Mom

I’m just glad I got a chance to talk to her before she died.

 The obituary will probably read “after a long illness”. There’s so much left unsaid in those four words, so much pain only hinted at. And you’d never know, reading such an obituary, that my mother actually died in a fire.

I don’t know how to feel. The overwhelming emotion is a species of relief: Mom had been battling an array of diseases for years, and I know for a fact she wanted to go. I know this because Eva and I have had at least four conversations with her in which she begged for permission to die. The first time was nearly three years ago. I wrote her a short letter, using a first-grader’s vocabulary, telling her everything was okay and I loved her, signing it ‘Kenny’.

I hope she kept that letter.

I feel so much guilt, too. Not for feeling relief: as far as I’m concerned, death was a great relief to Mom and so it should be to me as well. I feel guilty because I wasn’t as close to her as a son should be. That the distance was largely imposed and maintained by her seems like a poor excuse. I feel guilty for knowing this day was coming, preparing for it for years, only to be bushwhacked when it arrived.


My mother was a fighter. All her life she fought demons within and without. She left a highly toxic home environment at sixteen and made a life for herself, by herself, in the big city three hundred miles to the south. Her first husband died in a car accident; she lost her firstborn son, my twin brother, after two days (and nearly lost me). Her second marriage, to my father, was a fair approximation of hell for both of them; it dissolved in 1977, when I was five years old. For three years it was Mommy and I against the world. She met my stepdad, John McCallum, in 1980 and intensely disliked him on sight. It was one of the few times in her life that her first impression was a hundred percent dead wrong. And I’m forever grateful she overcame it: all John did was marry her, rescue and raise me, and remain devoted to her for 34 years. He was her primary caregiver as her illnesses progressed: in that he has borne, and continues to bear, a great burden, the same way he does everything: privately, with quiet grace and strength.

We had a falling out, my mother and I, not long after I met Eva. It was a silly thing that snowballed into anything but silly: both of us felt very much disrespected by the other, and some very hurtful things were said on both sides. She did not attend our wedding, which had its intended effect of wounding us deeply.  For roughly five years, there was no real contact between us.

John called me at one point and told me Mom’s health was starting to slip, and I realized neither of us was getting any younger: it was time to put away my bitterness. She had her reasons for acting as she did: to her they were damned good reasons, whatever I may have felt myself.

Our relationship reset, but it was not the same. Entire wings of her life’s mansion remained politely but firmly closed to me, the largest being her health. This was only to be expected: my mother was an intensely private woman, used to guarding her heart against betrayals, and while being weak didn't faze her, appearing weak certainly did.  And as her diseases — COPD and a form of dementia among them — progressed, taking away her independence and eventually most of her sanity, she was adamant that she didn’t want ANYONE seeing her. Almost totally housebound, shrunken and shrivelled to a seemingly impossible 67 pounds, and often incoherent, I could certainly understand her direction. But I resented it all the same: I wouldn’t be going to see her so I could look at her, if you understand my meaning. My resentment was at least partially founded in my own feelings of guilt for not being a proper son, not to mention my bewilderment in no longer knowing how to be.

She had her good days and bad days that ever so gradually became good hours and bad weeks. I’d never know which Mom I was calling: if I caught her in a lucid period, she sounded footloose and fancy free, as if she was about to get up and go gallivanting. Those were rewarding, if increasingly rare conversations. Through them I learned that she, raised deeply Catholic and terrified of hell, had cast off the shackles of her religion and embraced a spirituality that, strangely enough, wasn’t all that different from my own.

Then  there were the bad calls, when each sentence she uttered was an adventure, seemingly devoid of context, impossible to parse or respond to. What a horrid feeling: so many words  said, all of them doubtless meaningful as they’re spoken, all sense of meaning utterly stripped between mouth and ear. How do you talk to someone for whom each utterance takes place in a different era, years apart?

No matter how confused she got, she always remembered my wife’s name. Considering the tumult that accompanied the first year of that relationship, and the five years of radio silence afterwards, that meant the world to me.

I did get to see Mom in the hospital a few months ago — a place she had sworn up and down she’d never go to again. She sounded, when I saw her, quite remarkably well: God alone knows what effort that took, or how much it took out of her. What struck me more than anything else was the sheer vitality in her eyes….her body may have been most of the way to dead, but her eyes fairly burned with life. I’d long since given up any pretence of prognosis for her, but my sense then was that she had a good long while left yet.

And indeed, she got out soon after, returned home, and seemed better. Not well, but better. For a while.

On November 3, just before 11:00 a.m., I called her. She picked up on the fourth ring, and we talked for about five minutes. It was definitely a bad call: her confusion was a palpable thing. She asked me three times if I kept my cats at home, apropos of nothing at all; seemed convinced I was going to see my dad the next day; was inordinately happy that I was working night shifts. One of the few things she said that made sense was that she was “pissed off” that she couldn’t breathe. And this time she must have said she loved us both six or seven times. It felt final. I hung up thinking how final it felt, and then immediately chastising myself for having thought that so many times before.

About two hours later, the fire department attended her property and discovered her dead body. A volunteer firefighter was first on scene and was overcome by smoke trying to rescue her; he was treated and released.

The fire seems to have started in her chair, but she was not burned. As far as we know, she died of smoke inhalation. With her lungs in the state they were, it would have taken her quickly. The fire itself is still under investigation, so I couldn't say more now if I wanted to. What I can tell you is that she is free from pain, free from indignity, free from suffering.
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Everyone tells me I’m a lot like my mom. It horrified me when I was a teenager. I hotly denied it every time. She was so damn stubborn, I would stubbornly insist. Moody, too, I brooded. Endlessly loving, curious about people, passionate but reserved. Complicated mind, largely self-taught; simple heart, ENTIRELY self-taught. Many insecurities that sometimes manifested irrationally; many securities that made you look past them. A love of music, a love of words, a deep, deep desire for and appreciation of truth and sincerity. Cared so much for those who couldn’t or wouldn’t care for themselves. No, we aren’t alike AT ALL.

In her time she was an RPN, a patient advocate at a psychiatric hospital, an auxiliary police woman, an ambulance dispatcher. A devoted wife. A loving mother.

So many regrets. I regret I have no children to pass the mother in me on to. I regret that I ever said bad things about her, and to her. I regret so much the stolen years, both those long gone and those that will never come. She was 67 years old: an age when people are just settling down into no longer punching a clock and wanting to punch a boss. Too early. Far too early.

So many memories. Being a ‘momma’s boy’ for so many years, and proud to be THAT momma’s boy. Cookies and cupcakes baked for every school occasion. The satisfaction of knowing home was an oasis of peace and love, a priceless gift to a child for whom it wasn’t always. Teaching me how to write cursive…endless pages of capital K’s for me to butcher. Songs sung, stories read, laughter and love shared. A life.

My mother was a good woman, a strong woman, a true woman, and I love her.

I love you, Mom.

ARLENE JEANETTE McCALLUM June 10, 1948-November 3, 2015