Remembering My Mother

Remembering My Mother: Olga Lucy

“You-hoo, yoo-hooo.” That is the call the ones of us who knew Olga in February 2005 will remember her by. “Yoo-hooo,” she would call out at all hours of the day and night to get attention. “Guess What?” she would ask then. Most of the time, it felt annoying. But we all realized it was a useful way she had come up with to get attention to any number of possibilities of her getting what she needed—and that was what was real. “What are you going to do for me now?” was another common question at the end.

My mother probably has Alzheimer’s disease, they told me. I went to the classes available and learned about it. I read the Care Givers Book, and all the other books that are around to help me understand how others have dealt with this sad and confusing illness. These past eight years, since my father died, I had seen more of my mother than ever before. When I was little, she was busy, and now when she was old, I was busy. But when it is your mother, you change and put her needs first. At least I chose to do that.

I feel lucky that gratitude is my first reaction to most situations—including caregiving my mother. A few years ago, I chose gratitude to react with in life when I found out how exhausted all the other variety of emotions made me feel. I was tired of drama and trauma. I realized that the world’s “spiritual masters” had chosen ‘love’ as their reaction to everything. “Love they Neighbor” or “unconditional love”, or “Let Love be your guide” or any of the many versions of Love, Love, Love. I tried love, too. but I guess I am not a “master,” because I could not do it. So I sat and meditated and realized that I could do “gratitude.”

And so I am grateful for this opportunity to serve my mother in her last years. The doctors told me after the fall that broke her hip, that most people don’t last more than six months or a year after hip surgery when they are over eighty years old like my mother was. And it was painful for her to recover from that. Motivating her to walk again and exercise, eat right, move through the pain and become independent again was very difficult for us all. Especially since my father had died the year before, and one could see her mind was having struggles with some things.

I was so scared at the start. Hearing her fall down in my sleep and awakening, not knowing how to get her up. Figuring out a hundred different ways to fix a new problem. It has been a long time now, a long time of searching for answers. Trying to figure out the questions too. Old people seem so fragile and so helpless... and it gets worse. Until like the other night when the translucent glow came over her dying face, so peaceful and so real. Hospice, bless their hearts has stepped in. She is resting on an air mattress, hospice ordered in, less painful for her, and she has some morphine based drops to ease pain, too. And she has angels called caregivers who are there sitting with her, loving her, when I come and go. We are so grateful for all of them in these last days.

It is not easy to let go. Not even tonight when it probably is the last night of her life. I light a candle and sing her songs and read her prayers, and sit and listen to her gasping, deep breaths, breaths that come, pause, start up again. She looks so peaceful, so quiet. No more “yoo-hooo.” And it is okay. And I am grateful.

But I am remembering, too. My mother, remembering her as she has been asking lately, as the Alzheimer’s disease has been coming on—remembering for her too.

She doesn’t remember me growing up. Even just last month, she sat and said....”If I am your mother, then you must be my daughter, I should remember you growing up, and I don’t remember. Who was I?” And I would sit with her and remember for her. It was last year she said she didn’t want to remember the years in the Boston area, because she had to be responsible all the time. So then I asked her when was it that she was the happiest. When was the most free and happy time in her life. Then, she started to remember the bakery. Her parents had owned and run several bakeries in Massachusetts. They were Polish immigrants who came to Massachusetts and worked in the shirt-making factories, called mills. Her mother, Anellia, was very young when she came to America on the ship called Amerika in 1912. Anellia married Josef in 1914 and had their daughter Olga in 1915. And then they had three more children.

To understand my mother, one starts at her beginnings. The Polish Catholic Church and their cemetery in New Hampshire. It is here that Olga starts and finishes her earthly time. It is to this church we travel to every time that is important to Olga in those years where she was so responsible. The cemetery was the heart of the church when I was small. Every Memorial Day we drove to the church and cemetery to place flowers on the graves and walk with the priest to each and every plot. He said prayers and remembered each family planted there. Then we went up in back where the big pavilion was. The women made the periogi and golwombki, and the men went outside to drink and talk and maybe go hunt mushrooms in the woods. The children played on the swings and slides and learned to do the traditional dances of Poland. Sometimes, we went on May Day too, and the red and white Polish flag was raised up by the American flag. The old soldiers from WWI and, later, WWII, talked and remembered.

