Thank you for these memories and so many more that I will carry with me forever. Thank you for all of your love and kindness. Thank you for all the sacrifices that you and Dad made so that my life would be better. Thank you for all the trips to Emergency that I never had to take because Band-Aids and “You’ll live” were all that were really required. The day that you and Dad adopted me was my very, very best day.

Give Dad a hug for me and tell him that I miss him. I’m going to miss you, too. I love you, Mom.