What Else Don’t I Know?

I had a conversation today with an old friend of my mother’s. I am not sure where Annie is from, but her accent is thick – possibly Germanic. Though she’s been in this country for most of her life, I often have difficulty understanding her, but today, when we were speaking, I understood every word.

My mother passed away on October 6^th, and Annie misses my mother and thinks about her all the time. She left a teary message on my mother’s phone a few weeks ago that I had a hard time understanding. To me, this is utterly perplexing. These women hardly spoke over the last few years, but Annie is so genuinely moved by my mother’s passing that I hate to even imagine what the reciprocal would have been if Annie had died first. The woman I know would not have cared very much. Or at least I don’t think she would have. But maybe I don’t know her like I think I do.

I spoke with another of her friends who is also a cousin by marriage. Bernice misses my mother terribly as well, and I’m glad she can’t see me shaking my head. My mother used to yell at Bernice, at least during the last year or so. Bernice called all the time, and would send my mother lots of cards, especially when she found out that my mom was ill again. The cards were fun, and heartfelt, and nice.

When my mother got the cards she would say nasty things and belittle the gesture. Her frequent calls were not welcome, and Mom sometimes yelled at her on the phone and told her to stop sending the cards.

Bernice called my sister and told her what had transpired, and that there was already a card in the mail that could not be retrieved. My sister called me, and I confiscated it when it arrived so that my mother wouldn’t see it and get angry. Now I wonder if the receiving of the cards was to my mother a harbinger of bad tidings. One more indication that she was sick, that life was no longer good, that life just might be coming to an end.

Mom sent cards, lots of them, to lots of people. She sent many cards to Bernice’s daughter who was going through really hard times physically and emotionally. She was willing to be kind to others, but didn’t want that same kindness returned, at least not from Bernice. She did want that from her daughters and would freak out if we didn’t call daily, or even if we called at ‘the wrong time.’

I made a final call to a friend of my mother’s. As Mom is no longer around, I seem to want to call her friends – this call was to Joyce who lives in New Jersey. She and Mom had been good friends since their young motherhood days. Joyce is also still having a hard time with the fact that my mother is gone.

Both of my sisters are also having a hard time, but I guess that makes more sense, unless my mother’s passing portends to her aged friends their own mortality. When one’s peers start dying, perhaps the inner child begins screaming, “Shit, does this mean I’m next??!?”

It seems that I am the only one who is not completely broken up by my mother’s passing. I must assume I did not know this woman at all.

Paulette, our banker told me that almost every time my father sat at her desk he told her: “Marrying Sherry was the best thing I ever did.”

Who was this woman and why wasn’t I allowed to know her the way all these other people did?

I knew her angry critical self quite well, but today, when I was speaking to Annie I heard a story that actually made me cry.

When Ronald Regan signed the bill closing Agnews State Hospital, many people with various mental and emotional illnesses were released from their incarceration. My mother went down to Agnews to see what was happening. She saw many people, now displaced, setting up housekeeping under the Dumbarton Bridge near the hospital. My mother called Annie, who was a caterer, and said that they needed to make food and bring it to these people. She and Annie made sandwiches and other easy-to-eat foods and took it to the camp. I am curious about this incident. I am curious to know if she did anything more to help, not that feeding them this one time wasn’t enough. I am now in complete and unreserved cognitive dissonance about my mother. I wish I could talk to her about this and ask what other ‘crazy and kind’ things she did. This is not the woman I know.

Annie also talked about their larger group of friends and described these bridge playing mavens as highly opinionated. Apparently, another of their group who never would have gone out of her way because she thought it had nothing to do with her, declared my mother and Annie crazy.

I knew that my mother had done a lot of volunteer work in her life, but this spontaneous desire to help threw me off kilter. This is not the woman I know, but it is definitely part, and a large part, of the person that others seem to remember. Perhaps my memories will need to be reshaped by the stories of others. Perhaps that is much healthier than remembering an angry, bitter, woman with whom I thought I had very little in common.