A lot has
happened this past year (2016) in my family: changes in homes, changes in
relationships, changes in health, and the loss of my mother for the second
time.
It just came
to me why I’ve been feeling so much sadness since my father’s accident. At
first I thought it was because of the impending sale of his home and the
changes this was causing in his life. He and my mother bought this home the
year I married my husband, which means it’s been a part of my life longer than
the house I grew up in. I spent many happy times in that house from family
holidays to the birth of my daughter. My husband and I stayed there for a few
months while we were building a new house, and our daughter and our new house
arrived at almost the same time. She was only two months old when we moved from
my parents’ house to our house.
As the years
went by we were frequent visitors at my father’s house. Not only did we visit
but we stayed there again while we were building another house only two miles
away, and our daughter started school while we were still living there. After
we moved out and into our new place, my daughter spent many days and nights
visiting her Grammie and Grampa in their home. Her two cousins also visited and
the three of them spent happy days playing together.
After my
daughter started school I would drive by my parents’ house on my way to and
from work. My father was usually working or sleeping and I would stop in and
visit with my mother. I got to know her better during those times than I ever
did in all the years before. I don’t know if she had a premonition of her early
death or if she felt the need to tell someone about her life before she married
my father. I also don’t know who else in my family heard these stories from her
because I never asked and no one ever spoke to me about them.
When my
daughter was seven, my mother was killed by pancreatic cancer. She was always
comparatively healthy and otherwise, would probably have lived into her 90’s as
her father did. It was a shock to all of us. This is how I lost my mother the
first time. After a few years my father became reacquainted with the widow of
one of his friends from the past. She had seen my mother’s death notice and
called him to invite him to lunch. We were all happy that he had a friend he
could spend time with because he had been so lonely. What we didn’t expect was
his marriage to her only a few months later.
The years
went by. Our daughter grew up, married and had a son. My husband and I decided
we were sick of the cold and snow and moved to Florida. Our daughter and her
family also moved to Florida. We didn’t travel home much but kept in touch by
phone calls.
When my
father had his fall just after he turned 93, he was trying to help my
stepmother who had fallen in the night and called to him. We don’t know exactly
what happened because neither of them remembers. They were alone on the kitchen
floor for a couple of days and suffered greatly. My father is still recovering
from a wound that developed on his back, and they’re both in a nursing home.
We knew their
house would have to be sold because they no longer could live there alone. When
we went there to start cleaning and sorting, I didn’t realize what I would
find. I started sorting through their books and found several photo albums.
Most of them belonged to my stepmother but a few belonged to my father. As I
looked through them I noticed there were no pictures of my mother, although
there were plenty of pictures of my stepmother’s first husband. We had all
known that she was terribly jealous of our dead mother and hated for us to talk
to our father about her. We soon learned to do our remembering when she wasn’t
around. In checking her albums, I found one that had pictures of my father
mixed in with her pictures, just as if they had been together when they were
young. It was eerie and showed that her jealousy of our mother had developed
into the ridiculous.
As I started
sorting through more of their things, I realized nothing that belonged to my mother
was left in that house. My stepmother had managed to replace my mother
completely. But it wasn’t until I was putting away some of my father’s clothes
in his bureau that I realized how tyrannical my stepmother was. In one of his
drawers, hidden under some socks and underwear, I found some pictures that my
father must have put there. One was a picture of my mother and father taken at
their 25th wedding anniversary. He apparently felt it too would
disappear if my stepmother found it. That’s when I knew my mother had been lost for the second time.
(Written several months before my father's death in 2016.)