I was told as a child that the dead buried there, like my Babcie, grandmother, were able to see us happy and visiting them from the other side. That to see us eat and dance and make joyful sounds was important to the dead. So the cemetery is a joyful and sad place when I am a little girl visiting there with my mother and father. Poor Bill, my father, never learned to speak Polish, or to dance the polka, or to drink. But after awhile, he did learn how to tell jokes and laugh with the men. And now he has been dead since February 1997 and buried there, and waits there for my mother, although I saw and felt his presence by her bed these past few days of February 2005. Even one of the workers here saw the male shadow in the hall walking about the past few nights. We watch and wait.

I am grateful that my mother and father ran their stories over and over and over again. For now I can remember for my mother when she can’t or won’t, yet wants to remember. I am her collected memories. And soon they will be over.

She struggled. She always struggled, except for her memory of being a teenager before the depression set in. She remembers working in a drug store, serving sweets, and setting out fruit and things for people to buy...the only time when her father worked for someone else, a time of peace and easy time off to play with her friends. She made her room fancy looking like the movie stars in the pictures, by putting cloth around the mirror, until her mother came and saw it as pretentious and silly. But in Olga’s imagination, it was elegant.

And every year we would ride down to visit my Uncle Chet and stay by the water. Swim in Buzzard’s Bay and go out on his boat, and walk around the town where Olga and Bill had met and got married. As we drove through those narrow streets, he and my mother would tell me again and again their stories of growing up in New Bedford. The famous shipping town from the story Moby Dick, and we would see the museum, too. We’d eat French meat pies with gravy in the old restaurant with sawdust on the floor. Each chair had a special piece of wood on it that the food would be on, probably an old school chair like a lecture hall might have. Only it had food instead of your writing pad is on it. Each of us sat separately, and it had a long corridor and big bar and lots of smells in the air and lots of people crowded in most of the time.

Then we went to visit my mothers oldest friend. Helen and her husband Phil and their son Philip and her mother. They lived in a nice large house, and Helen’s sister lived the next street over. Her brother was nearby too. They had a big organ in their living room. We would visit for a few hours every summer. Olga’s friend, Helen, who was Polish, had blonde hair and blue eyes like me, where Olga and Bill both had dark hair and dark brown eyes like my daughter has. And we would usually eat good things at Helen’s house.

Olga’s other friend from this early childhood time of fun for her was Ella, who would come to visit us every four or five years. They would come in their fancy car and bring her two sons and husband to come see Olga and the north shore coast. And we would hear how wonderful her boys were, how smart and clever they were, and hear them play the piano. She kept these two friends until Helen died in the 1980’s, and Ella got Parkinson’s disease in the late 1980’s. They were her friends for a long, long time.

Once upon a time, Olga had a friend named Dot. We were visiting her when I stuck my finger in a hole in her fence. A bee stung me, and she pulled out the stinger and put baking soda and vinegar mix on it. We had to suddenly walk home through the fields in a hurry in the summer heat. Another visit, I fell down a steep hill to the ice skating area, and the ambulance had to come and get me because my knee got dislocated. My mother may have visited Dot more than just two times, I only remembered those.

Olga was a very private person, and so was Bill, her only husband for 55 years. Very rarely in these past three years did Olga remember him. They spent a lot of time together, but most of my memory of it was their fighting. They could keep up this huge argument about how he didn’t buy her an ice-cream cone once years ago, but they fought about the same incident over and over and over again.

My daughter pointed out to me last time we were driving around the New England area, how the strange and twisted paths of roadways I went, that the map showed the freeway went to in a direct line. I followed the ways my father drove my mother and I around, and it was the way I remembered how to get from one store or place to another. All those twisted roads went by ice cream stands. And I remember driving those roads and their fighting every inch of the way. The constant “watch out, watch what your doing, watch out” fear. My mother lived in constant fear, not just her last few years of really being weak and unable to do for herself, a time of fear we all understand, but the fear she had personally really done all her life.

But I only began to understand how deeply she was afraid recently. And now I understand why she didn’t want to remember the years of responsibility. But I still remember them, those lost memories. And I remember her stories told again and again. She would say “If you are my daughter why can’t I remember your growing up?” And I would tell her it was okay. And maybe find a story she used to tell.

When I was a baby, some man came to visit my father and he coughed on me. Then I came down with “jungle fever”, only I was an infant in Boston and it was winter. So my mother went to the nearby Catholic Church and stole some holy water. She came home and read out of the Bible the words for baptism and baptized me herself. My father said it was the gypsy way to steal the holy water for ceremonies and that we all are priests when need be. He told me that he had given my life over to God that day, that I belonged to God now and God was my father. So when I went to school and they asked me who my father was, I answered, “od in Heaven.” The teachers thought that my father was dead, but I was just very, very confused. Until a PTA meeting cleared that up in third grade.

