7/15/2025

 Tuesday, July 15, 2025

D+249/177/1284

1973  My mother died

In bed at 9:15, up at 6:15, with painful shoulders, hip pain on both sides during the night while sleeping on my side(s), normal hourly up and downs. 70°, high of 83°, sunny.

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at about 10 a.m.   

On July 30th, i.e., in two weeks, I will hit the third anniversary of starting this journal, blog, morning musings, notes, or whatever it is to which I devote some part of each day: writing, copying, reflecting, grousing, ranting, celebrating, or moping about.  I have often wondered what it is I am doing in these pages and why I do whatever it is I am doing.  The practice is clearly a sorry substitute to starting each day communicating with my dear sister, gone now since March 3,  2022.  She left a huge hole in my life.  She was my only contact with what we both grew up with after the war, the big one.  She was my touchstone, my way of assessing whether I was completely or only partially crazy, delusional, or perverse, or just a wimpy, self-pitying crybaby about our lives at 7303 and 7307 S. Emerald Avenue.  The big difference, of course, is that in talking with her every morning, I spoke with a mature, responsible, rational, and wise interlocutor.  In these daily notes, I speak only to myself and run the daily risk of compounding my errors, weaknesses, biases, prejudices, and self-delusions.  Will I make it till the 30th and 3 years of twaddling?  If so, what then?  Quo vadis?

My Mom died on this date in 1973.  This is her wedding photo with my Dad on August 3, 1940.  She was 18 years old.  He was a month shy of his 20th birthday.  They were married by Father William Cousins (later Archbishop Cousins of Milwaukee)  in St. Bernard's church at 66th and Stewart in Englewood.  The Second World War had started in both Europe and Asia, but America was not in it, not until after Pearl Harbor 16 months later, 4 months after I was born.  They were married less than 33 years when the doctor 'pulled the plug' on the heart-lung machine that kept her breathing, though comatose, for 8 days after an aneurysm burst in her brain as she tended her little backyard garden in Riverdale.  In February 1944, 3 and 1/2 years into their marriage, my Dad was drafted, assigned by lot to the Marine Corps, and eventually sent to the island of Iwo Jima, where his soul was crushed.  My mother, my sister, and I got back what was left of him after the war.  She stayed with him until she died, though my sister and I, as children, wished she would leave him and take us away from him.  She stayed with him and supported him until he got on his feet, just as she stayed with my sister and me and supported us through life. and stayed with her father and older brother James and supported them.  She is my patron saint, my guardian angel, my hero, just as she was to my dear sister.  I wish I were worthy of her.

St. Bernard's church, where they were married, was torn down in 1968.  The succeeding parish is named St. Benedict the African.  Englewood Hospital, where I was born, is also no more, as is Blue Island Hospital, where she died.  All gone.

My entry from last year on this date:

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 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 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.)

Ironically, I believe your grandmother was the happiest person in our family.  It is clear to me as I look back, 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

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 want to 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 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 have 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. 

I read A Domestic Dilemma by Carson McCullers today, a short story about a very young family in which the mother is an alcoholic who behaves badly in front of her very young children and her husband.  The husband loves her and feels some responsibiltiy for her condition because it was brought on by her being uprooted from her hometown in Alabama, with its 'matrix of family, cousinships, and friends; to move to a suburb of New York City because of her husband's job.  It's a sad story for all concerned: the confused and frightened chldren, the lonely, fearful, and ashamed wife, and the husband, who loves all of them.  He feels frustration and anger at his wife's inability to control her drinking and its effect on her behavior.  He fears for the safety of the children and for his and their reputation if it becomes widely-known that the wife/mother is a lush.  What, if anything to do about it, is his dilemma.  Should he let the situation continue with all its risks to family health, welfare, and reputation or should he do something else, and, fi so, what.  The conclusion is enigmatic.  They are in their bedroom at the end of the day and 

As Martin watched the tranquil slumber of his wife the ghost of the old anger vanished.  All thoughts of blame or blemish were distant from him now.  Martin put out the bathroom light and raised the window.  Careful not to awaken Emily he slid into the bed.  By moonlight he watched his wife for the last time. His hand sought the adjacent flesh and sorrow paralleled desire in the immense complexity of love.

Did he strangle her, smother her, make love with her, leave her, or something else?  My first thought was that he was going to kill her.  "[H]e watched his wife for the last time."  Others may read the lines as he was about to leave her, so she could return to Alabama, or he could gain custody of the children to protect them from her.  Others read the lines as telling the readers that he was horny and wanted some sex.   I'm wondering what, if anything, it may reveal or suggest about me that I so quickly thought 'he killed her.'