She'd Be 99 Today!
My mom, that is. It's taken me a while since her death, in 2005, to think of her without pain, but I'm finally getting there. During her last three years of life I visited her four or five times every week, so naturally enough, my last memories of her are of a person in steady decline.
At last it is hitting me that for someone who lived 94 1/2 years to be ill for only years 91 through 94 is no tragedy--more of a triumph, really. No, they were not good years. But what were three bad years when held up against 91 good ones? Not that I'm not sorry I shared those final years with her--it seems like the least I could do given how much I owe to her. It's thanks to her if I have any sense of humor, any intelligence, any facility with language, any physical strength, any enduring worth.
Did you know that before "The Addams Family" was a hit TV show it was a series of New Yorker cartoons by Charles Addams? Here's my mom sometime in the early 1950s, dressed as the cartoon Morticia for a costume party. I was still quite little, but I remember regarding her transformation with awe. She was her, yet she was also Morticia.
Thanks to my favorite nephew for scanning this and many, many other old family photos and making them available electronically. They've been the means these last few weeks of restoring to me a more complete picture (pun intended) of days, people, and events that will never come again.
Of course this post is running-related. How much running do you think I'd be doing if it weren't for my mom? (For that matter, how much of anything? Thanks, Ma.)
At last it is hitting me that for someone who lived 94 1/2 years to be ill for only years 91 through 94 is no tragedy--more of a triumph, really. No, they were not good years. But what were three bad years when held up against 91 good ones? Not that I'm not sorry I shared those final years with her--it seems like the least I could do given how much I owe to her. It's thanks to her if I have any sense of humor, any intelligence, any facility with language, any physical strength, any enduring worth.
Did you know that before "The Addams Family" was a hit TV show it was a series of New Yorker cartoons by Charles Addams? Here's my mom sometime in the early 1950s, dressed as the cartoon Morticia for a costume party. I was still quite little, but I remember regarding her transformation with awe. She was her, yet she was also Morticia.Thanks to my favorite nephew for scanning this and many, many other old family photos and making them available electronically. They've been the means these last few weeks of restoring to me a more complete picture (pun intended) of days, people, and events that will never come again.
Of course this post is running-related. How much running do you think I'd be doing if it weren't for my mom? (For that matter, how much of anything? Thanks, Ma.)
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