My Mother

Mother and Child - by Pablo Picasso

The best radiologists, oncologists and surgeons here in Erie have given my mother just two months to live after several exams and tests led them to a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer early last month.  She hadn’t been feeling very well for quite awhile but couldn’t identify any pain and chalked it up to diabetes and her newly introduced insulin.  Then at a routine check-up her family doctor noticed that she was a little jaundiced.  Some rapid blood work confirmed it:  painless jaundice is the black mamba of the cancer ward.  If it’s not caught very early WITH the proper “anti-toxins” (for lack of a better word), it’s a cruel disease.

How do you make up for all your screw ups of 50+ years in just 8 weeks?  You can’t.  You just can’t.  Especially when you always felt like a failure as a son.  The best you can hope for is a chance to show through actions, not words, just how much that person has influenced your life in a positive way.

I was fortunate enough to live with my mother for 6 weeks just prior to her diagnosis, and it gave me an opportunity to show her, I hope anyway, with some of my small actions what a blessing it was to have her as a mother and role model for good parenting. I made my usual mistakes, but she knew I was trying hard to please her.   And not only that:  when paired with my father, she showed me that such a pairing could stay warm and affectionate much, much longer than 60+ years.

Mother & Child by Howard Weingarden

I feel very lucky to live in the same city as my parents, a “luxury” my older sister and brother would surely bargain just about anything for during the next couple of months.  I wish it could be so, if for no other than to see the joy in my mother’s eyes.  Very lucky indeed, do I feel, despite the sadness and sense of loss that now permeates the very air I breathe.  For SHE draws some of those same molecules into her lungs, SHE once taught me how to seal those lungs so I didn’t drown when she bobbed me up and down in the lake which was practically our back yard.

She does have faults of her own, like everyone else, but more often than not she tried to show me how to cope with them in a positive way, just as my father did in his own way.  The failures were my own, certainly not theirs.  There was a time when I thought such skills were “automatic”, that they came one’s way as the natural result of loving a creature that is part of one’s self, virtually without effort.  Being a father myself, and one who has failed to follow my parent’s example too many times to count, I now know much, much better. 

And that is the true lesson I learned from my mother and one I will carry with me always:  it is vitally important to love your children to the extent and degree that you will sacrifice your own wants and desires to further their growth, but it is equally vital that you let them see that you have those same struggles, and that by daily effort they can be overcome.  This is the essence of what my mother taught me, and if I could pass just one of her attributes through the generations onto my daughter, as my only child, it would be this:  your grandmother struggled in many of the same ways that I have, and that you have in your own way, but she never gave up, she never stopped trying to find some silver lining in that dark cloud which so often penetrates our days.  Even today, she contemplates chemo therapy she would otherwise forego just to try to make it to my niece’s wedding this summer.  Where does such courage come from?  I’m at a loss, unless it be that familiar trio of faith, hope and love.

She carries herself with such dignity and grace these days, even the difficult ones, demonstrating a love which comes from some ineffable source that carries joy along with it.   This is her ultimate gift to her family, those of us who will somehow carry on:  parenting not as chore, but a divine art form which captures the heart and touches the soul.

This is my mother, Virginia Mae.