Roses for the Mothers
Commentary by JoEllen Collins
We all know wonderful fathers. But those mothers!
Nature created them with perpetually open arms, ready to accept their
children with all of their "faults," no matter what.
In his remarkable book My Own Country, which
chronicles the arrival of the AIDS epidemic to the small town of Johnson,
Tenn., Dr. Adam Verghese discovers the reason his patients return to the
home they left for the big cities where they contracted the disease.
Verghese writes of the need to come home in spite of the eventual
requirement for many of these patients to reveal their homosexuality. They
had to confront parents from conservative religious denominations with the
news that their sons (most of these early victims were men) had strayed
from the path their biblical training had instilled. Overriding that
obligatory and dreaded confession, however, was the realization that
family meant all, that one should die in the arms of family.
At the risk of writing about an uncomfortable topic, I
need to express my thoughts this week about the meaning of family and the
pains that ensue when it is riven by death or separation. Four of my close
lifelong friends have seen their mothers die within the last few months.
Certainly these mothers were aged; when my contemporaries experience this
loss, it is almost always of progenitors who have lived to a remarkably
ripe old age for their generation.
I believe the four mothers averaged 88 years of age. And,
we know that life is finite, that all things end eventually. One might
rightfully assume that the loss of these parents is not the same in degree
as those of children or siblings, as nature is taking its inevitable
course. I cannot imagine the agony that would come with the death of one's
child.
Nonetheless, I think we need to honor our emotions and
grief at the losses we incur, even though they might be in the correct
order of life's passages. I caught myself the other day commenting on
Ronald Reagan's Alzheimer's disease with a rather flip comment about how,
at least, he had just turned 90, so it might not be that tragic. That was
most insensitive of me, and I apologize. I would wish that affliction on
no one, and while one would find it harder to accept that same illness in,
say, a 60-year old, it is nonetheless horrific.
My temporary callousness reflects, I fear, a prevailing
attitude that dismisses the complaints of the aged. In an era promising
increased longevity, I believe we need to examine this attitude.
I don't think it is ever easy to see one you love suffer,
whatever age he or she may be, for one thing. And I think we deny a
powerful rite of passage when we dismiss sadness over the parting of
someone very old. Certainly we are reminded of our own mortality when our
parents die, but more than that there is the true loss of the only people
who may love us unconditionally. My mother died when I was only 29. With
her passage at the age of 59, I lost my most staunch advocate and
defender. When my father died eight years later I was aware that I was the
eldest member of my family, that I had stepped into their places in every
sense. Now I was to be the haven in my family, the responsible source of
constant love.
The loss of a mother is unspeakable. Even
less-than-perfect mothers are bound to us in ways science may never
comprehend. A young woman I know had a mother who committed a gruesome
crime, one I can't speak of without great pain. The fact that the mother
was hateful to her children is an anomaly that is almost incomprehensible.
The conflict for this young woman is that she still loves her certainly
flawed and even monstrous mother, and has to deal every day with the
conflicting emotions this reality presents.
The mothers in Vergese's book were often the only ones to
accept their ill sons. To their credit, many fathers did come to a belated
tolerance of their sons, even in the light of the alternate lifestyles and
disappointed expectations they represented. We all know wonderful fathers.
But those mothers! Nature created them with perpetually open arms, ready
to accept their children with all of their "faults," no matter
what.
The women who have just passed from my friends' lives, for
the most part, stayed in marriages that may not have "fulfilled"
them in ways my generation has sought, saw husbands off to devastating
wars, groped with financial realities and bewildering changes in mores
that would have stumped their mothers, and generally did all these things
without complaint or public soul-searching. All these women raised
daughters of remarkable strength and style.
In my extensive reading of poetry, I have encountered very
few poems expressing the loss of mothers. Perhaps this is because one
risks excessive sentimentality in voicing these emotions. In a rare poetic
tribute, e.e. cummings wrote of the garden of black-red-roses he pictured
his mother presiding over in heaven. I wish I'd written his words for my
own mother, a grower of roses.
So, here's to Viola Minasian, Lou Sternberg, Betty Condit
and Anne Stilwell. Way before Mothers' Day, our culture's obligatory,
maudlin, and prettified glut of devotion, I want to honor you for the love
you gave and the generation you represented. I give you vivid, black-red
roses, too. We will miss you.
