On Being An Orphan

She was four months and twelve days shy of her ninety-fifth birthday. We buried our mother last week. She suffered bouts of dementia for four years but always knew me when I drove from Ohio to Iowa to visit. She loved to read murder mysteries and she always had a glass of iced tea standing next to her in a twenty-four ounce glass. If the television was on it was tuned to ESPN and her very favorite sport was basketball and the Iowa State Cyclones. Mom had a crush on Fred Hoiberg, the former Iowa State All-American and now Cyclone head coach. Four years ago, shortly after Hoiberg was named the coach, I was golfing with him and his best friend in Minnesota. I told him that, if it was possible, mom would try and steal him away from his wife. Later on I contacted our Minnesota lake friend and asked him if he would contact Fred to see if he would send her a photo.  A week later my mother received an autographed picture of Hoiberg in his Minnesota Timberwolves uniform with a personal note from him. Next to photos of her children, her five precious grandchildren and fifteen great grandchildren that picture was her most prized possession. It was pasted on her bedroom mirror from the day she received it until the day she died. Simply led lives don't require much for satisfaction. Mom was the envy of the nursing home with that personally written note. Unless you happen to be a hardcore Cyclone fan you won't understand but we all do.
A few months ago I was talking to one of my best friends in Dublin, Ohio about his father. He told me his dad was a 'great man'. This intrigued me because I haven't actually known many great men. My dad wasn't a great man. And my mom wasn't a great woman. I like to think I'm a good man but I'm not a great man. My friend might having been using semantics that didn't fit into my vocabulary. So, if my friend believes his father was a great man that's good enough for me.
I wonder if parents and children go through the same historical perspective as I did with my parents. What do we actually know about their lives when they were young? Not much, I'd say. I knew that my mother was born in an Iowa farming community, Fonda, in 1919. She was either placed on a doorstep by her natural mother or given to a doctor to be put up for adoption. Who knows. I've heard all kinds of wild tales about how she got where she did. It doesn't really matter, does it? I do know that her given name was Nellie McMahon. Her adopted name was Mary Maxine Dickerson. Her adopted mother was married to a barber who died when I was two. Her mother, my grandmother, died when I was fourteen and I thought my world was going to come to an end. She spoiled me like no one before or after can. My mother graduated from a Catholic high school. There were hundreds of them in Iowa in small towns up until the 1970's. It made up their identity. I also know that her high school nickname was "Mae West" after the well-endowed movie star of the Thirties. Isn't this sad that this is all I know about my mother's teen-age years? I wonder if it's the same way with my children. I think it is because on the way back to Ohio from Iowa yesterday my son and I talked for a couple hours about my life in high school and especially about sports teams I was a part of in the Sixties; things I'd never talked about before.
My mother went to nursing school in Ft. Dodge, Iowa and then, in 1941, took her first and only job at the Boone, Iowa County Hospital. She was a nurse, the head of the OB unit until she was 74.  My mom, her nickname by then was "Dickie", in this community of 12,000, loved her job. She liked to boss the doctors around when she didn't think they were doing their job correctly. A few years ago she told me the thing she was most proud of in her life, aside from her offspring, was that she helped deliver over 5,000 babies to their mother's. So, the way I figure, given that she worked an eight hour shift, the chances that everyone in Boone, between the ages of 72 and 25 who were born in her hospital: Well, for thirty-three and a third percent of them, the first person they saw coming out of the womb was my mother. That, in the minds of those people, might be grounds for calling Mom 'great'.
 Mom's visitation lasted two hours on Thursday evening. I arrived a few minutes before the start to see mom before others arrived. Five minutes later a young man(he was four years behind me in high school) arrived. He's a businessman in Boone. I like him a lot. We talk about the old days when I'm in town but we're not close-close. Truth be told I've only spoken with him a handful of times since I got out of high school fifty years ago. We played baseball for the high school. I was just old enough that he sort of idolized me when I was a Senior. You know how it is when you're a ninth grader and a Senior is a decent athlete. Anyway, When the visitation was about to close I saw that this man, after those two hours, was still in the funeral home. I was so taken that he had stayed so long. I hugged him and mentioned how impressed I was for giving so much of his time.
 What makes a person great? He told me a story about his own mother, how she lost two babies at birth in the 1950's. His own mom, as you might imagine, was utterly devastated. He told me, and I was clueless about this because mom never talked about her job, that my mother went to their home after both of these losses to sit with his mother, just to be a friend. That was why he stayed at the visitation for two hours, I'm sure. He was paying tribute for what she had done for his family. And if Mom did that for this woman how many others received her care and sympathy?
I gave a brief talk to the friends of mom at the visitation. My mom led a tough life. She had her ups and downs, mentally and physically. Who doesn't go through crises in ninety-four and a half years? My mom was a survivor. My dad, her husband, divorced her when she was sixty. Mom was also very feisty. She loved telling self-deprecating stories, stories that made her look silly and ridiculous. I get this trait from my mom. Anyway, when my dad died in '94 his biological family, we children and his brother, went to the visitation first. My daughter and I were outside of the funeral home standing on the front steps when mom drove up in her car, got out and shoved us aside. She then said,  "Outta my way. I've got a few things to say to your father"! And say them she did. She reamed him up one side and down the other because she knew, this time, she was going to have the last word.
The one great success I had in dealing with my mother was, about twenty years ago, I flipped her over from democrat to republican. But, when it came to FDR she remained an unreconstructed socialist. Some things you win and some things you lose.
So, now mom's gone and I'm an orphan at age sixty-eight. As I looked out at the visitation crowd I thought of all the good things that we're coming Mom's way: She was now at God's banquet table. She was with her mom and dad and she would finally be able to meet her biological parents; those who gave her life. She had a biological sister she never saw in this life. Now she has. And, most importantly, she can wrap her arms around those four or five of her own babies who died before they could take their first breath. Such treasures await her. Nice job, Mom.