Tuesday, April 15, 2025
D+160/86
1922 Mary Norma Healy was born in Grand Rapids, MN
In bed at 10, awake and up at 5:45. 38°, wind chill 22°, high of 47°.
Prednisone, day 360; 3 mg., day 19/21; Kevzara, day 14/14; CGM, day 13/15; Trulicity, day 4/7. 2 mg. of prednisone at 6 a.m. and 1 mg. at p.m. Other meds at 6:50. Kevzara injection at 7:30.
My mother's birthday. This is the only anniversary of which I take note today, the only entry in today's journal, and an exception to my usual practice of no more than 2-4 pages. From my memoir, which as addressed to my children, who never knew her, I copy it here to have it available on the blog and in cyberspace, perhaps shooting off into endless space, as the thoughts of one sad member of our sad species:
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.
I haven’t written much about her until this letter [the memoir] for a number of reasons. First, revisiting memories of her is painful, for reasons which will become clearer later. Second, I left home within days of my 18th birthday to go to Milwaukee, be sworn into the Navy Reserve, and to attend Marquette. My college summers were spent on active duty with the Navy or Marines. I married immediately upon graduation and went off to serve 4 years of active duty in the Marines. Your mother and I returned to Milwaukee after I was discharged in 1967 and we did not visit my family frequently. My mother died 5 years after I was discharged so for the last thirteen years of her life and the first thirteen years of my adult life, we were living in different cities and I was not in frequent contact with her. As a consequence, my most vivid (though fading) memories of her are from my childhood and adolescence. I am remorseful that my relationship with my mother during those years was not nearly as close as Kitty’s. I have lived with this remorse in my heart for 35 years. It is one of the two great sorrows in my life. Third, it is impossible to get an understanding of my mother’s qualities without some knowledge of the tremendous challenges she encountered in her life, i.e., the subjects of the last several letters.
My mother’s early life reads like a melodrama. Born of 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 was almost certainly an alcoholic during her childhood 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 expenses of the family, 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 she was 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.)
Your grandmother was the biggest baseball fan in the house, listening to or watching White Sox games, cheering when they won and grousing when they lost. She knew that Nellie Fox played 2nd base with a chaw of tobacco the size of a golf ball in his cheek and that Chico Carrasquel and then Luis Aparicio were terrific shortstops and not to be confused with Sammy Esposito who played 3rd base. She loved to listen to the announcer introduce the line up, especially when he chanted in long drawn out tones “and in left field, Orestes “Minnie” Minoso!” She was excited when the Sox would play the Yankees and Billy Pierce would take on Whitey Ford in one of their many pitching duels. She knew Billy Pierce was a better pitcher but she had a soft spot in her heart for Dick Donovan, who, after all, was Irish. I don’t know whether she suggested to Uncle Jim that he take Kitty and me to Comiskey Park or whether he came up with the idea. I don’t know who paid our streetcar fares or admissions to the ballpark. It could have been either of them or they could have pooled their change. In any case, they made me into a true blue White Sox fan, rooting for the team and my favorite player, right fielder Jim Rivera who would stand near the dugout gate and sign kids’ baseballs or scorecards before the game began. I remember the excitement of getting off the Halsted Street streetcar at 35th Street and making our way on foot in the gathering crowd east to Shields Avenue and finding our way to the right field grandstand to be near Jim Rivera. What I don’t remember is my mother, the No. 1 Sox fan, ever going to a ballgame herself. She sent us and listened to the game on the radio or, later, watched it on television. What I also have no memory of is my father getting excited about the Sox or the Cubs or about either of Chicago’s two NFL teams in those days, the Cardinals and the Bears. Enthusiasm for life’s daily blessings came to us from Mom, never from Dad.
When I reached an age at which I was to attend my first dance, it was your grandmother who taught me to dance the two-step and the jitterbug while we listened to music on the radio, Elvis or Jimmy Rogers or the Four Lads. I would practice the steps with Kitty or with our downstairs neighbor and friend Kathy Semrau before the dance. There is a much larger sense, however, in which your grandmother taught me to dance, indeed to live. I was reminded of her when I saw a bumper sticker that read: “Those who dance appear mad to those who don’t hear the music.” Despite the lousy hand that was dealt to her as a girl and a young woman, Mary Healy heard the music. That was part of her saintliness. She refused to be a loser or a loner, a whiner or a sniveler, a victim or a mope. That was her heroism. She was as alive and spirited and as open to life as my poor father was the opposite, emotionally dead, dispirited, and trapped within his haunted self.
