A bittersweet day. What would have been my parents’ seventy-second wedding anniversary. What is the eighth anniversary of my mother’s death. I have only known of people who were married that long. Not known them personally. Only noticed their picture in a Nebraska newspaper, smiling out at us like those little characters that crafters make from dried apples. Each wearing a similar look, as if they have grown into each other over the years. The smiles contiguous. Would my parents have had such a picture, such contiguousness? I don’t know. My father died in 2007. My mother in 2011, on their sixty-fourth anniversary.
It was a hundred and three degrees that day in Gainesville, Texas, the place where my mother grew up and went to school and graduated through all the levels of St. Mary’s Catholic School. She was a ward of sorts, of her fierce grandmother, Maria (pronounced like the singer’s name) Moran Gallagher, and three aunts: Anne, Gen, and Em (yes, we had an auntie Em). It was decided early on, when she was only seven, that she would go to live with them instead of her own family, so that she could attend Catholic school. The grandmother treated her more like a servant than a child. My mother had a terrible memory of being often summoned to put an evil-smelling liniment on the old woman’s feet. But the various aunts doted on her—Helen Marie, they called her, in that southern fashion of using double names. And she was the special pet of her uncle Neil and aunt Mary, another brother and sister pair in the big Gallagher family.
A hundred and three degrees in the church that morning, at ten o’clock. A Saturday. Auntie Anne played the organ. Auntie Nell had sewn the delicate wedding dress, with its barely-perceptible cherry blossoms impressed on the fabric—silk my dad brought back from his stint in Japan toward the end of the war, especially for this occasion. He had been a ROMG (radio operator mechanic gunner) on a B-29. Encouraged by his twin sister Jeanne, my mother’s roommate in nurse’s training at St. Paul’s Hospital in Dallas, the two had corresponded during the war. Letters led to love and marriage.
A hundred and three degrees and there’s not a sign of perspiration in any of the photos. For the natives of Gainesville, probably nothing out of the ordinary for an August day. And for the Nebraska contingent, my dad and his mother and brothers, well, there had been plenty of days like that out on the farm near Republican City. When they spoke of their wedding day in later years, my parents always chuckled between themselves and got looks on their faces that might have eventually become like those of the couple in the newspaper, celebrating their seventieth. I’ve read my parents’ love letters (with their permission, actually). There was plenty of sizzle and passion that brought them to that day that now takes its place in family history.
Eight years ago last night, my brother Sean and I managed to get a late flight out of DIA in time to get to our mother’s bed side. Fierce thunderstorms were widespread, from New Mexico in the south to Colorado and on east to Nebraska. I was surprised the flight wasn’t canceled. As we sat on the runway waiting to take off, lightning made a shadow-play around us, in all directions. As we lifted into the sky it was the same. I swear I could see all the way to the mesas and mountains of New Mexico as we gained altitude, lightning coloring the sky into a purple-then-gold-then-orange-and-yellow panoply of shapes in the dark. My brother Sean was not afraid of much, but he turned to me with a look in his eyes I had sometimes seen in his childhood, like the time he got stung by a bee.
“Do you think it will last long?” he worried.
“Oh, they usually try to fly around—or above it,” I answered, ever the big sister, trying to reassure.
I’d flown through my share of storms. Landing in the middle of a wild and windy Houston deluge. Flying to Ireland at the tail end of Hurricane Helene, with the 747 whipping around like a reluctant big fish on the end of a line—and landing, though not before leaping slightly into the air and coming down again, hard enough to make the Irish women on board, who had been telling their beads all night, utter a syncopated plea of “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” Being told, as the next flight out of JFK, that we’d be held on the ground because of a summer thunder-boomer. Then, without warning, the plane lurched forward with what felt like the engines at full throttle, and up, and off. “I apologize, folks!” The pilot came on the intercom about ten minutes later. “There was a clear space, and I took it. The planes behind us have been ordered to stay on the ground for the next three hours.”
My reassurance to my brother was overly optimistic. There was no up or around this trip. The pilot didn’t say so, he just did it; there was no choice but to fly straight through the storm. Seated just behind the wing (a place my dad had assured me years ago was always a smoother ride), we could look out the window and see the plane’s light blinking—and because of that, the fierce, wind-driven rain lashing against us. We knew good old midwestern thunderstorms from growing up with them. Tornado sirens. Heading to the basement. Up to this point we had been worried whether or not my mother would make it through the night. Now, our concern, silent, was whether or not we would. I could see the headline: Brother and Sister Tragically Killed on Way to Mother’s Deathbed.
But we did make it. And as we stepped off the plane in Lincoln, met by our brother Dan and sister Kelly, we got a whiff of that after-rain-in-Nebraska aroma, when every scent from tree bark to grass and hay and earthworms comes through the air in a single scent. Home.
Half an hour later, we entered our mother’s bedroom at the memory care facility where she had been living for the last year. She lay on the bed with her eyes closed. Unresponsive. She had entered hospice on Friday. This was late Sunday night. My brother and sister and other brother Keenan had been there with her. The boys stayed till after midnight. Kelly and I decided to stay the night with our mother. I will be ever grateful that we did. It turned out to be her last night on earth, and we the midwives to her going. Kelly, exhausted from keeping watch not just for hours but as the primary care giver for days, weeks, months, years, fell asleep in a chair. I went back and forth between standing near my mother’s bed and sitting. She was not responsive, although Kelly said she thought she saw the hint of a smile when she told her Sean and I were on the way. I’d worked as a nurse’s aide, been trained in coma stimulation. I knew the last sense to go was hearing. So, I talked.
During those last years my mother had told me several times that my presence was a comfort to her (something that had not always been true). So, I comforted her. She liked to have her forehead rubbed. I rubbed her forehead as I spoke, telling her every move I was making, what was going on around her. And then I told her a story. I told her the story of her life as I knew it, from the vantage point of all of its strengths. I thought I felt, a couple of times, a stirring, though it might have been only wishful thinking. Responses are often hard to determine when someone’s dying. We were part of her accomplishment, five kids who had all grown up and found their way, even through a few detours. I thanked her for giving us the very foundations of life, as well as important values: honesty, compassion, forthrightness, determination, an appreciation for beauty and the need for it in everyday life. So many things. I told her we would continue to take care of one another; and that if disagreements arose, we’d settle them and go on. That was one of the moments I thought I felt a stirring from her. Mothers need to know their children will be ok.
I reminded her what a good friend she’d been: faithful to them when others had not been. Enjoying their company with joy and pleasure. Remaining faithful and caring to her birth family, though they were mostly far away; making a point to keep in touch with nieces and nephews, some of whom she had never met or met only once. Going from “not being able to boil water or cook an egg,” as my father teased her, to becoming an enthusiastic and creative cook. Developing a passion for antiques—not just for collecting hem, but for learning their stories. For history. Giving time and energy to various volunteer groups over many years. And suffering through the indignities of old age—of arthritis, of “the Gallagher heart” that afflicted so many of her family members, of bad hips. “Old age is not for sissies!” she’d say, fond of quoting Art Linkletter’s famous adage. She suffered other indignities, as we all do, but you don’t need to know those.
She died between 8-8:30 a.m. on August 30, 2011. About the time of the morning she would have been getting ready to go to the church for her wedding, to the man she loved. I would like to think she departed the earth with some sense of the same love she felt that day, going forward into a completely new life with no idea of how the story would end. I have been with several people as they died. My mother’s passing was one of such deep release, it was profound. All the wrinkles and worries in her face disappeared. That’s not always the case. Her skin smoothed out like that of an infant. No more fear. No more worry. As quick as a bolt of lightning, her spirit was up, and off, and away.