And my mother laughed a little and asked for more stories.

Her favorite one was how the bull got loose from the slaughter house truck and ran down the city streets and into our yard, and tore up the cyclone fence with his horns, and pulled the fence round and round until the bull and fence was next to my baby carriage under the big shade tree. The police came and shot the bull. It fell dead beside me. My mother had to wait for them to untangle it all before she could get me.

Then she liked the story of my father trying to help her with the baby, had been doing the bath with soap. He lost the baby under the water and was screaming about the baby drowning. She came in and threw the whole bath tub over all over the floor and the baby, me, was still slippery and hard to catch up from all that water and soap.

Then she would tell me of the time we were walking through the commons in Boston and it was night, I even remember this one, and how we had to run to get away from some strange man following us. And how to always throw open the door when entering my Uncle Chet’s house because you never know who might be lurking behind a city doorway when entering an apartment house.

Olga had so many fears, so many fears of possible places where danger lurked. Common places, and the door had to be locked and bolted at night. Some fears are good to have, they got her to live to be almost ninety. But these past few years I watched as her memory faded and the fears faded too. As she became more helpless, she had less fear of others touching her.

It was only a couple of weeks ago that when I was visiting her, she allowed me to sit by her, and I put my arm around her sitting on the arm of the big green lift chair we got her. She looked over and said she could feel my warm hand on her and she could feel the love. She could feel the love. It is the only time I can remember my mother willing to receive a real hug. She would hug hello and good-bye if one made her, but usually it felt awkward. But we do live in a time of people hugging a lot, especially out West where I live now and where I brought her to live with my husband and I these past few years. Here we hug, and we are surrounded by people who hug, and so Olga has gotten used to seeing hugs, and is less afraid of why people hug. Finally, in these last few weeks, being so weak, my mother has been able to feel the love in a hug.

These last few weeks I have helped Olga to remember the good times. Trips to Europe, visits to museums, seeing her granddaughter graduate from college, good happy moments of restaurants with good views and trips to national parks, and us driving her now around pretty neighborhoods of nice houses and gardens and yards.

In these drives, she kept saying “I wonder what they do for work?” and “I wonder how many cars they have?” and we would drive up and down the streets of our town in Oregon, and she would say she remembered when she climbed that mountain over there, and how she remembered picking fruit over there.” And of course she never visited Oregon before these past few years with us. But she “remembered her and Bill driving here and there.” Our minds are peculiar parts of ourselves.

I remember the sunny day sitting outside on our deck here, and she was sitting with me looking out at the marvelous view of the mountains, and all the plum trees and almond trees and apricot trees were taking turns blooming, blooms so full and fragrant and the birds eating the seeds we put out for them. She said how warm the sun felt, how beautiful everything was around us, and we agreed. Being in the moment is good. No sign of disease, of being weak, of fear, no hassles....just peace. Those rare perfect moments that are so fleeting. Then it was time to make another cup of tea for her, or time to go in, or to do this or to do that. Always some chore could be done, or some person to call back or someplace to go to, and the list of possible busy busy. We often miss our sweetest and most precious moments if we feel we ‘have to’ something. So we have one rule now...it is ... ‘you don’t have to’ and ‘I don’t have to anything,’ choose, but not ‘have to’.

It has been a long few years of ‘remembering’ with her, for her, about her, and yet there is probably so much more to remember. Reflecting on our lives, and the lives of others, and sorting through the items collected during a life time is an amazing experience and inside my head it is ongoing. I look at her smooth face lying on the bed, and I pray and meditate and I sing her songs, ‘You are my sunshine,my only sunshine,” and I forgive her and me anything we did or didn’t do. I bless her and me and all the people we ever knew together, and I tell her to tell my father that I forgave him and loved him, too. And I feel she is at peace now and will be in an even bigger extended peace soon in the cemetery with all the others who I remember and all the others I never knew.

We all face our mortality, over and over again. To live without too much fear, and to love openly and celebrate our presence with each other, these are the experiences of love. Learning to love, sometimes learning what blocks us or separates us, but I feel all our purposes for living is the opportunity to love. It may change form or expression, but love never dies. Our hopes and fears change and develop as our illusions of who we identify ourselves to be changes. I feel that once we feel love for someone, we always love them—even from a past life. We love forever and love is forever, but it changes us as much as we allow ourselves to accept how very much we are loved, too.

Olga died peacefully on Valentine’s day.

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