A memorial to my mom
It was a cool February day in Louisiana in 1953 when my mother was born. She was a baby boomer, born to a poor Italian American family. She was raised old school Catholic; I no longer practice Catholicism, but the cultural trappings are embedded generationally into my bones - the kind of Catholicism you find in largely Italian American communities. Like when I ate a hot pocket on a Friday once? My mother was furious.
And she loved cats. Cat decor covered her entire home.
Childhood in NOLA
My mother spent the first part of her life in the city of New Orleans, Louisiana. She grew up playing under the old magnolia trees that lined Magazine street. New Orleans is a dense city, and while there was extensive old plantation money along Magazine and Laurel, my mother grew up among the urban poor on the side streets. She, her parents and all three of her siblings lived in a tiny cottage.
She talked about these days always with fondness. She may have lived in Bryan most of her life, but her heart never left NOLA. She talked about going down to Audubon park and wrangling crawfish up to eat. One of her memorable stories was when she managed to dig up a mussel while digging around in the mud. To hear her tell it, it became an entire afternoon with her brother trying to break it open to eat.
My mom was a headstrong and clever woman, even as a child. My aunt, a year younger than my mom, was excellent at school. So my mom intentionally failed second grade so she could be held back and rely on my aunt’s natural bookishness to get easy homework. This arrangement apparently carried on through all of elementary school.
The neighborhood got expensive, however, and her parents made the choice to move closer to family in Bryan. She always deflated when she remembered this part of her childhood. They couldn’t fit her and her sibling’s bikes into the truck, so they reluctantly had to leave them behind. She moved to a lower income neighborhood in Bryan, a few blocks shy of downtown. She has many fewer stories, and even less fondness.
Return to NOLA and Fighting Demons
As soon as my mom graduated from the first desegregated class at her high school, she moved back to Louisiana and found work as a veterinary technician for a large animal vet in the rural hinterlands of the small town of New Iberia. This was another period of her life she speaks of glowingly. She loved working with animals. One story she told me of was the first time she helped with a horse castration, and she was jokingly told to whisper sweet nothings in the horse’s ear to help calm them down.
My mom married young. I never learned how she met her first husband, but he was apparently a piece of work. He cheated on my mom constantly. Despite my mom’s headstrong and cynical nature, she was surprisingly naive and trusting of others. Her marriage deteriorated after a few years, and it’s easy to see why.
For example, one time, he broke in through a window in the middle of the night as a prank. When she asked who was there, gun in hand, he charged at her. My mom shot at him, and he screamed at her. Tensions between them quickly proved too much, and my mother tore off her wedding ring in front of him, threw it into the swamp behind their house, and told him to ‘fuck off’.
That’s all her point of view, but it lines up perfectly with the fiery spirit I knew.
Her time in Louisiana as an adult wasn’t all bad. She gained a group of hippie friends who, as she told it, smoked weed and did white magic. Apparently, by invoking the Lord’s Prayer with a large enough coven, you could engage in spiritual warfare. The most proficient witch in her friend group, one time, had my mother sit in a ring of salt and summoned a demon for her to see. Another time, she went to a haunted house in the swamps and felt an evil presence lurking in the basement. Still another time, when arguing with her ex-husband, she caused a bottle of beer to fly with her mind and nearly hit him.
The most dramatic of these encounters was when her coven fell on the wrong side of a black witch (a witch who practices evil witchcraft rather than white witchcraft, which involves Catholicism). The black witch cursed my mother. Her coven rallied around her, invoking the rosary to not only break the curse, but weave a spell of holy magic protection around her.
Her coven also did Creedence Clearwater Revival covers together.
I really wonder what the fuck was in that ‘70s weed she was enjoying.
She left New Orleans when issues with her ex-husband came to a head. While she was driving, her ex-husband ran her off the road with his car. She was far away from most of her family, so she reached out to her uncle for assistance. According to her, her uncle asked if she wanted her ex to ‘disappear’. That side of the family was still deeply involved in the mafia: you can draw a direct line from Sicily to my mom. My mom, instead, decided to move back to Texas.
She soon met my dad, and I was born eight months after their marriage.
Older Age
My mom wasn’t a nonna by nature. She didn’t like kids. She wasn’t particularly good at cooking - my father did most of the cooking when he was at home. But she had the fire. I describe her as an ‘Italian 4’9’. She was tough and resourceful. She wanted to believe the best in people. She held some racist views in her life, parroting the southern reasoning that the n-word slur was not related to skin color at all, and instead to a demeanor. She also held the ‘lost cause’ myth. I always had the feeling that these were not from a place of genuine hate, but cultural blindness.
