Megan Willome’s “The Joy of Poetry”

Certain images of my mother stick in my head, the earliest being her reading to me from a tall green edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Other images crowd in: holding me in her arms as we watched the dogcatcher take our Boston terrier away (no treatment for mange existed at the time); the room mother bringing cupcakes when I was in third grade; the expert manager of garage sales; the long weekend when I visited during her recovery from surgery when she was 89, and how she talked about her life before she married my father.

I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point, I realized that she was a person who was more than just my mother, a person with hopes and dreams, challenges and disappointments, happiness and grief.

That realization permeates The Joy of Poetry: How to Keep, Save & Make Your Life with Poems by Megan Willome. It’s a book about poetry, yes, but it is a book about how poetry becomes an important facet of the large and small events of one’s life.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

What separated us

Twenty-eight years separated us,
not even a comma in the span
of time, those years of Roaring 20s,
Great Depression, Gone with the Wind
and the Wizard of Oz, Pearl Harbor
and the bomb bookending the war,
divorce and remarriage, whole novels
of experience and living, generations
fusing and passing, and she sat
in a hospital bed, eyes tired, smiling
at the thought of what she had had
for dessert for lunch. The sherbet,
she said, was delicious.

Photograph by Larisa Okhtienko via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Sacrament of Pain

In August of 2013, I found myself spending a weekend with my mother in a retirement home, and all I can think about is poetry.

My mother had fallen and broken her hip. She had surgery; the surgery was successful. I had spent a long weekend with her when she was recovering in a nursing home (described in my post yesterday). She had eventually returned home.

She was required to use a walker. She hated it. It was awkward maneuvering around the house, she said, although her house, the house I grew up in, was not cluttered. She convinced herself she didn’t need it to walk from her bedroom to the kitchen. One afternoon, leaving the walker in her bedroom, she fell in the kitchen. Fortunately, she had no broken bones. Unfortunately, she couldn’t pull herself up.

The neighbor who checked on her twice a day had gone out of town. The backup neighbor wasn’t due to check on her until the next morning. My mother couldn’t pull herself to reach the telephone.

She spent the night on the floor.

She spent as total of 18 hours on the floor.

She’d hear the phone ring, but couldn’t answer it.

My sister-in-law called, a daily ritual. No answer. She called the neighbor. No answer but she left a message. Same thing with the backup neighbor. My sister-in-law got in the car and started the 90-minutes journey to my mother’s house. Halfway across the Lake Pontchartrain causeway bridge, she connected with the backup neighbor, who had been out grocery shopping. She said she’d check immediately. She did, and found my mother asleep on the floor.

We knew we had to do something. My mother was almost 90; she could no longer live alone. The cost of hiring a full-time caregiver would be horrendous. All of us, including my mother, knew what this meant: a retirement home,

She had lived in the house for 57 years.

Moving her was for her own good.

Moving her from her home would also be a sign to all of us that she was dying.

My mother holding Cameron, with my daughter-in-law Stephanie - June 2010

In May of 2013, my younger brother and I flew to New Orleans, charged with a task we weren’t looking forward to: breaking up my mother’s home, with her there to give us guidance on what to keep. For three days, we sorted papers, objects in her curio cabinets, clothes, photographs, some of our own personal things she had held on to, things belonging to our father. Over the years, my mother had been rather ruthless in culling through “stuff” she owned. It made our job easier, but there was still a lot of stuff.

A week or so later, she moved into the retirement home. She actually knew someone who lived there, and she seemed to have made friends rather quickly (she had a “circle” she ate lunch and dinner with regularly).  I spent a weekend with her that August, staying in the home’s guest apartment.

She had fractured her back, lifting the toilet tank cover one night to fix the tank stopper. She thought it was just like home, where the tank cover weighed only a few pounds. This one, specifically designed for retirement homes, weighed over 30 pounds. Her back fractured, and she had been in constant pain for several weeks, helped only by pain medicine. The home had to get someone to administer the pills – my mother would take them as soon as the pain started, and consequently was spending a lot of time sleeping.

I sat with her in her little apartment and with her for meals, and the pain was clearly debilitating. The only thing that seemed to help was me. I had experienced a ruptured disk in 2011. Ongoing pain, strong pain meds, eight months of physical therapy including traction – yes, I knew what my mother was experiencing.

Because of my own experience, my mother felt comfortable talking about the pain she was experiencing. She knew from the expressions on others’ faces that they wouldn’t understand, would get impatient, would believe she was only complaining because she didn’t have anything else to do. She knew that I understood. That kind of pain changes your personality. It narrows your horizons and confines you like a strait jacket.

