Paris/COVID: Spring 2021 Moments
Found an email from my mother to my husband when his mother passed away:
Dear Lewis,
It is very hard to lose a parent no matter what the circumstances, it is a milestone in your life. I know your mother loved you very much and no doubt contributed greatly to the terrific lovable person you are. In time you will only remember the good things in your life with her, the hard times of age and illness fade. We are so sorry… I am sure this is a very difficult time for you. Remember that you are loved not only by Aliss but by us and many others. We both love you very much and are grateful that you are in our lives and know the special person you are and the wonderful husband and father you are and have been. We send our love and care and prayers for you and your mother. I wish we could be there to help in some way. Much love, Ruth
You can see why she is missed.
At the end of April, we had an online memorial for her with close family and friends. My sister and I, our partners and kids put together a slide show, the arc of her life in pictures, from her grand parents to her great grand children.
A total recall of her life in words would take 97 and a half years, so I decided to give just a few minutes of background:
On my Mom’s side of the family, the ancestors are Lutheran Yankees, proper city folk descending from early American settlers and Pennsylvania Dutch farmers. One of them, John F. Reynolds, a Union Major General from Lancaster, PA, gives his life heroically at the battle of Gettysburg. There are still statues of him there. One of Mom’s grandmothers, Blanche Johnson, is a beautiful “Gibson Girl” whose first job is compositor at the Bellefonte, PA Gazette where her childhood sweetheart, Walter Crosthwaite is a printer. As happy newlyweds, they cruise to Cuba and the Caribbean and settle in Brooklyn, NY.
Tragically, Blanche dies from an infection just after giving birth to Mom’s mother, Roxie. Family lore has it that the attending physician didn’t wash hands between patient examinations. Walter takes the train from NY to Pennsylvania, carrying baby Roxie on a pillow, Blanche’s casket in another car. Roxie’s baptized at her mother’s funeral and then fostered by her childless aunt Emma. Emma’s husband is a photographer and takes many portraits of them. Roxie is their pride and joy until Emma unexpectedly has a daughter of her own. Roxie’s father Walter dies when she’s 12.
Growing up an orphan stepchild, Roxie turns out spunky. During WWI, she’s one of the first women ever to join the Navy, as a reserve Yeomanette. On duty in Philadelphia, she meets Don, the son of Lewis Gettig, who owns a lucrative meat packing business in Bellefonte. (His wife’s name is Alice!) Good-looking and spoiled, Don had been expelled from the local private Academy for running the principal’s long-johns up the flagpole, among other exploits. They fall in love, marry, and perhaps too soon, become parents of Alice Jane, then Richard. After the stock market crash of 1929, the Depression hits, the family business fails and Don goes to work as a guard in a mine, renting a farm out in the country with his wages. My city girl grandmother Roxie learns to grow all their food, buying only flour and sugar, making clothes for her 5 kids out of flour sacks and donated bolts of green gingham, proud they never have to go on “Relief.” There are laundry days, baking days, cleaning days and mending days. Her premonitory dreams and visions often startle the family, like the time during WWII when she awakes in the middle of the night calling her son Richard’s name. They later find out Dick’s army unit was on a train stopped on a railroad siding nearby, secretly en route from the European Theater of Operations to the Pacific. Sometime along in here, my grandparents buy a house in the town of Pancake, near Washington, PA, and open an electrical appliance shop, attending Masonic Lodge and Eastern Star functions. Every spring their daughters wear long white dresses to wind ribbons around the May Pole at Trinity High School. My mom jitterbugs expertly to Big Band tunes and knows every Ella Fitzgerald song by heart. My grandmother sews her stylish dresses for every dance. After Pearl Harbor, they design a red and white carnation “lei” that’s copied by all the other girls. Mom’s dad enrolls her in college, but she gets homesick and doesn’t want to stay. Instead, she dances with a brilliant future doctor at his college, marries him in her late teens, and leaves home.
Zoom in to the D.C suburbs, mid-twentieth century. My future mom and dad are working on different floors of a ziggurat called the Bethesda Naval Hospital, now the Walter Reed Medical Center. Mom is separating from Dr. Andy and has a little girl, my future sister Lynn. Working for the Red Cross, in a big office, Mom transcribes mental patient case histories from a psychiatrist’s dictaphone, and cracks everyone up with the bizarre and gory parts she reads aloud. Dad is training as a medic, bound for Korea. In their portraits, they look like Hollywood movie stars. One day at the hospital swimming pool, their eyes meet. Later she tells me, “He was the handsomest guy I ever saw.” They fall in love, find themselves with an unplanned baby on the way, arrange a quick wedding and spend a few very happy months before my dad ships out. He leaves as a sweet, soft spoken guy. When he comes back the next year, Mom said, “He was a completely different person.”
