7/15/23

 July 15, 2023

Mary Norma Healy Clausen

4.15.22  - 7.15.73

In bed around 10:30, up at 6:06 after a bout with GERD mid-night had me on the recliner.  66℉, high of 85℉, sunny skies, Air Quality Alert due to Western Canada wildfires  The wind is currently WSW at 6 mph, 2-7/15. The phone says .25 in. of rain in the last 24 hours, but no sign of it outside.  The sun rose at 5:25 & will set at 8:29, 15+4.

I Remember Mama.  Today is the 50th anniversary of my mother's death.  This is a remembrance I posted on Facebook on what would have been her 100th birthday last year.

Mary Norma Healy was born 100 years ago today in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, at the south end of the Mesabi Iron Range.  1922 was the year that saw Hitler’s Brownshirts, the SA, becoming violent in the streets of Germany on their long march to power 10 years later.  It was the year that 30,000 of Mussolini’s Blackshirts marched on Rome and seized control of the Italian government.  Mary was born just a few months after Crown Prince Hirohito became Regent of Japan on his way to becoming Emperor of Japan in 1926 and just a few weeks before Frances Gumm, later to be better known as Judy Garland, was born in the same hospital as Mary.  Mary’s mother, Catherine O’Shea Healy, had two other children, Cornelius and Donald, and had had a third son, Daniel, who died at birth or in infancy, for Mary’s birth registry listed her as Catherine’s fourth child.  In 1928, when Mary was 6 years old, her mother died of pernicious anemia, an autoimmune deficiency causing non-absorption of vitamin B-12 needed for red blood cell production.  Her father never remarried and Mary grew up motherless.  Mary was 7 years old when the stock market crashed in 1929 and she lived most of her youth in the Great Depression.  She attended Catholic schools in Englewood on Chicago’s south side and on August 3, 1940, she married Charles Edward Clausen, a co-parishioner at St. Bernard’s Church.  She was 18 years old, several weeks shy of his 20th birthday.  In August of 1941, she gave birth to her son Charles and 3 years later, to his beloved sister, Catherine, named after Mary’s mother, and always called by her nickname Kitty.  In 1944, her husband was drafted into the Marine Corps and sent off to kill or be killed by Emperor Hirohito’s soldiers on a small island called Iwo Jima.  Her brothers were likewise conscripted and sent off to kill or be killed by the soldiers of Hitler and Mussolini.  Charles survived the battle, unlike 6,800 other Americans and more than 20,000 Japanese who died on the island, but he returned to his young wife emotionally shattered, damaged in ways that lasted throughout his life.  In September 1947, a 15-year-old neighbor of Mary and Charles, broke into their basement apartment while Charles was at work, threatened Mary, her 6-year-old son and her 3-year-old daughter with a knife, and slashed and sexually assaulted Mary.  The investigating detective described the crime as ‘sexual torture.’ Mary survived the crime against her and her children and, though she suffered her own PTSD, she never allowed herself to become embittered by the many hurts and injuries she experienced in her life.  Like her mother, she died young, at age 51.  Her husband and her daughter are gone now too, and her son is in his 80s.  He remembers her today on what would be her 100th birthday for the love and kindness she shared with a world that so often abused and neglected her, for the love and loyalty she gave to her family and friends, for the compassion she showed for all of ‘our fellow men,’ and for the strength and integrity and goodness with which she lived her too-short and too-hard life. Rest in peace, Mama.

. . . . . . 

I woke up this morning thinking of her and, not only still mourning the loss of her 50 years ago, but also feeling remorse, guilt, and shame at how I took her existence for granted and neglected her after I moved away from home at 18.  It is those feelings that I reexperience when I so often think of Yeats' lines "Things said or done long years ago / Or things I did not do or say / But thought that I might say or do / Weigh me down, and not a day / But something is recalled / My conscience or my vanity appalled."  There were reasons of course.   There are always reasons for our failings but none of the reasons excuses my 'things I did not do or say,' my sins of omission.   The surgeon who treated her told us that she was probably born with a weakness in the blood vessel in her brain and that it was just a question of time when it would leak.  Without her knowledge, or ours, she had been at risk for some time. Once the aneurism gave way, there would be no second chances to shower her with a portion of the love and attention she deserved.  My father, Kitty, and I - each of us was emotionally devastated by her death, each in different ways.   We survived her death but never got over it. It knocked my father for a loop. He fled to Florida, married his second wife, Grace, then divorced her, and then married her again.  Kitty and her mother were as close as mother and daughter could be and she was laid low by her death.  I was stunned and fell into some of the same emotional deadening that  I used as a defense mechanism as a child during long fraught periods in our basement apartment.  Kitty and I spoke of our Mom regularly in our daily. early morning conversations over several years.  Now they are both gone.

    Today I find myself thinking and thinking again of the 9 days my mother was in a coma in the hospital between the stroke on the 7th and her death on the 15th.  I made several trips between Milwaukee and Blue Island, trips that seemed to take forever, wondering whether she would survive and, if so, in what condition.  A vascular surgeon performed surgery on one carotid artery in an attempt to get more blood to her brain because the other carotid had been blocked.  It didn't work as hoped and she slipped away, kept alive by a heart-lung machine until we agreed that the machine could be disconnected.  I only recall her opening her eyes once during those 9 days.  We were asked about donating her organs, an issue my Dad couldn't deal with.  Kitty and I agreed to donate the organs, except for her eyes, which I couldn't get myself to agree to.  How hard it is to remember those days, even half a century later.

My beautiful sister, when her children were young, and Aunt Mary lived with them.

                                                   

My Dad and I at Snook Haven outside North Port, FL, after we recon

cited following a 13-year estrangement after my mother's death.

Milwaukee 2% sales tax.  I have to believe the sales tax that takes effect in January will really hurt some City of Milwaukee businesses and some low-income residents without access to easy transportation to nearby suburbs for shopping.  The County Board will most likely pass an additional county sales later this month.  All of this is due to the persistent, long-term, irresponsibility of city and county legislators approving pension benefits of employees without adequate funding to 'pay the piper' when those employees became entitled to their promised benefits. 

HarleyFest is with us again. the 120th Birthday of the Harley-Davidson company in Milwaukee, or something like that.  Harley riders from all over the United States, Canada, and the world descend on Milwaukee for festivities and camaraderie.  One of them just drove down County Line Road doing a little sightseeing.  I think I understand the enjoyment bikers get from riding their motorcycles.  I owned a little 50 cc bike in Vietnam though there was really nowhere to ride it.  Ownership was passed informally from one Marine to another as guys 'rotated out of country.'  I owned a 125 cc bike when I returned to Milwaukee to attend MULS.  I got rid of it when Anne became pregnant with Sarah.  I realized that riding the bike was more dangerous than driving a car and it seemed the responsible thing to do.  I have a harder time understanding the cultishness of Harley riders, the need to maximize noise, "the look," the style of dress, the club uniforms, the trips to Milwaukee and to Sturgis, S.D., and all that.  It seems pretty adolescent, an attempt to re-experience youthfulness.  Meanwhile, there are 'hogs' all over Milwaukeeland, announcing their presence with their characteristic deafening racket.  I saw them in the inner city when I drove down to Repairers of the Breach to drop off clothing, and up on Mequon Road in Ozaukee County on my way back.  Here, there, everywhere a Hog!

Still trying with Camille Claudel.