So this is Helen, my mother. She was a character and a half. It's hard to imagine that she has been gone over five years. Just doesn't seem possible, plain and simple. Was it yesterday when I held her hand, gently told her that it was okay to say goodbye to me? I squeezed her fingers and held on for my dear life as I listened to her take her last breath. Most of the time, though, it seems like an eternity since she's been gone. This woman could drive me sheer off the berserk-o scale, but the bottom line is that I would give just about anything to have one more day with this woman. Heck, I'd settle for anything I could get, one more minute, one more opportunity to say the words "I love you."
As a kid growing up, Ma was my best friend. She was CRAZY and above all, liked to have fun. I used to think that my girlfriends wanted to come over and spend the night at my house so that they could hang with HER. Decades of bad health would take some of that fun-loving spirit away from her but not all of it. Even at the nursing home where she spent her final four years of her life, she was Belle of the Ball and she was loved there by everyone.
I haven't been writing my blog very much these days. My father arrived home from Florida last week and my time is better spent with this aging man instead of sitting at the computer. Right now, he's off running errands and I thought that I would take the time to pay tribute to my mom on Mother's Day.
The following are excepts from words that I spoke at her funeral. Only six people were able to attend the service as there was a MASSIVE snowstorm. I called everyone I could think of that morning, asking them to please stay safe at home rather than risk an accident or worse. Too bad, as they missed a pretty good time, as much as one can say that about a funeral. Ma would have wanted us to smile rather than to wail and cry, and that's exactly what we tried to do as we watched the inches of snow pile up into feet. These words will help you to get to know my mother. As I said, she was a character.
SOME HELEN DESCRIPTORS
- The neighborhood party planner. I still don't know everything that took place at these events and it's probably a good thing.
- One tough cookie. She held very high expectations for everyone around her.
- A lover of cigarettes, a three-pack-a-day woman, who later substituted three bags a day of candy and popcorn.
- The most stubborn German ever born. But under it all, she really had a wonderful sense of humor. We had great fun, most of it being legal. Oh, there was that one time. I remember we found ourselves out in the country in the middle of the night. I was standing on my cousin's shoulders, dismantling a Cattle Crossing sign, with my dear sweet mother crouched down in the trunk of the car, playing lookout.
- A Mitch Miller Affecianato. She'd go downstairs with a can or two of Genesee Mule Swill and belt out The Whippenpoof Song on our cranky old player piano. A self-taught musician, I'd lay in bed in the middle of the night and listen to "We are poor little lambs who have lost our way, baa, baa, baa, blah, blah, blah," wafting through the hot air registers. To this day, I personally hold her responsible for our entire family being chronic insomniacs.
- A lover of reading and the educational process. She may have been short on money, her family being dirt poor. But she wasn't short on brains. She was the valedictorian of her class at a large suburban high school. I will always remember with great affection our weekly trips to the grocery store, where she would stuff me like a little pork sausage into the kiddy chair in the grocery cart. No matter how tight the grocery money was on any given week, I was allowed to pick out a new Little Golden Book. She read to me every evening, sometimes even when I was a teenager.
- A lover of game shows. Summers at noon, my mother, my brother and I would eat lunch to Jeopardy. She'd sit there in the living room, wearing her napkin as a bib, suckling on her pickled pigs feet and nibbling on liverwurst. Sometimes, I think she revolved her three marriages based on the show Let's Make A Deal. She didn't like what she got behind curtain one (my father) and two (a REAL disaster), so she wheeled and dealed and finally got it right when she selected the man behind curtain number three, who ended up being the keeper. Ed really loved her and treated her like royalty. Speaking of which, she was:
- Queen. Helen and I invented a place called Queenie Land. Here was a place where there was no pain, where she didn't have to waitress with her back in a sling, where there was no vacuuming; a place where men fed us grapes and waited on us hand and foot.
Enjoy your Queenie Land, Ma. And know that on Mother's Day and every day, I love and miss you.
