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Starting
Point I
hope Mom has met her heroes in heaven
By MARJORIE KOWALSKI
COLE
My mother, Martha Gray Kowalski,
M.D., died in June, 1998, following a four-year struggle with Parkinsons
Disease.
Widowed in 1955 at the age of 39, with five children between the
ages of 10 and 2, Mom found her work cut out for her. It took awhile for her
sense of humor to snap back. But in later years -- when my own marriage was
ending, for instance, and she tried to encourage me to rescue it with humor
(Cant you laugh at him, Marjorie?), she made a clear
statement of lessons learned.
There is almost nothing in this world so sad, she
said, that there isnt some humor in it, somewhere. Once she
dreamed that my father walked out the door like Rhett Butler, and when she
said, What about all these children? he replied, Frankly, my
dear, I dont give a damn. It seems to me that a slap-in-the-face
dream of that sort is a sign of healing. Relief from the pain isnt found
in self-pity.
When I was young she worked 60 hours a week and patients called
her at all hours; but every summer we left town for a month to camp, hike,
canoe and soak up the wilderness. On vacation we functioned well. Each did what
he or she could and received what he or she needed. In my backpack I carried
clean socks and candy; my brother carried stove, tarps, frying pan, fuel
bottles. He changed the flat tires, my oldest sister planned menus, scrubbed
faces and hands, and read poetry at night. Mom drove the car, paid the bills
and took thousands of slides.
Back home, parental serenity was a rare commodity because she
wasnt home most of the time and at night she was tired. We raised
ourselves, fought, teased each other in ways that now horrify me and coped with
neglect.
When the load lightened as children went off to college, Mom
relaxed more, discovered a little more energy. Perhaps, too, she was recovering
from her loss. She was funny, opinionated, and while ladylike and reserved, she
was an independent thinker. She was a bit of an oddball. Thats the woman
I miss -- an older, calmer woman, the critical mass of her work accomplished,
ready at last to expose her personality to the world. Where in the name of God
did she go? I long to celebrate her life and to tell the world that its
missing.
I try to forget these four years of her increasing dependence, her
fear, denial and anguish. She knew what was coming when the symptoms began,
just like Christ in Gethsemane. In my grief, she doesnt have
Parkinsons.
The last year she lived in her own home, cared for by a live-in
nursing assistant. My sisters and I went to see her several times a week, in my
case usually after an agony of indecision and vacillating. I wept driving
there, dreading what Id find. Driving home I felt guilty at my relief
that another visit was over. Her cries of Make it stop! were
constant.
Her bitterness and stubbornness leading up to the final year of
confusion often seemed to me to be self-imposed. Having a new lease on life
myself, I thought a spiritual answer could be found for every misery. I tried
to reassure her. In a sense, I abandoned her even while I was holding her hand,
looking in her eyes, touching her hair that was still brown at 82.
Now I take a look at her picture, taken a few years ago when she
was made a lifetime member of the Alaska Medical Association. I see dark hair,
strong cheekbones, big modern glasses, an expression of dignity and emphasis.
Shes wearing a necklace of beads from Kenya, where she served in the
Peace Corps from 1982 to 1986 -- to repay a debt, she said. Is this the woman I
lost?
Not quite. If I let go of my pain and think instead of hers, if
love enters in, then I understand that death came as a friend. She was blessed
to leave five children and 10 grandchildren healthy and intact. To reap the
rewards of being her daughter, I must try, as she did, to love that well
which I must leave ere long.
Her death makes clear that my own days are numbered, but having
allowed death to enter into my most off-limits and frightened self -- a task I
was unable to accomplish with the death of my father -- Ive begun to
accept a mystery. To accept death is to accept an increased understanding of
life itself.
At times Im fully aware of her presence. I can see her mouth
twitch with amusement. I can hear her all-purpose expression of scorn:
Ptssh. I will never touch her warm bones again (she was little but
bones at the end) but I sense that her spirit is free. I wonder if she is
restored to my father, if shes met her heroes -- Beethoven, Eleanor
Roosevelt, FDR himself, St. Joseph, the great photographers. Was she on hand to
welcome the naturalist and writer Marjory Stoneman Douglas into heaven? I think
so.
Society pressed my mother for conventional behavior. The world did
not ask her to become a doctor, love the wilderness, grow more radical in her
politics as the years went by, practice the Golden Rule daily, or join the
Peace Corps for four years. But she followed her own code, found her own
balance. She trusts me to find mine, and I will.
Marjorie Kowalski Cole writes from Fairbanks, Alaska.
National Catholic Reporter, April 16,
1999
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