Yes, I knew what she was going through. And we talked. I know it helped her. It helped me as well.

As I listened to her talk about the pain, and then gradually shift to talking about other things, and her own life stories, I began thinking about poetry, and how her life and her very self were like poems. We both knew that her time was short; she died six months later. But her life, and this time we were spending together, bonded by a common experience in pain, had become something of a poem, likely a poem I will never be able to write but one that wraps itself around my heart and has become part of me.

In Mortal Blessing: A Sacramental Farewell, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell quotes Catholic poet Denise Levertov:  “To write poetry is to labor in the transcendant.”

O’Donnell might call my experience with my mother the sacrament of pain, a sacrament we mutually shared, one that became part of both us.

Our last poem together.

Photograph: March 2013 – my younger brother and I in front of my mother’s house after her memorial service. It's the house we both grew up in.

My Own “Mortal Blessing”

I’ve been reading Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s Mortal Blessing: A Sacramental Farewell, about the death of her mother and what she learned about family, the nature of the sacred, dying, and herself. During the 48 days of her mother’s final decline, small, commonplace things became sacramental.

Like O’Donnell’s mother, my own mother fell and broke her hip. She had surgery to repair, and although she was in her late 80s, the surgery was successful.

As she recuperated and started physical therapy at a nursing home, I flew to New Orleans and spent a long weekend visiting. And we talked, for hours each day. The talking didn’t seem to tire her. I’m not sure what prompted it, but it was important for her to tell me what she did, most of which I had never heard before.

O’Donnell might call this the sacrament of listening.

My mother had been a wartime bride (World War II) and like so many others had gotten divorced. Her first husband had been her childhood sweetheart and joined the army, fighting in Europe. In 1945, she and their not-quite-two-year-old son lived with his family in Gary, Indiana, and then with his sister in Chicago. When the war ended, her husband chose not to return home. He wasn’t ready for the responsibilities of a family. And so they were divorced in 1947. It was important for her to tell me he did pay $42 a month in child support; she repeated it several times.

She was dating my father when her former husband called her one day at work, asking her to reconsider and get remarried. After work that day, she said, she walked slowly to the streetcar stop to ride from downtown New Orleans to where she lived with my grandmother in the Ninth Ward. She stopped at St. Patrick’s Church on Camp Street (not far the present-day D-Day and World War II Museum). She was not Catholic, but she sat in a pew and prayed. And clarity came.

When she got home, she wrote her first husband a letter, telling him it wouldn’t work. As she prayed, she said, she realized she would never be able to trust him.

She married my father in 1950. I was born a year later.

Mother, May 2013

At first their marriage was happy, but once he started his own business, she saw very little of him, except late at night and an occasional Sunday. (The same went for me and my older brother; I didn’t really see much of my father until I was in junior high school.)

She said that there would be days when she would sit on our back breezeway and cry for sheer loneliness. She’d see me play in the backyard and knew my older brother was with friends in the neighborhood. No one would see her cry.

“I couldn’t believe how lonely I was,” she said, talking to me while she lay in her nursing home bed.

It was not an easy story to tell or hear. But I listened. And in those few hours my mother became a much more complex person than I had ever realized, with her own joys and sorrows, with her own stories of a life lived.

Sacraments work two ways, as O’Donnell explains in Mortal Blessings. They work for both the giver and the receiver, for the object of the sacrament and the participant.

That weekend in New Orleans, my mother was blessed by the sacrament of listening, and I was blessed by the sacrament of her story.

Tomorrow, I’ll complete this meditation.

Photograph: Interior of St. Patrick’s Church, New Orleans.

Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s “Mortal Blessings”

The most difficult writing assignment I’ve ever had occurred this year.

At the request of the family, I wrote my mother’s obituary.

I wrote it before she died. I edited the final details after her death.

Angelo Alaimo O’Donnell was asked to do the same for her mother.

In the last 48 days of her mother’s life, O’Donnell and her sisters gathered round their mother, Marion Salvi Alaimo. She had fallen and smashed her hip; whether she could survive the surgery required to repair it was questionable.

The gathering, as O’Donnell describes in Mortal Blessings: A Sacramental Farewell, becomes a kind of sacrament, just one of the many sacraments the family leads, participates in, and becomes part of in their mother’s final days. Sacraments, even those related to the death of an individual, gain their meaning in their communal celebration.

And while sacraments are an intrinsic part in the family’s Catholic faith, O’Donnell comes to understand that sacraments are not confined to officially defined ceremonies of the church. Sacraments can be found among the most commonplace of acts, events, and emotions.