During Dad’s hospital treatments for PTSD, Mom keeps the family together. As a military wife, she had tried a lot of different things, from driving a taxi to selling real estate. When I’m a toddler, she gets hired as cashier and bookkeeper at a car dealership called Suburban Cadillac.
At the wheel of her convertible Chevy Impala, Mom drops me off and picks me up at my school in Bethesda on her way to and from work at the Cadillac dealership. I love our car commutes, often with the top down. In her beautiful alto voice, she sings along with the radio Hit Parade, harmonizing with Perry Como, Patti Paige and Frank Sinatra. She’s a knock out in bright print dresses, high heels, cats-eye sunglasses, and red lipstick, her shiny honey-colored hair up in a chignon or bouncy ponytail.
When Mom and her friends stand side by side, they tower over me like technicolor goddesses. You wouldn’t think so now, but in the macho world of the 50’s, women have a powerful presence, literally occupying more vital space than men with their bright calf-length full skirts, belted waists, pointy bosoms, red lips, costume jewelry, and big hairdo’s.
She meets Jimmie, the love of her life, at Suburban Cadillac, where he’s a mechanic in the repair shop. He seems like a giant. He had left high school to join the Navy and trained as a submariner at the very end of WWII. After the service he worked in a garage for a while and later got promoted to service advisor at a car dealership. Mom’s brother Don, an executive at a Gas company in Pennsylvania, gets him an interview at JC Penny, where he rises to tri-state energy manager. Jimmie can build and fix anything. He tells jokes. He’s generous with his hard-earned cash and the first man who ever takes us out to nice restaurants. He’s into cool vehicles so we have a black Triumph convertible and a white Plymouth Barracuda parked in our driveway, lined up with an outboard motor boat for summer weekends on the Chesapeake. I’m really blown away when he takes Mom to a jazz club downtown to see Charlie Byrd, whoever that is. Another time he takes her for dinner at the trendy Trader Vic’s Kon Tiki-themed dining room in the DC Hilton and I brag about it to the kids at school.
Mom is super smart. She audited classes with her first husband, Andy, during his medical studies and eventually finds her niche as a medical secretary and physician’s assistant.
My parents work 40+ hour weeks with overtime, taking care of kids, nieces, nephews, school friends, grandparents, animals, a house and a vegetable garden. When I start going on Peace marches in the early 70’s, I bug Mom for not doing anything to change the world. She takes a deep breath and says she thinks the best thing she can do is to show kindness to the women who come into the obstetrician’s office or call asking for advice about their health problems, test results, bills and appointments, by listening to them, making sure their kids are okay in the waiting room, explaining complicated medical terminology, and comforting them when they get a bad diagnosis or lose a pregnancy. That shuts me up. As time goes on, I respect and love her more and more for this and it inspires me.
She had many talents, but never thought of herself as an artist, a writer or a singer, a decorator, a seamstress or a chef. All that energy and presence was channeled into family and friendships…
She taught us about: holidays, flowers, animals, color, sewing, juggling work with family and friendships, keeping house, cooking, resilience, rebuilding a life after tragedy, outliving illness, travel, snorkeling, playing the slots, singing, health and medicine, absurd humor and cut-throat scrabble. Who would we be if we hadn’t had this person in our lives? She made us feel loved.
She was really a good sport about assisted living. She regained her sense of style, wore lipstick, had her hair done whenever she could, enjoyed outings and family get togethers, but it was hard. Thank you everyone who visited her over the past 7 years. Thank you everyone who called, sent cards and flowers. You all made that easier for her and for Lynn and Ned, who took care for her.
One of the poems read by our officiant, Rev. Thérèse Bimka:
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Death ends a life, not a relationship.
Lost love is still love.
It takes a different form, that’s all.
You can’t see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around a dance floor.
But when those senses weaken, another heightens.
Memory. Memory becomes your partner.
You nurture it. You hold it. You dance with it.
- Mitchell Albom
To be continued…
Originally published at http://thankyouparis.wordpress.com on May 5, 2021.