Wednesday, July 15, 2026
1973 My mother died at age 51
Today. Jimmy Aquavia died around 5 a.m. at age 92
In bed at 9:10, up at 6:10, but on the LZB from 3 to 4:20, b/c of flank pain.
Morning meds at 9 a.m., and Eliquis at 6:50 a.m. and 7 p.m.
My mother at Kitty's wedding, Oct. 8, 1966
My Mom. On this date and on her April 15th birthdate, I honor her and subordinate all entries to remembrances of her, her heroic strength and resilience, her loving heart, and the care she bestowed on all around her, especially me and my sister. I devoted a long section of my memoir to her. Here are the opening and closing portions (addressed to my children):
My mother was a hero and a saint. You may have heard me say that we are surrounded by saints and miracles, that the world is full of them. I believe that, and I should add heroes to that short list. It was my mother who first introduced me to real-world saintliness and heroism. . . . .
My mother’s early life reads like a melodrama. Born to poor immigrant parents, she was motherless by age 5, left the only female in her family. She was 7 years old when the market crashed in 1929 and a child and adolescent throughout the Great Depression. Her father may have been an alcoholic during her childhood (as he was in his later life), and there were times (I know this from her) when the Salvation Army left baskets of food at the Healy doorstep. She left high school before graduation to get a job, either to support herself or to help with the family's expenses, or, more likely, both. (It’s uncertain whether she lived with a couple of aunts for a time before she married. My Aunt Monica says yes, my father thinks not.) She became a bride at 18, a mother at 19, a victim of a brutal sexual assault at 25. Her husband was drafted before she turned 22, leaving her with a 2½ year old son and a daughter on the way. For support, she had $22 each month from my father’s $50 private’s pay and an $80 military dependents’ allotment from the government. Her father was 64 years old and probably an out-of-control drinker by the time her husband was drafted and all three of her brothers were away in the services. Her husband fought in the worst slaughterhouse battle in the Pacific theater, with Marine casualties so horrific that William Randolph Hearst wrote an editorial calling for a change of top command in the Pacific theater of operations, and TIME magazine wrote about the furor over the editorial. When the war ended, and her husband came home, he was one of the thousands of hidden casualties with no missing limbs but with a hole inside him where his heart and soul had been and with a mind full of horrors that, like the Japanese defenders on Iwo Jima, crept out of hidden recesses to terrorize him.
My mother suffered greatly in her too-short life. She suffered from the absence of a mother, she suffered with an alcoholic father and alcoholic brothers, and, after the war, she suffered with an alcoholic husband with a terrible case of long-term PTSD. She suffered from James Hartmann’s vicious attack on her in her own home. These were in addition to the “ordinary” sufferings that life brings to each of us.
I would create an altogether inaccurate picture of your grandmother, however, if I were to paint her as some sort of long-suffering victim and martyr. Of all of us in the family, it was she who was the strongest and the most life-loving, the least self-pitying and least blaming, the most aware of life as a blessing and a gift, the most religious and Catholic, and the most grateful for all that she had, especially her children. She was the most loving and the most loyal, even to those who did not return the love or loyalty. She was no whiner or sniveler. She sang, and she danced. She laughed. She liked people, and people liked her. She was not naïve or Pollyannaish, but rather optimistic and hopeful. She saw goodness and promise and dignity in people who were down and out after the Depression and the war, (including her husband, her father, and her oldest brother.)
Ironically, I believe your grandmother was the happiest person in our family. It is clear to me as I look backwards that my paternal grandparents and Grandpa Dennis were unhappy people. My poor Aunt Monica was terribly burdened and not a happy person. Uncles Jim and Bud were heavy drinkers, as was Uncle Bim until Aunt Marie straightened him out. Kitty and I were also unhappy because of what we lived with. My mother hated my father’s drinking and withdrawal (and wasn’t averse to letting him know about it), but she was grateful for what she had. She had ‘the attitude of gratitude,’ a sure mark of a basically happy person. She was most grateful for her children, and she let us know how much she loved us and how much we meant to her. She rejoiced in us.
Her not wallowing in self-pity, her not worrying about what she didn’t have, her seeing positives in what were to most observers totally bleak situations are as much proof as I need of her saintliness. She had Faith, Hope, and Charity, not just as the so-called theological virtues, but as practical day-to-day living virtues. Paul wrote to the Hebrews that “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” My mother had a firm belief in the “things not seen.” She, like T. S. Eliot in Ash Wednesday, knew that
. . . . time is always time
And place is always and only a place.
And what is actual is actual only for one time.
And only for one place
She never lost sight of the fact that there is more to life than the troubles of the moment.
She had Hope in abundance; witness her sticking with my father, witness her support for her children’s success in school and other endeavors, witness her own stick-to-it-iveness in moving up from “the Greeks” to The Old Barn, from the factory floor to the Quality Control Lab.
Her Charity or loving kindness towards others was abundant, towards my father during the terrible years, towards her father, towards her brother James, towards her in-laws, towards her children, and towards herself. Unlike so many of the other adults around her, she never sank into self-destructive behavior (except for the then-commonplace habit of smoking cigarettes and a fondness for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups that were to play a role in her death)
I close this terribly inadequate portrait of my mother by repeating my central point, that she was my first, best, and most lasting model of a saint and a hero in a world that I eventually came to see as full of saints and heroes and miracles. Through strength of will and strength of character, she was a happy person despite all of the obstacles, all of the excuses for unhappiness. If Kitty and I had not had her model for happiness in adversity, had we only had our father, our grandparents, my uncles, and my aunt as models, I don’t know that we would have known any happiness in our lives or that we could have transmitted any sense of happiness to our own children. It took effort, it took strength, it took heroism for my mother not to feign happiness, but to be happy despite everything.
She was also a circle-breaker. Her father, her brothers, her husband, and her in-laws were all unhappy for one reason or another. It is easy enough to say that they ‘had every right to be unhappy’ and to wallow in the ‘slough of despond.’ But no one had any greater ‘right to be unhappy’ than my mother. If she had chosen to live a life of self-pity, however, she would have transmitted an attitude of self-pity to her children, her husband, and to all around her. Attitudes are contagious. Your grandmother’s attitude was one of courage, of continued engagement with life, of not giving in to despondency. She transmitted that attitude to Kitty and to me, and although we have faltered along life’s road, it is her attitude that still sustains us. It is her attitude that we have tried to transmit to you. I hope you can, from this wholly inadequate word portrait, garner some idea of why your grandmother is, for your father and for your Aunt Kitty, our patron saint, our guardian angel, and our hero.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Jim Aquavia, June 28, 1934 - July 15, 2026
