“Then he said to the disciple,
’Behold, your mother!’”
When I was a child, Mom (Marise) and I would race to the backyard wall and back. The races faithfully followed one format. I sprinted to an early lead—for I was fast—touched the wall, turned around, and the race was lost. Because there, approaching the wall, was my mother, puffing and giggling and making all the motions that in others accompany speed.
I knew I was doomed if I looked at her, but I couldn’t help myself. Gleeful incredulity grabbed me so that I’d double over laughing, struggling for breath, morphed to stone by a modern Medusa. Mom passed me on the stretch every time. The moral stands somewhere between the tale of the tortoise and the hare and the experience of Lot’s wife.
However, don’t get the idea that Mom herself couldn’t be fazed. She didn’t come by her family nickname, The Great Inhaler, for nothing. For instance, you would never steer close to another car if Mom were a passenger. Minutes later, when you could again draw breath, you’d wish you had actually hit the car. Less trauma on the lungs.
Her best inhale took place the time I came home from college in San Luis Obispo to Ontario, a four-hour drive. I had set up ahead of time with my brother, Bruce, so that Mom was in her bedroom when I sneaked into the house. Before mobile phones existed, I knew a telephone number whereby one could ring one’s own house, so I placed a handkerchief over the mouthpiece (for that faraway sound) and called from the kitchen. Mom picked up the phone in the bedroom and we talked for fifteen minutes, or until the phone bill might be running high. Then we said goodbye, hung up, and I waited.
Enter Mom. Oh, what an inhale! Windows buckled. Curtains flapped wildly. All the air was sucked out of my body. Airplanes soaring overhead lost altitude. Pilots would blame it on “turbulence” but we knew it was Mom.
At 53, Mom really took to running. She began training, entered 6K races (about four miles), and worked up to running a half-marathon at age 57. Mind you, she wasn’t any faster than when we raced to the wall. She wore a tee shirt with a picture of jogging turtles above the words, “Start slow, and then ease off!” But she kept at it, working out every day. In the 5K Turkey Trot held in Dana Point, California, in her eighties Mom took first place in her division five years in a row.
Maybe running is in my mother’s blood. Growing up in Greensburg, Kansas, whenever she spotted black clouds boiling in the distance she ran home before the fine dust stung her legs and arms. At her home it seeped through cracks and covered the kitchen linoleum until she couldn’t see the pattern. In the middle of the dust bowl in the depths of the Great Depression “dust pneumonia” whistled through Kansan shuttered houses. At night, her family slept with wet cloths draped across their faces.
In 1936, her father experienced severe abdominal pain. Before antibiotics and sulfa drugs, he lay for a week in the veterans’ hospital, waiting for a surgeon. By the time they opened him up he was filled with gangrene. His appendix had burst. He died there, leaving his 35-year-old wife with no income and five children, ages 3 to 11. They had to be shipped off to relatives in other states for a year until my grandmother found a job at the post office and the children could come home. They returned with stories of sleeping in barns as the mice scurried about.
As much as she ran, my mother couldn’t avoid the sting of losing her father and then, decades later, her husband, my father, to lymphoma. After he said No to dialysis, our family gathered around his bed and talked and laughed and watched him die.
“Are you okay, Jim?” Mom would ask. He wasn’t, of course, and would never be again in this life. Whether he grunted or smiled weakly or closed his eyes in resignation, she remained close by, tending to his every need.
After Dad died, Mom started running in a different way. When people came to visit her, they rarely found her at home. She might be at aerobics class (at 60, she became a certified instructor), or wandering through a museum, or substitute teaching, or playing piano at various events (she’s a superb pianist), or swing dancing (she became a professional dancer at 67) or, much later, organizing laughter-filled Scrabble games with people half her age at a nearby coffee shop, and she often won. (They all cheated like mad.)
She figured she had spent enough of her life at home raising four kids—those other three were a handful—so she ran around visiting friends and relatives from California to Finland, Mexico to Alaska.
These days, my mother is 95, and she cannot run at all. She cannot leave her room in Dana Point. She cannot dance or wander or walk on the beach. She remains immensely vulnerable to the pandemic virus.
But she still laughs, and she still makes me laugh. Last night, I got her to sing “Moon River” “Sunrise, Sunset,” and “Straighten Up and Fly Right.“ We sang together, even though neither of us knew all the words. Recently, via Netflix, I hooked her up with Mr. Bean episodes (she loves Mr. Bean), “One Planet,” and Michelle Obama’s documentary “Becoming.” Her marvelous 24/7 caregiver, Donna, calls her “Queenie” and loves her like her own grandmother.
Whenever I call my mother, she asks many times during the conversation, “When are you coming to see us?”
“I don’t know, Mom,” I said last night. “Yolanda and I were going to come down in March. We don’t know when we’ll be able to visit you. “ I don’t really know when I’ll see her again.
Sometimes we Facetime, and sometimes her grandchildren and great-grandchildren Facetime with her, but naturally it’s not the same as visiting face-to-face.
It’s not the same as racing to the wall and back.
So I’ll leave with this thought: I love you, Mom. Thanks for giving me life and love
and laughter. Thanks for your courage. Thanks for your care. Thanks for being who you are.
I hope to visit you soon.
—Chris Blake