Mother's Day Memories

...a humbling,  precious Mother's Day memory...
 

May 2, 2006

            Today a local farmer stops by my husband’s work saying he saw Dad and Mom driving on the interstate yesterday. This is after my sister and I have had many conversations with them about the safety of their driving, and they’ve finally agreed and promised us they’d drive no further than a ten-mile radius. I decide I must talk with them about this incident, so I stop by their house and visit with Mom, making small talk about the nice weather and the spring flowers blooming in the yard. I ask her what they did the day before. Mom replies they drove to the grocery ten miles away. I tell her a community member was concerned because he saw them driving on the interstate about thirty miles away.

Immediately, she grumbles, “Who told you that?” Then she defiantly says the community member was “tattling.” She yells, “We made an important trip to the mall, because I needed to buy face cream. We’re not teenagers who needed to be monitored. We’d rather lay down and die than not drive.”

She shakes her head in disgust. I ask her if she wants me to leave. She fumes, “Yes.”

            About a year later, when I was cleaning out their house, I found a sales receipt from that shopping trip for two small heart necklaces Mom had purchased for my sister and me for Mother’s Day. (Mom always gave us something for Mother’s Day.) I felt sad to think this trip, which had caused an argument, was taken to buy Ann and me something so thoughtful.

While speaking at the groundbreaking for the new memory care unit at The Western Reserve Masonic Community in Medina, Ohio, a yellow butterfly flitted across my pages. I thought of Hospice, and knew my dad, a seventy-year Mason, (and Mom too) hovered in spirit.

Book Review of SO, WHAT IS LOVE? by Ann B. Keller

Ann B. Keller pays tribute to her husband's parents, George and Patricia Keller, by writing the forward to, So, What Is Love? 

Ann’s mother-in-law, Patricia, wrote this memoir when she was in her eighties, caring for her husband George while he declined with Alzheimer’s disease for twelve years before his death. Patricia died four years later.

Patricia's writing is mushy, sugary, tender, eloquent, and vividly detailed. She briefly takes us back to her post World War II courtship with George, then through the years they raised a family, continuing through their retirement when they renovated an old Victorian home in Wellington, Ohio. The bulk of the text describes George's battle with Alzheimer’s, and how Patricia struggled to care for him.

At times the reader will wince with pain as George, at two hundred pounds, no longer recognizes Patty, a mere one hundred pounds. Thinking she’s an intruder into their home, he attacks her, and she has to call the police to subdue her own husband. You’ll gasp and be repulsed when George tries to wash his face in a public urinal. You’ll chuckle while shaking your head and moaning with sadness when Patty struggles to change George's soiled diaper in a men's restroom, while other men listening think there’s hanky-panky going on in the locked stall.

Two years ago today my sister and I held hands with our mother as she birthed her soul to heaven.