This faith in my mother was ultimately proven correct. As we both got older, she shook off many of her racial pre-conceptions. She warmly embraced friends of multiple sexual orientations. She accepted my best friend being asexual, even if she didn’t quite understand how he wasn’t gay when he dated men. She voted against Trump in 2016, and planned to do so again in 2020.
She wasn’t without flaws, however. She could blow up easily, which caused her and my father to butt heads. She found it difficult to call out her family when they were spiralling apart after the death of her mother. She also fell into the mudslinging and interfamily fighting that they engaged in. It was ultimately my father’s death that brought her family closer together, but it also broke her.
All of her insecurities she held deep inside her heart bubbled up after my father was gone. It had started earlier than that when he moved to Dallas after he finally managed to find work after the recession. They spent the last two years or so of his life apart, though he came down every weekend he wasn’t working. He passed away from liver complications in 2011, a week before I was to graduate from college. My mother began to withdraw, pushing away sympathy. I dove into my master’s degree. We were both isolating.
When I went to go teach in Korea, she and I wrote a few letters, but her being largely offline made communication difficult. Eight months into my stay in Korea that I was told by my aunt (who my mom was living with at the time) that my mom had suffered a stroke. The next day, I filed the paperwork to leave Korea and return home as soon as I could legally exit my contract.
My mother never fully sprung back. Her ferocity and strength were gone. She was depressed, lonely, but resistant. I tried to get her to move into a home nearby so I could see her, but she was reluctant to move out from where she was staying. I can’t blame her; I struggled to keep up regular contact beyond texting or trying to make the 30 minute drive out to see her every other week. I wouldn’t have trusted me either. She suspected (without basis) that her family was stealing from her, but I later learned she was having holes in her memory as a result of the stroke.
However, one nice day was when I got her tablet. She instantly fell in love with the internet: watching videos, reading the news, listening to all the CCR she could enjoy. She loved shopping online for cozy clothes, gifts, and things for her cat. And, of course, one of the first things she discovered was Google Street view and she loved to take a walk around her old neighborhood.
The last trip she took out of the house was to a Halloween parade in New Orleans, and she was ecstatic.
Passing
I had been taking my mother regularly to a doctor in the half year before her death. As a teacher, my workload had severely diminished after COVID shut down the schools after spring break, so it was easy for me to spend time with her and take her to her appointments. We spent a lot of time together then, at least once, sometimes twice a week. She was living on assisted living, so I would buy her lunch when we went out. She loved Whataburger, fried chicken livers, or a vanilla coke from Sonic. Her heart was in a struggle, but it seemed to be on the mend when she abruptly passed away shortly into quarantine.
I am so glad I caught her ‘good night’ text that evening before she went to bed for the night.
When we emptied out and sold her trailer, I found the journaling she had been doing after my father’s passing. Mixed in with the lamentations and the sorrow were sketches she had done of her and her cat in tears. She was deeply lonely after my father’s death. I’ve only gotten through the first few pages as I can’t read it without crying.
She was worried she was a burden on me with my graduate school and plans to go to Korea. There’s a lot she internalized, not wanting to feel like she was an anchor keeping me down. The last entry I read was only about two months after my father’s passing, even though there’s still quite a bit more. Apparently, when clearing out his apartment, they had found substantial evidence he had been cheating on her. The hurt I read from her words was one thing; the way she tried to find justification for it broke my heart, and made me hate my father.
My mother needed therapy. And she needed me. She couldn’t get one, and she didn’t feel she should request the other.
My father has been dead for fifteen years. While the image I had of him was shattered by the probable infidelity, I don't hate him any more. But, I think about him much less than I do my mother.
When my wife and I went to New Orleans, we went to visit the tiny home my mother had loved so much, just off Magazine Street. It was a chilly, grey, cloudy winter day when I stood face to face with the home my mother had spoken so glowingly of. I tried to picture her as a kid playing under the magnolia trees, climbing up the stoop, scrambling for crawfish in the ditch. Despite missing her so much, I smiled.
What we are, when we are dead and gone, is memory. I’m the only child of my mother. I’m the only one to carry the flame of her memory so that she doesn’t fade away. I’m proud to carry her in me.