Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family

chapter thirty-two

I started 1985 with growing confidence in the direction of my career. Many young faculty are still trying to find a publisher for their initial book at the time of the third-year review. I was ahead of the game, having already published my first book and being well on the way to designing a second research project. I was granted a sabbatical and applied for and received a prestigious National Fellowship from the Hoover Institution. I was particularly pleased that I could take my sabbatical just a few paces across campus and did not have to move. Feeling quite comfortable, professionally and even—thanks to a couple of raises—financially, I bought a car with my own money: a little rocket ship of a Buick that I named Misha, the Russian nickname for the Soviet Union’s leader at the time, Mikhail Gorbachev. I thought I deserved a little break, and for the first time in three years, I decided to go home for Easter.

A day or so into my visit, I was watching television in the den when my mother came in with obvious bruises on her arm and leg.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I fell down the basement stairs on the way to do the laundry,” she answered. “I’m getting clumsy in my old age. This is the second time this month!”

I didn’t think much about it, assuming that she had just been careless. She also had a penchant for wearing high heels even when doing chores around the house. Maybe that was the explanation. I returned to Palo Alto after a lovely Easter and finished the quarter, planning to visit again sometime in the summer.

A few days before the Fourth of July, though, my father called. His usually strong voice was shaking. “I think I need to take your mother to the doctor,” he said. “She keeps falling, and she seems really forgetful. The other day she asked our neighbor about a friend of ours from Alabama who’s been dead for ten years.”

July 5 was one of the darkest days of my life. Daddy called to say that Dr. Hamilton had taken an X-ray and there was a large mass on Mother’s brain. The doctors were sure that it was inoperable and cancerous. Ever since Mother’s breast cancer diagnosis, I’d feared this moment. Mother had done remarkably well for a long time. True, there had been a scare the year before when she’d required surgery to remove a small tumor on her lung. But she’d undergone follow-up chemotherapy during the summer of 1984 and had tolerated it well. She’d returned to work in the fall, and though I worried that the cancer, having returned once, might do so again, I’d buried that thought deep in my subconscious. But now I was faced with the worst possible news.

Mother got on the phone. “I’ve got this little thing in my head,” she said. “It’s not in such a bad place.”

“Yes, Mother, but I want to come home for a little while,” I said.

“Okay, but don’t hurry,” she replied.

When I got to Denver my father picked me up at the airport. We went directly to the hospital, where Mother was undergoing more tests. The room was pretty dimly lit, but Mother was remarkably upbeat. We talked for a while, and I didn’t notice any of the mental deterioration of which my father had spoken. But the conversation with Dr. Hamilton couldn’t have been clearer. When I asked how long she had, he said, “I’ve seen some people make it a year. But it won’t be longer than that. I’m so sorry.”

The doctors prescribed a treatment regimen for her. They were certain that surgery wasn’t an option but believed tumor-shrinking radiation and medication could prolong her life. Every day I’d accompany Mother to the hospital, where she would undergo treatment. The effects were pretty devastating. Her once-beautiful hair began to fall out. She’d also lost some of her hair during the previous treatments in 1984, and we had actually had a little fun finding a wig that she loved wearing. But this was different. This time she was left with almost no hair. I was absolutely crushed when I saw her sitting on the bed holding a large clump of her hair in her hand and crying.

The four weeks in Denver were the hardest of my life. Mother’s mental capacity was clearly diminished. One day I saw her sitting at the piano. She couldn’t remember how to play. Yet when I sat down next to her on the bench and began to move her hands toward certain keys, she started to play—a few notes at first, and then miraculously a song, and then another and another. “I can play,” she proclaimed. When she started to play “The Lord Knows How Much You Can Bear,” I said to myself, Mommy, I hope so, and left the room in tears.

Daddy and I didn’t really talk very much about what was happening. Life revolved around trying to make Mother comfortable. We went about the daily routine, even going out to brunch for her sixty-first birthday on July 21. As Daddy tried to raise his glass and say “Many happy returns,” he finally broke down. Mother looked confused, not sad. It suggested to me that she didn’t fully comprehend that she was dying.

I returned to Palo Alto at the end of July when my mother’s sisters, Gee and Mattie, came out to be with her. I planned to teach my scheduled two-week alumni summer school session, go to a conference at Cornell, and then return to Denver in the middle of August.

Though I knew that she was gravely ill, I realize now that I just didn’t let myself believe that I was losing my mother. Somehow I kept expecting a miracle, or perhaps I was just putting the awful truth out of my mind. But one day I was sitting at my desk at Galvez House when Herb Abrams stopped by. He was a world-renowned radiologist who was working at the center studying the potential effects of nuclear war. Herb had heard about Mother and wanted to offer his support. I think he was taken aback by my optimistic assessment of my mother’s chances. “They say it’s not the worst kind of brain tumor,” I told him.

