At Christmas I wrote about my mother: my fraught relationship with her, taking care of her during cancer treatment, and what forgiveness and love look like for me. At that time, we were nearing the end of treatment for what was considered to be a fairly easy-to-treat cancer. She had completed chemo and was scheduled for straightforward excision surgery in January.
They did, indeed, remove all the cancer, but my mother developed complications afterward— first bleeding, and then a bowel leak. Long story short, she passed away on January 30.
I gave the eulogy at her memorial service. It’s a tricky thing to write something lack that when you had a complex and often difficult relationship with someone. I had to remember there were people grieving— her siblings, her friends, people from her church—who had a very different relationship with her than I did. Public funerals are always something of a performance for the immediate family, though not without value to the overall process of putting closure to someone’s life. It’s nice to know that other people appreciated the person you lost, and to get a different perspective on them.
I wanted to say something that was true to who she was, and to the difficulty of our bond, while also being true to the genuine love I had for her. I wanted to say something that was honest but hopeful. I think I succeeded, based on the number of people who remarked on it afterward. So, for today, my mother’s birthday, I thought I’d share it with you:
A Country Girl
I always thought of my mother as a country girl. Although she had lived in an urban or suburban setting since the age of 19, glimpses of her rural past were always peeking through.
I grew up hearing stories about Uniontown, Kentucky on the Ohio River. It was a town, although there wasn’t, and still isn’t much of it. Her mothers’ family had been there for generations, and her descriptions of small town life, her extended family and the assorted characters in town always fascinated me. I wondered what it was like to live in a place where you were so deeply rooted and everybody knew everybody.
Her stories always seemed like they came from another world. She told me about seeing a tornado roll back the tin roof of the neighbor’s house just like a sardine can. Biking down to the levee and playing too close to the roiling waters of the river and getting busted by a neighbor. Making slingshots out of old rubber tires. Watching Fess Parker film Davy Crockett on the river right there in her tiny little town. Riding a friend’s horse, falling off and getting dragged so hard her mother had to remove the gravel from her backside with tweezers.
The people she told me about sometimes seemed like characters in a southern gothic novel. People like her namesake, great-Aunt Ril, who thrived on tales of the supernatural and insisted that one of our ancestors rode with the Jesse James Gang. When one of Ril’s husbands died, she insisted my mother take a picture of him laid out in his coffin, a request my mom found too morbid to comply with.
There was an uncle who lived for years with a bullet in his head. And the single mother, Dorothy who lived a few streets over: as a child, my mother believed she kept a Christmas tree up all year because there was always a red light in her window. My mom would laugh over her own naiveté when she told us the story. But, she said, it was such a small town, and everyone was humble enough, that they never treated that Dorothy or her son any differently.
I don’t know if all her stories were true, but I do know that the people she loved were. Her Aunt Delilah and her uncle Glen and Aunt Nancy, who she always spoke of so fondly. Her parents, Helen and Blue Eyes, who used to burn down the roadhouse with their dancing. And, dearest of all to my mother were her grandparents, Ike and Anna.
Ike came from a large Southern Baptist family and scandalized half of them when he insisted on serving beer at the family reunion. Anna was a Catholic girl, and despite this religious difference- which was quite a big one back then- they had a long and loving marriage. In 1922, Ike wrote his young wife a love letter that is famous in our family. It ended in a few lines of self-penned poetry:
With fond embrace
both my arms about your waist
like a sailor on deck
me a gnawin’ your neck.
It’s my great-grandmother who stands out as the towering figure in my mother’s stories of Uniontown. For my mom, Anna’s house was a refuge. When things got difficult at home, or she didn’t feel like she fit in at school, she knew she could slip through the door of her grandmother’s house anytime and find her cooking, praying the rosary, or ironing Ike’s pajamas— my mother found that last task particularly absurd and futile— and she would be welcomed with open arms.
It was Anna my mother spoke of the most, Anna’s heirlooms she treasured the most. When we knew my mom was dying and she could no longer speak, I told my mom, over and over, not to be afraid. That her grandmother would be the first one in that great cloud of witnesses to welcome her home.
Telling it like it is
I thought about Uniontown a few months ago when my father came into their apartment after watching the evening cinema at their retirement complex.
“How was the movie?” I asked him.
“Terrible!” he said. “It was the most depressing movie I’ve ever seen. I’m really surprised your mother sat through it.”
A little while later, my mother came in with a spring in her step, singing a jaunty tune. I asked her how the movie was.
“Oh, it was really good! It had a lot of the old-time music in it. Afterward I started singing some of the songs and some of the other people sang along with me.”
