Life with (and without) Mother

Sudden illness puts amazing woman into perspective

Editor's Note: This column was written in 2014. My mother passed away June 7 of this year. She would have been 99 on July 14. This is being rerun in her memory.

It's hard to imagine life without my mother.

Thank goodness, it seems I won't have to quite yet.

Mother is a month shy of 95 years old, and for the third documentable time in my life, she's been in the hospital. The first time was during the Kennedy Administration, the second during the Clinton Administration and this time, during the Obama Administration. I think there was a brief Republication sojourn somewhere between Clinton and Obama -- but only a brief one. She's a Democrat by both persuasion and hospitalization, it seems.

It's the first time she's ever scared the daylights out of everyone -- but herself. She was convinced she was fine, even though she couldn't breathe without coughing and couldn't get enough oxygen into her lungs or blood.

It's no surprise. My mother is as tough as nails. She had to be.

Raised in a beautiful house in a mid-size Southeast Kansas town -- the house where she was born in the front parlor -- little tow-headed Ruth was a tomboy who loved to ride bikes and skate and break bones. (Maybe she used up all her bad physical luck then.) After secretarial school, she married Raymond mostly to move to the farm, she jokes, where there was no running water but plenty of the critters she loved. All through their marriage, in both Kansas and Idaho, she worked as hard as he did, feeding, harvesting, haying, gardening and, after a very long wait, having one child (who was not menopause as the doctor first thought).

Ten years later, her husband emptied the bank account and the freezer and went off to his girlfriend and her sons.

That's another story. This story is about how Mother found herself with nothing but the roof over her head, a 10-year-old daughter, an old, beat-up car and no work experience that she could show on paper. She scrubbed floors at the neighborhood cafe and got credit at the grocery store until she could sell our house and move us back to Kansas, where her family still lived.

We never had money. Ever. It was always a scramble to pay the bills, to have enough to eat and to keep a car running. But we always had fun. Mother always made sure there was a dollar or two for a Little Golden book when we went to the grocery store and for things like high school basketball games and plays (clearly shaping who I grew up to be). She never set any limits on what I could dream and did her absolute best to help me do it.

As I got older, she opened our home to all the high school drama kids and, when I was going to the community college, to the first season ever of city boys recruited to play basketball. She fed them chili and listened to their problems, and they called her "ma'am" and "Miss Ruth" and felt at home.

After Dan and I married, she moved to Fayetteville with us, and it became the rockiest years of our relationship. She resented not living in her own home, and I resented her living in mine. But that too is another chapter. This chapter is about how Mother created her own family, largely through going to lunch every day at Jim's Razorback Pizza. She has another "daughter" named Rosie, a ton of friends, a police officer who is her favorite person in the world and a whole fleet of firemen who look forward to picking up cobbler at her apartment every Sunday.

And suddenly, with no warning, Mother almost died.

The scariest part was not the trouble she was having breathing or even the words "heart failure." It was the fact that for the first time, she wasn't making sense. Her mind has always been sharp -- sharper many days than mine, I'm somewhat embarrassed to say. But suddenly, she was confused, repeating the same conversation in about a two-minute loop. It was the most terrifying thing I have ever faced, as bad as Larry's illness and death, I think.

The good news is, Mother is on the mend, and she should be back in her apartment and back at her regular seat at Razorback Pizza in a couple of weeks. She'll go back to having her small glass of beer with her Spanish pie at noon and her coffee 24/7, and she'll live to see 95 and quite possibly beyond.

In the meantime, she's talking about chasing cute male nurses, missing her firemen, wanting her beer and worrying about worrying me.

I'm not sure the staff at the rehab facility understands that she is, in fact, in her right mind. But that's my mother. She's one of a kind.

Becca Martin-Brown is an award-winning columnist and Features editor at the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email her at [email protected].

NAN Profiles on 07/29/2018

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