“Well, you make sure to spend time at home with her now. Don’t wait,” he replied.

The last session of the summer course I taught at Stanford was on Saturday, August 18. I had planned to leave the next day and stop in Denver overnight on my way to Cornell, just to check on Mother. After the two-day conference in Ithaca, where I would give a paper, I intended to return to Denver and stay for several weeks. There would be no pressure to return to Stanford early in the fall since I was beginning the Hoover sabbatical. And I was pleased that the summer teaching and the conference paper were yielding additional income. I intended to use the money to help my parents, since my mother would no longer be able to teach.

Mother had not been doing very well that weekend. I had talked to her several times that Saturday and she seemed weak, unable to finish a full sentence without running out of breath.

“Why don’t you take her to the hospital?” I asked my father.

“She doesn’t want to go,” he said.

I called Saturday night before going to bed. “She’s a bit better,” Daddy said.

Hours later the phone rang, jerking me out of a very deep sleep. “Ann isn’t breathing,” Daddy said.

“What?” I asked, still not fully awake.

“I’ve called the ambulance because your mother isn’t breathing,” he said, clearly frightened but relatively calm.

“Call me when you get to the hospital,” I said. I just lay in the dark and prayed. Over and over, I asked God not to take my mother.

Daddy called back less than an hour later. “She’s gone,” he said.

“I’ll be there first thing in the morning,” I told him.

“No need to hurry. She belongs to the ages now,” he replied.

After I hung up the phone it occurred to me that Daddy must have been alone at the hospital. I called a friend of my mother’s, who agreed to meet my father at the hospital. I didn’t want to be alone either, so I called my dearest friend, Chip Blacker. When he answered the phone, I simply said, “Mother’s dead, Chip. Can you come over?” He did so, sleeping on the sofa while I tried to go back to sleep for a few hours. I already had reservations to Denver the next morning.

Chip drove me to the airport, and I boarded the United Airlines plane for what seemed like the longest flight of my life. Going to my seat, I ran into a former student.

“Hi, are you going home to Denver for a visit?” she asked, knowing nothing of my mother’s death.

“My mother died last night,” I said. Then, to reinforce the point more for myself than for her, I said, “My mother’s gone.”

A friend picked me up at the airport and drove me to my parents’ house. My father greeted me at the door and we hugged each other, tears flowing gently. His first words surprised me. “She was such a fighter. She fought to stay with us. She fought so hard,” he said. He was right. Ever since her first bout with cancer Mother had refused to let her own circumstances intrude on our family’s life. Because she’d been so tough and unyielding to her disease, sometimes even making light of it, we had been able to get on with our lives.

Daddy continued pouring out his thoughts, saying that he already missed her but that he had thanked God for answering his prayer.

“What prayer?” I said, somewhat puzzled.

“The one that asked him not to leave me alone with a fifteen-year-old girl,” he replied.

I was hurting then more than I ever had, but I too felt just a touch of gratitude that my mother had died when I was thirty, not fifteen. She’d seen me grow into a successful adult. I was so grateful that she’d held my first book, attended the teaching awards ceremony, and shared with my father a glimpse of how well I would do at Stanford.

Still, I was so incredibly sad. I went into my parents’ bedroom and sat on the side of the bed. There I looked around a room filled with my mother’s belongings: her jewelry box, family photos, and the heavy mahogany furniture that had been her pride and joy since I was a child. And then something happened. I felt my mother’s spirit release, breaking its bonds with earth. There was the unmistakable sensation of someone or something leaving the room. I had not made it home before she died. Had she in some sense waited? This was a mystical moment that I have never been able to adequately describe. Yet I suddenly felt at peace. The Apostle Paul called it “the peace that passeth all understanding.” I got down on my knees and prayed that God would take care of Mother’s eternal soul.

Daddy and I planned a very small funeral, not making a newspaper announcement of her death until the day after the service. My mother did not have many close friends outside of her family, and a public funeral just seemed wrong. About fifty friends and family—her brothers and sisters and my cousins—gathered at Montview Boulevard Presbyterian Church and then at the cemetery. We laid her to rest elegantly dressed in a gray and black dress and very high black heels. Even after all that she had been through, she still looked very beautiful. It wasn’t too hard to picture the long-ago image of the pretty young teacher. The thought crossed my mind briefly that I should have dressed her in red.