Marion Salvi Alaimo

The sacrament of a haircut and manicure.

The sacraments of the cell phone and the wheelchair.

The sacraments of humor, honor and witness.

The sacraments of speech and memory.

The sacrament of distance.

Angela Alaimo O'Donnell

As a loved one is dying, the simplest of acts become sacraments, not only for the one dying but for the ones participating as well. Sacraments are communal acts, conferring meaning too all involved.

O’Donnell does not tell an idealized story. Dying and death sharpens and unveils, particularly if it occurs over a period of time. No life lived is perfect; O’Donnell doesn’t gloss over her mother’s failings, or her own. Mortal Blessings is not a memoir about her mother; it is a telling of the last days of a life, and what happens, what sacraments happen, when a family is drawn together around a dying person.

The writing of a book like Mortal Blessings is a sacrament, too.

Tomorrow, I’ll have the first of two personal meditations on Mortal Blessings.

Related:

My review of O’Donnell’s The Province of Joy.

My review of O’Donnell’s Saint Sinatra: Poems at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph of the Church of the Mount of the Beatitudes by Betty Krausova via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

In the afternoons

In the afternoons, when

the children are playing

at a neighbor’s, she sits

in the screened-in porch,

seeking what little breeze

there is without the flies

and mosquitoes, and stares

at the smooth cement

floor. The tears form

at the interior of her eyes,

but no one is there

to notice.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Lorraine

Lorraine was born in 1923, the fourth of six. There is one photo of her from her childhood – a blurry, rosy-cheeked little girl with her father kneeling next to her, his arm around her shoulder. She has a scarf in her hair, like girls wore in the 1920s.

Her adored father died in 1935 of a ruptured appendix, right before she turned 12. This was the Great Depression, and they were already living in one of the poorest sections of New Orleans – even in the 1930s, the Ninth Ward was a poor part of town, where people grew vegetables for the farmers’ market at the back of the French Quarter (still in operation today). With four children still at home, her mother went to work scrubbing floors at New Orleans movie theaters.

Lorraine remembers times when there was no food in the house. Nothing. She remembers what it was like to go to bed hungry. She remembers next-door neighbors – African-Americans – sharing food with them. This was 1930s New Orleans – but poverty and hunger didn’t know there was a color line. When there was food in the house, she remembers eating everything on her plate. Everything. She would require the same of her children. Occasionally, there would be a splurge with a dessert – a piece of buttered French bread with sugar sprinkled on it. Her children would grow up thinking “bread, butter and sugar” was a pretty cool dessert treat.

She was smart, likely the smartest of all the siblings. Her dream was to teach, and to teach Spanish. She took four years of Spanish in high school and was president of the Spanish Club. She wanted to go to college, but the fact that her mother could barely afford to send her through high school told her that college was not possible. Her second-oldest sister (who would become my godmother) had quit high school out of embarrassment – she couldn’t afford to pay $1.25 for the required gym suit.

In high school, she met a football player named Joe. He boarded at Holy Cross High School, just a block from where she lived. He was from Chicago, and she had stars in her eyes. They would marry in late 1942, right before he shipped out for Army duty in Europe. She found out she was pregnant after he left, and her first child, a boy, was born in late 1943. He had a problem with faithfulness, and he broke her heart, likely several times over.

They were divorced in 1946, and she went to work as a secretary at a trade publishing firm. Her boss was this Southern-talking, nice-looking charmer from Shreveport. They were married in 1950. Their first child, a boy, was born in 1951. Their second, also a boy, was born in 1961.

She had a desire to achieve, but she gave it up (and gave up going back to work) because that little boy born in 1951 didn’t like what today would be called day care. He cried for two straight days, and she gave up the job.

To transport him to the kindergarten at the Lutheran church they attended, she had to learn to drive, something she never felt comfortable doing. She preferred taking the bus, and to see a movie (she loved movies, especially romantic movies) she and her son would walk a block to the highway and catch the bus for downtown New Orleans. Disney movies: Pinocchio, Bambi, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella. Sometimes dramas that made her son cry. Or comedies like Some Like It Hot.

She wasn’t a great reader, but she read to her son, books like Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Bible stories for children. She encouraged her son to read; her first child wasn’t known for reading or scholarship and she didn’t want the same thing to happen with her second. In fact, the second son turned out be a lot more like his mother than his father – doing well at school, known for being somewhat distant and quiet, rather shy but also seeing everything that went on.