Had my mother died when I was 5, as her mother had, it is inconceivable that my incapacitated father could have raised Kitty and me. If, perish the thought, we had grown up with only him as a parental influence, I can’t imagine how we would have turned out. I have mentioned before that Kitty remarked years ago that we were “emotionally crippled from growing up with Dad,” even with my mother’s saving influences. Without our mother’s loving care, protection, encouragement, and nurturing, I daresay we would have been like the children in one of Emily Dickenson’s sad poems:
Early aged, and often cold, -
Sparrows unnoticed by the Father;
Lambs for whom time had not a fold.
Gender roles have blurred significantly since the 1940’s and 1950’s. In those days (and perhaps still) fathers had traditional roles: provider, protector, rule enforcer, teacher and male role model. Since my father was too wrecked to succeed in any of these roles, my mother had to fill them in addition to her nurturing role as mother.
My mother was the steady (if low income) wage earner in the family as my father bounced from job to job. I have a fuzzy but I think accurate) memory of her taking in laundry and ironing in our basement apartment when I was very young, probably at the end of and immediately after the war. During most of my childhood, however, my mother worked as a waitress. She started working days at a luncheonette owned by Greeks at the southeast corner of 74th and Halsted Street. Kitty and I would go from St. Leo Grammar School to “the Greeks” to have lunch, usually PB&J, each day during the school year. I’m sure her income from that job was extremely paltry. Her tips would have been nickels and dimes. When she had enough experience to get a better paying job, she worked at a small restaurant called “Kilty’s” at 1111 W. 79th Street, not far from where my Uncle Bud and Aunt Mary lived. She moved up from there to an Italian restaurant called “Louis George’s” and finally to a very fancy supper club at 81st and Central Avenue in Burbank called (a bit perversely) “The Old Barn.” The other restaurants ‘bit the dust’ as the South Side lost virtually all its white residents, but the Barn is still operating as an elegant eatery.
The job at ‘the Greeks’ was a daytime job; all the others involved evening and night work. My mother didn’t drive until later in life and, until I got my driver’s license at 16 or so, my father would drive her to work and pick her up. Once I could drive, I would bring her to and from work. I remember her meticulously preparing her uniforms and polishing her white ‘nurse’s shoes’ each afternoon. At Louis George’s, she wore what was supposed to be some sort of Italian provincial outfit, with a colorful full skirt and a white blouse with big starched puffy short sleeves. [Photo omitted.]
Mary Norma Healy Clausen, daughter of Ireland,
as una signora Italiana at Louis George restaurant
At The Old Barn, she wore a plain nylon black uniform with bleached and starched white collar and apron. Each evening, she would walk into work looking energetic and professional; each night, or at least on the busy nights, when I picked her up she would drag herself out of the restaurant bone tired and often exhausted. Her arms and shoulders hurt from lifting and carrying the heavy food trays. Her legs hurt from all the standing and walking. Mostly though, it was her feet that ached until the following morning. The waitresses wore nylon stockings in their ‘nurses shoes’, not cushioning cotton socks. Often my mother could hardly wait to get her shoes untied and off her feet as she settled into the passenger seat of the car and started rubbing her overtaxed feet. Then we would drive home where she could get some rest on the sleeper sofa that was her bed all the years we lived in the basement apartment.
I state the obvious: waiting on tables in a restaurant is very hard work. The waitress is the interface between the customer and the other workers at the restaurant. She is in one sense in charge of the tables at her station, but she has no real authority. She must depend on bus boys and bartenders and the kitchen staff to make things go smoothly. If there is a shortage of bus boys, the waitress has to bus the tables as well as take orders and serve drinks and food. If the bartenders screw up the drink orders, or take too long to fill drink orders, the waitress gets the heat. If the kitchen staff is slow or uncoordinated or unskilled in food preparation, again it’s the waitress who hears about it from the customers, both verbally and by diminished or missing tips. At The Old Barn, my mother worked only for tips, no wages. If there were problems at the bar or in the kitchen, she was the one to suffer the consequences.
As she worked her way up to ‘classier’ establishments, she encountered fewer and fewer customers who were cheap or jerks, but she did occasionally get one. I would hear about it on the drive home.
I wrote earlier that there were times when paying the $1.50/month tuition at St. Leo Grammar School or $15.00/month tuition at Leo High School was a source of friction between my mother and my father. My mother would not hear of Kitty and me attending a public school. I have often thought of how hard she worked to ensure that we got what she saw as the only proper education. I have always attributed my obtaining a scholarship to college and eventually being able to attend law school and to be appointed to a university faculty to her work as a waitress all those years. I am usually a generous tipper.
I treasure the memory of those rides with my mother to and from work. They provided a great opportunity to talk and we did a lot of talking. I have to pause as I write these words and think back on those rides, especially the long rides to and from The Old Barn. It was a blessing that we had only one car. In a modern two or more car family, there would not be the need or the forced opportunity for sharing the vehicle and for the riding and schmoozing together. Efficiency would be enhanced; togetherness would be sacrificed. I treasure too the shared time with my mother on the long drive over pre-interstate roads from the south side of Chicago to visit Uncle Jim in ‘the loony bin’ in Elgin.