“How could you like that movie?!” my dad asked incredulously. “It was so depressing”
“Oh, but it’s real life,” she said. “That’s how things are. You’ve got to tell it like it is.”
The movie was Winter’s Bone, and if you’ve never seen it, it is pretty bleak. The protagonist is a teenage girl named Ree in the backwoods of the Ozarks, who, in order to save her family’s home, must prove her father’s death. She goes up against the local meth gang, enduring beatings, being thrown into a hog pen, and finally diving into an icy pond to recover her father’s severed hands.
I was a bit surprised by my mother’s response to the movie too. When it comes to books and movies, she usually likes to keep it pretty tidy and uplifting. If there’s going to be a murder, she wants it to happen in a cozy New England town where it will be neatly sorted by a ginger-haired lady with a transatlantic accent played by Angela Lansbury . If a family is struggling with hard times in the rural south, she wants it to end with a heartfelt, “Good Night, John Boy.”
I know there are things about her childhood my mother didn’t talk a whole lot about. But I feel pretty sure that whatever the hardships, they were never as macabre and grim as the plot of Winter’s Bone.
But I do think that, apart from the rural, working class setting, what she resonated with in that movie was the character of Ree— an oldest daughter growing up in difficult circumstances who will do anything to protect her younger siblings and keep her family together.
My mother was also an oldest daughter. I can’t speak too much to her relationship with her siblings. But when I was 12, my own family experienced a tragedy— my father suffered a head injury that left him unable to work for a while, and plunged our family into bankruptcy and financial instability.
My mom, who had been a housewife since I was born, had to go back to work full-time, without a lot of pay, while juggling 3 kids and a sick husband. I know it wasn’t easy. She worked so hard to make ends meet, to give us treats to replace the luxuries we were used to, and to make sure we all got the medical care we needed. If it had been required of her, I’m pretty sure she would have plunged into a cold, murky pond to retrieve body parts.
Learning love together
Like a lot of mothers and daughters, we didn’t always have the easiest relationship. I used to think it was because we were so different— and in some ways we are— but the older I get, the more I see how much alike we are. Both of us were oldest daughters who could be bossy know-it-alls. Women who strove to appear calm, strong, and together while struggling with deep anxiety. We both get a mischievous look on our faces when we’re about to cause trouble, and we can be stubborn as hell.
It can be painful to see the best and worst of yourself reflected in another person, and I think my mother didn’t always know what to do when confronted with it. I know I didn’t. But the thing of it was, that no matter how difficult things were, no matter how mad one of us was at the other, or how bad one of our blow-ups had been, I never doubted her love for me.
My mother didn’t always show her love perfectly. Neither did I. None of us does. We often spend so much time trying to make our loved ones into the people we think they should be, or resenting them for who they’re not, that we forget to just appreciate and love them for who they are. It wasn’t until I was losing my mother that I realized how much I loved her, and how well I was loved.
My mother had a deep faith in Jesus, and an understanding that she would go to be with him and her loved ones when she passed on. I am sure many people here saw that faith in her. But faith is not always the same as trust. My mother, like many of us, had a deep fear of things she could not understand or control. That anxiety came to the surface in her more vulnerable moments. I felt some of it in her dying. It’s one thing to tell ourselves we believe, it's another to let that belief take root in our bodies and our nervous systems.
I did my best to reassure her as her life slipped away. I told her not to be afraid, to trust God, that Jesus was coming for her, to look forward to seeing her parents and her grandparents. At the same time, I was praying desperately for a miraculous healing, because I was afraid to face the unknown of living a life here on earth without my mom.
I think the great lesson that my mother and I were learning together was to surrender to this love that was much, much bigger than either of us could imagine. It’s a terrifying thing to do, because the truth is this Love of God that holds the whole universe together— what Dante called the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars— is something none of us can ever control or fully understand. Whether in death or in life, it requires a willingness to let go, in each moment and each breath, all our plans and machinations, all our preconceived notions and beliefs, and a willingness to let Love show us just who and what it is.
When I see my mom now, in my mind's eye, she is always young and beautiful. But more importantly, she’s healed and whole. I see her full of the love of Christ, and I know that she is at peace, that her love is with me still, and that we will always be learning this lesson of love together.
Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For now we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears.
When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. For now we but a poor reflection; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
I Corinthians 13:8-13
Oh, Rebekah, this is so beautiful! What a lovely wordsmith you are. I could relate to so much of what you said regarding your relationship with your mom in my own complicated relationship I had with my mommy. Love you.
Thank you so much for posting this. Thinking of you on this day.