For the first 12 years of my life, she was the major influence on my life. My father started his own business – and often weeks would pass without me seeing him. But she was there. She was always there.

Jennifer Dukes-Lee is hosting a link-up for writing about a person who had a major influence on your life. Check her site at Getting Down with Jesus to see all the posts submitted. 

Photograph: Lorraine Young with granddaughter-in-law Stephanie Young and great-grandson Cameron Young, June 2010. Photo taken by Travis Young.

My Mom and Me: The Early Years

My mother was born in 1923, and born at home on Dauphine Street in New Orleans. She was the fourth of six children, five girls and one boy. The house was located in the Ninth Ward of the city, an area of numerous vegetable gardens for the markets at the back of the French Quarter.

She was a beautiful child, and strongly favored by her father, who’d take her visiting to friends and to his various local haunts. The family had been fairly well off – her two oldest sisters had memories of wearing silk dresses – but then hit hard times. My mother did not know silk dresses. But she loved her family and had a special bond with both of her parents.

Her father died when she was 12. The Great Depression was still going strong, and her mother went to work as a cleaning lady in movie theaters. My mother can remember times when there was nothing in the house to eat, and what it meant to go to bed hungry.

She attended John McDonough High School, then an all-girls public school. And she did well, and loved Spanish (she was president of the Spanish Club) so much that she had her heart set on becoming a Spanish teacher. But life intervened. First came a romance with a football player for Holy Cross High School; the area where my mother grew up is still known today as the “Holy Cross District.” Then came World War II, and a quick wartime marriage that produced one son but didn’t survive the war.

She had worked through the war at the Port of Embarkation in New Orleans, which helped process military recruits for sending overseas. After the war, she continued to work, mostly as a secretary. She eventually landed as a secretary of a trade publisher for the shipping industry, where she worked for – my father. They were married in 1950.

My earliest memories of her date from about 1953 or 1954. And they’re associated with living in a duplex in suburban Jefferson Parish. I wasn’t exactly Dennis the Menace, but I was active and creative.

I thought the new sofa needed some color, so I added black shoe polish, a kind of early performance art.

I snuck the dog in the house, which was strictly verboten, and then had to hide him when I heard my mother come in. I was in the kitchen, so I found the most accessible place to hide him. The oven. (No, it wasn’t on.)

She wouldn’t let me play with her pots, so when she went to check on the clothes in the washing machine in the garage, I locked the screen door and proceeded to play with the pots. She had to get the neighbor next door to take the door off the hinges to get inside.

When she needed a break from her child, she’d vacuum. All it took was the first sound of the vacuum cleaner being turned on and I was on the sofa (the one with the shoe polish stains). She likes to vacuum to this day.

We moved to a new neighborhood when I was 4, and I vividly remember moving day, with my mother stationed in the new house while I rode with my father back to the old house to finish cleaning out the kitchen. I was worried, because our new house was next to woods. I remember asking my father if my mother would be okay with the bears.

Shortly after we moved in, she took driving lessons, so she could drive me to kindergarten at Mount Olive Lutheran School. She hated to drive, but the idea of all the bus transfer that she would have to make – and four times a day if she wanted to go back home – was too much. So she learned to drive, and sat in the driver’s seat exactly the same way for the next 45 years – upright posture, very proper, very serious and very attentive. But even after she learned to drive, she always preferred the bus or the “streetcar” – the New Olreans version of a trolley. Many times I remember riding with her on the bus into the city to see a movie at one of the four big downtown theaters – the Saenger, the Lowe’s State, the Joy and the RKO Orpheum. (The buildings are all still there but only the Saenger remains as a theater.)

My mother loved movies. She saw Gone with the Wind and the Wizard of Oz when they were first released. She loved all of the movies, but especially the epics and the romances. One day, she took me with her to see a movie called The Last Voyage with Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone, which was so full of tension that I cried through most of it. It was not a suitable movie for an 8-year-old.

Some mothers might have taken their distraught child to get ice cream cone or (in New Orleans) french doughnuts (beignets) at Café du Monde. Not my mother. She took her distraught child right across the street to the Joy Theater to see Some Like it Hot with Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe.

Of course, she got to see another movie on the same day. She would consider that a good day.


To see more posts on mothers, motherhood and Mother’s Day, please visit the blog carnival hosted by Bonnie Gray at Faith Barista.

Top Photograph: My mother with my grandson Cameron, June 9, 2010, New Orleans.

Bottom illustration: Canal Street, New Orleans, about 1930. Except for the cars, it looked much the same when my mother took me to the movies. The Saenger Theater is on the left and the Loew's State theater is on the right.