My Mother

For some reason, the picture I have in my mind of my Mother is the one taken when my Father was about forty. They both had photographic portraits taken and I still have the one of the three of us, Larry, Dorothy in the middle, and David on the green couch in the living room. Mother’s picture had her hair pulled back into a bun. She had beautiful eyes and dark brown hair and full, pretty lips. I thought she looked like a movie star.

Younger, she wore her hair in a bob, but it never cooperated fully, becoming unruly upward curls. That was when I was little.

My memories of Mother were that she was a typical 50’s Mother. She braided my hair before I went off to walk to grade school. We came home for lunch and had toasted cheese sandwiches and tomato soup, or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, always at the kitchen table. We hardly ever ate in the formal dining room. She fixed city chicken, hot dogs, spaghetti, chili, fried chicken, and lots of different casseroles for dinner which was always at 6:00pm. Daddy was always home then for dinner. We were usually outside after school or in our room doing homework. No TV then. We often played board games like Monopoly or card games, or were read to at night, but bedtime was early. I remember feeling guilty turning my radio on low and listening to George Burns and Gracie Allen or Hopalong Cassidy later than lights out.

From age about 5 to 13, we had a live in maid, Clarabell. She stayed in the attic room. There was a back stairs. She did the laundry and babysat and cleaned and maybe fixed meals, I don’t remember. Mother was always volunteering. She was a member of the Junior League, on the Board of the Sumner Home, and the Women’s Auxiliary of the hospital where Daddy had privileges. She took us to the Doctor, mostly for me for allergy shots. If we were bad, she told us that we would get spanked when Daddy got home. He used the back of a brush on our bare bottoms. Mother would tell us that we were stupid, we should be ashamed of ourselves, and to shut up a lot. That was her form of discipline. Maybe she got that herself at home, she never said. The child rearing guide at the time was Dr. Spock.

She took us each week to First Congregational Church, where our Minister of decades was Dr. Pelletier. When I was in high school, I once got mad at Mother for making me go to church one day, I forget why I didn’t want to go, but I called her a hypocrite. We almost came to blows.

After Father died, she worked at the hospital and we were on our own after school. Then she married Maurice Patry, and she seemed happy again. We moved into a nice neighborhood and she started volunteering again.


When I dated David, my eventual husband, she was very critical of us living together. That Christmas I asked for a slip. She gave me a very plain, white slip. David’s Mother gave me a beige two piece slip with pretty flowers embroidered on it. We lived far apart and she didn’t like to call long distance or talk long on the phone, so I would get occasional letters, and replied. Maurice at that time had undergone a second bypass surgery and was not doing very well. He died at home 5 days before our wedding. They had plans to come, but she told me weeks before that it didn’t look like he would make it and she would try to come. Well anyway, she did come, with a bottle of booze, and all the California relatives came to the wedding, where they saw Mother to console her. She later said to me that the only reason everyone came to my wedding was to see her. Grandma Evelyn was at the wedding. So was Uncle Kim, her brother and Aunt Patty, Aunt Elaine, her sister and her husband Craig Woolman. Grandpa KD had already died, I think.
Later, our Grandmother Evelyn broke her hip and went into a nursing home. Mother visited her every day until she died, about a year or so later.
David and I went to Alaska and Mother visited us almost every year. She planned some sort of excursion, cruise, or tour before she saw us. She was still very active in the Junior League Sustainers, the Sumner home, and the hospital Women’s Auxiliary. Her best friend was Lucille Palmer. I was surprised that after a few years she decided to leave Akron, OH where she was born and had all her friends, and moved into the retirement community at Village on the Green in Longwood, FL. In fact, she was one of the first occupants, having bought into it before the ground was broken. She decided to end her days near her son David, the doctor, in Florida.

She went there at a relatively young age, around 62. She lived there, was very active in all the activities and ran lots of things, until her death in 2003 at the age of 84.

She came to Alaska after the birth of both of my children. She stayed a couple weeks after Aaron was born, and was there before Andy was born, and after, to take care of Aaron. She moved to Fairbanks with us and helped with that. I remember her bringing Aaron to the hospital after Andy was born to see the new baby.

A year or so after we moved to Alaska, we were drawn to the rustic life, and wanted a cabin in the woods. We were both working with good jobs, but we couldn’t afford the whole thing. We found a property on the Kenai Peninsula that was both on the water, and had a view of the mountains! Mother pitched in $35,000 to help us put up a cabin. We did all the work inside, because we just bought a shell. She had loaned David about the same amount to start his Oncology practice, and Larry the same amount also. She always tried to deal with the three of us equally.

To help pay for the cabin, we at one point ran a bed and breakfast there during the week. We shared all the profits as well as the expenses evenly with Mother. After about 15 years, she deeded her half of the cabin to us. She spent time there for many summers and sometimes even at Christmas. We promised her a white Christmas one year, and it didn’t snow until the day after Christmas! She was nice to have with us, but she was always anxious to get home and back to her activities at Village on the Green.