I should state what is perhaps clear from the story of my mother’s ‘career path’ as a waitress, i.e., that she was a very good waitress. She had regular customers who asked to be seated at her station and waited until one of her tables became available. It wasn’t only that she was a professional at serving diners that brought the customers back, it was her personality. She was friendly and upbeat and very easy to like. The customers liked her, the other waitresses and staff at the restaurants liked her and, of course, the bosses liked her both because she was so likable and because she was very good for business.
Mom with dear friend and fellow waitress Lou Bushelle [photo omitted.]
Eventually, the nighttime and weekend hours and the wear and tear on her body made her want to get out of the waitress business. Sometime during my college years, when she would have been about 40 years old and when the family was living in an apartment in the Marquette Park neighborhood, my mother took a job at a General Foods plant at 74th and Rockwell Avenue, walking distance from the family’s apartment. The plant was built in 1949 and shut down in the summer of 2003. It was quite huge, 350,000 square feet. Originally it manufactured only Kool-Aid, but after it was bought by General Foods (now Kraft) in 1953, it also made Good Seasonings salad dressings, Shake ‘N Bake, Open Pit BarBQ Sauce and some other products. My mother worked in the main plant, but I can’t remember what her job was. Eventually, however, there was an opening in the Quality Control Laboratory and she applied for it and got the job. She had to pass a mathematics test to get the job, which made this Depression era high school dropout more than a little nervous. Nonetheless, she worked hard at getting ready for the test, passed it, and moved off the assembly line into the Lab. We were all proud of her. That was the job she held until she died.
Mary Clausen and Monica Cummings, Christmas, circa 1960. I include this photo and the preceding one with Lou Bushelle because they so typify your grandmother, especially the smiles and the embracing and supporting arm around the shoulder. [photo omitted.]
My mother was our protector as well as our steady provider. Unfortunately, the person we needed protection from was my father, not in terms of physical violence or abuse, but in terms of his profound isolating unhappiness, his drinking, his ‘crabbiness’, and his emotional abuse of us at worst and emotional neglect of us at best. It is a terrible thing for a child to grow up in an alcoholic family or with a parent suffering from PTSD. I’ve mentioned before the 4 rules: rigidity, denial, isolation, and silence. Those are rules of survival, ways of living in a context that for a child is often scary and sometimes terrifying. My mother was the rock to whom we clung in the stormy waters.
On the other hand, I confess that there were times as I grew up when I wished as hard as a kid can wish that my mother would leave my father and take us away. I have wondered as an adult why she didn’t. I don’t know. She had no family to turn to for help with Kitty and me, but I do not think she stayed with my father because she had nowhere to go. God knows she wasn’t daunted by adversity. I think she stayed for at least a few reasons. First, she knew the man your grandfather was before the war and wanted to bring that person back from his combat trauma. Secondly, in addition to the love and loyalty she felt for him as her husband, she undoubtedly had a sense of duty to help a badly injured veteran of one of the war’s worst battles. Walking out on him when he was in such bad condition is something that I believe she was utterly incapable of doing. Lastly, she was Irish Catholic through and through. Divorce was not an option. It was for her sister-in-law Monica; it wasn’t for your grandmother.
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 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 place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I cannot remember when I wrote these words, but I believe it was about 20 years, I wrote them as an integral part of my memoir but I wrote the memoir itself mainly to explain my Dad, who was coming to live with Geri and me, to my children. Their mother had described my father as "a crabby old man." That was an entirely honest and accurate description and it was the only version of my Dad that she ever saw, but I wanted my children to realize that there were reasons for my Dad being the way he was. Much of the memoir is devoted to WWII, Iwo Jima, PTSD, and the terrible home invasion and crime against my mother, Kitty, and me in 1947. In any case, I wrote these words about my mother whom my children never got to know because of her early death. Writing them was painful for me, as is reading them. They trigger regret, shame, guilt, sadness, and embarassment, and perhaps other unnamable bad emotions. I have often written about them in earlier pages of this journal over the last two and one-half years, usually along with a part of Yeats's VacillationShe 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 other 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 want to close this terribly inadequate portrait of your grandmother 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 in spite of everything.
She was also a circle-breaker. Her father, her brothers, her husband, her in-laws, all were unhappy people 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 transmitted an attitude of self-pity to her children, and to 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.
Things said or done long years ago,Or things I did not do or sayBut thought that I might say or do,Weigh me down, and not a dayBut something is recalled,My conscience or my vanity appalled.
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