MUSINGS FROM THE PAST

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 25^th 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.)