The last few years, her sister Elaine joined her there and they were a team. Mother organized a group composed of women who had been in Sororities. She called it the Panhellenic group. She ran the Friday bridge game. A group of women friends won the grand prize every year at the Halloween costume party. They had one white sheet, and the rules for their group were that you had a theme using the white sheet. They came up with something different each year! They were angels, Romans, unicorns, brides, etc.
Mother was never jovial, affectionate, smiley. But she always pitched in to help, organize, plan, and was the instigator of many activities.

In 2003, she said she would come visit us in the summer. For some reason, I asked her to join us in Palm Springs where we had a Timeshare. She could see her brother Kim who spent the winters in his home on the Thunderbird golf club subdivision, and see both Aaron and Andy who were now off to college and not always around. We had a two bedroom unit, so she could have her own bedroom. At first she said no, but later she called and said she bought a ticket and would come to Palm Springs. When the day came, her flight was cancelled, but she didn’t give up and came the next day. She said that on the plane the flight attendant had to waken her. She was out of it and didn’t know it. She didn’t know what had happened. The whole time she was in Palm Springs, she said she didn’t feel stable. She wouldn’t walk far, or go very many places with us. She just wanted to sit most of the time. But she got to visit with all of us and her brother, and went to my birthday dinner. That was on March 19th. Shock and Awe, the beginning of Pres. Bush’s war on Iraq, started that week, and was the only thing on the television.

I got a call from my brother David on April 6th, that Mother had not woken up the night before. She had gone to bed after attending the Symphony, changed the clocks to daylight savings time, and didn’t show up for Sunday brunch. No one checked on her until that afternoon when they found her in a coma in bed. I got the first plane to Florida, but she was gone by the time I arrived. She had had a massive aneurism in her brain stem and was never going to wake up. My David arrived later and so did Larry and we spent the week dividing up her possessions which she had carefully outlined in a letter. Then we sent letters to everyone on her Christmas list telling them that she had passed, called Lucille Palmer, which was very difficult for me, and then I called my step-brother Lee Patry. He drove 5 hours to the funeral. Little did I know that he was there because he thought he was due half of her estate?
Village on the Green put on a very nice memorial service which Mother had planned herself. Many people attended. I spoke about how she was always there for me.
There was a memorial fund started which had quite a lot of money. Aunt Elaine took charge of what to do with the money. Eventually they decided to put in a putting green and dedicate it to Mother. One of the residents thought it should be a very nice putting green and donated about $10,000 which added up to enough to make a three hole putting green with the right kind of grass, holes, flags, etc. as well as a nice plaque commemorating Mother.
I remember being very very sad after my Mother’s death. I had a hard time for several months. I still think of her a lot and wish she were around to talk to. I cried and cried after the service in Aunt Elaine’s car when she was taking me to the airport.
I went through her closet and took the nicest dresses and things for myself. It seems that, even though she was three inches taller than me, somehow we ended up the exact same size, even her shoes. She gave me her diamond from Maurice which she wore around her neck, and the Chinese chest from her parents estate that she inherited from them. She lived on her inheritance from her parents and a trust set up for her by Maurice after he sold the company. She got half and his son Lee got half, which was in a trust managed by Old Phoenix bank. David said she lived on $40,000 per year. She would buy a new car every couple three years and paid cash and bargained like crazy. I eventually inherited almost $500,000 from her estate.

I tried to talk to her in her later years about her early life and life with my Father and things, but she wouldn’t say much. I gave her a book to fill out with questions to answer that would help me understand her more, but she left it blank. She never seemed to be happy, but was always willing to do stuff and helped out a lot and was well respected at the retirement home where she lived her last years. She went to church regularly and was even in the bell choir for awhile. She played golf when she first arrived in Florida, but gave it up. She also gave up smoking at age 60 and was very proud of it. She rewarded herself every year on the anniversary of her quitting. She smoked for almost 40 years, however, and I’m pretty sure it was the reason for the deep wrinkles on her face and her “warts” in her throat. She called them warts but it could have been cancer, I don’t know.

Grandma Sweetheart’s niece, the one that inherited all of my Father’s parents’ money, Betty, told Larry after Louise’s death, that my Father had jilted her for my Mother! Mother said that was a lie and she knew nothing about it.
I have Mother’s photo albums, diaries (of weather and daily mundane things) and her cookbooks and travel diaries. She kept track of mundane things, nothing of her thoughts or feelings.

About a year before her death she had a cold and got up to get something in the kitchen in the middle of the night and fell down and went out cold. She had trouble ever since then but wouldn’t talk about it really. Her handwriting was shakier is all I noticed. She had osteoporosis although she denied it, but she broke both her wrists, and a bone in her foot, and some other bones I think while she was in Florida. Other than that, she got colds a lot, mostly after traveling.
4/3/09