She was gentle when she needed to be, but she could fight, too.
Most people remember their mothers as an example of the godly woman from Proverbs, but I’m sure, had the need arose, Miss Lois could also have been a Jael from the story of Deborah and Barak in Kings.
She didn’t approve of fighting, but she also taught me never to tuck my thumb inside my fist. If you had to fight, it needed to be for the right reasons, and you fought to win.
I reckon fighting, literally or metaphorically, was ingrained into my mother. She grew up on a very hardscrabble farm, in a time and place where her family only knew there was a stock market crash and the start of the Great Depression largely through reading it in a newspaper – if they could afford a newspaper. Life was earned by fighting the soil, and occasionally Mother Nature. My mother was a little girl when a wildfire threatened their farm, and she was called out with her siblings to work alongside the grownups, slapping flames with a wet feed sack and praying for the wind to shift. She was five or six that year.
Later she worked hard to help support her family, when they moved to Washington City. It’s likely she had to fight a bit then as well, since she was an attractive young woman in a time and place when it wasn’t always smart or safe for a young woman to walk alone. Any man worthy of the name had best consider his mother beautiful at any age, but my mother was, in the words of one her granddaughters, hot. More than once she had to fend off unwanted advances, since it was a different time and place than we can even imagine.
Years later, as a pretty young divorcee with four children, she fought to provide for my brothers and sisters, and to learn a new job that had better prospects than just working behind a counter running a cash register. Even when she got that job, working for a newspaper alongside the man who would be my father, she still had to fight to prove that a woman could cover real news as well as any man. She fought that battle, too, and won.
Miss Lois fought for things she believed in, whether it was a family fallen on hard times, or an old house that had waited for decades to become a museum and community center. She stayed up around the clock to feed sick baby animals, and spent weeks nurturing plants that showed just a little more life every day.
Miss Lois fought hard, with all the passion of her Irish ancestors, but she didn’t always win. When our family started our own newspaper, and eventually ran out of money and strength, she kept trying, up to the bitter end. However, she was the one who finally convinced my father and I that we couldn’t win that particular battle, not right then. She was also there to comfort us; I have no doubt that she, too, cried at a dream gone by the wayside, but if she did, she cried alone.
For a while, Papa worked for the circus. Through no fault of anyone on the crew, things went extraordinarily sidewise (the reasons why are a column for another day). The circus crew, children, animals and all, was stranded and hungry. It was Miss Lois who browbeat the grocery store owner into providing enough food for the crew to have a few meals, and talked the owner of a feed store into a little more credit. She couldn’t stand to see children or critters hungry.
If you think my mother was a constant combatant, you couldn’t be further from the truth. She was almost magically nurturing when the situation called for such. She could calm any baby, as I saw her do in a courthouse hallway one day. Miss Lois spoke no Spanish, and the baby’s family spoke no English. Mother was covering a murder trial, I think; I have no idea why the family was there.
The little one was fussin’ up a storm, and the poor mom was completely out of sorts and embarrassed. Miss Lois gently asked if she could hold the infant, while the other mom attended to the needs of another child. She was hesitant at first, then acquiesced. It didn’t take long for Miss Lois to calm the crying and dry the tears.
Despite having had five of us, Miss Lois never tired of children, especially babies. She was happiest holding a baby of any kind – white, black, Indian, Latino, Asian, she didn’t care. A child was a child, a gift from God. While she rarely smiled in photographs (she hated having her picture taken) her face is lit up in the pictures of her holding my nieces and nephews, and later on, their children. When Parkinson’s became too severe to allow her to safely hold a little one, she had to be content with talking or singing to whatever little one she encountered.
As the dementia slowly, sadistically took her away from reality, she would call me and ask where “Jeff” was. She was worried that something had happened to her youngest child. I would assure her I was fine, and she would get angry. We finally realized that she was looking for the toddler version of me. Miss Rhonda and I would assure Mother that Little Jeff was just fine, and we were keeping him out of trouble.
Even after she lost the ability to speak clearly, she would cuddle a doll, or sometimes a sweater or pillow, and treat it like a real baby. Deep in that happy place her mind had gone, she just had to take care of a child.
When things got to the point when she could no longer hold even her imaginary babies, she sometimes became angry. I don’t know if it was just the frustration with all the cruelty that dementia inflicts on its victims, or if she knew death was close but didn’t want to go just yet. Whatever the reason, her smiles became less frequent, and her eyes sometimes darkened and narrowed, while at other times they just pleaded for something nobody could provide.
Her hands, her ever-busy hands that sewed and crocheted and cooked and cleaned and doctored and comforted fussy children, those hands waved and thrashed about sometimes. In her last days at the hospital, if one of us wasn’t holding her hand, she would make a fist. We ended up holding her hands a lot.
Miss Lois fought until the very end.
Her hands were gripped into fists that would have hurt because of her arthritis, had she known. Her breathing was fast, and her lips set. Her eyes were wide — not with fear, but with determination, almost anger.
Have you ever had to tell someone you love that it’s okay to go ahead and die? To say it’s hard is an understatement.
I am reasonably sure that even though she knew the Old Man was waiting for her in Heaven – after all, it was Valentine’s Day, when they always had a date – she didn’t want to go just yet. We tried to tell her it was okay, as did Uncle Bob and Aunt Doris. But she wouldn’t listen. I think she would have sunk her teeth into the Grim Reaper’s throat and kept hitting him , with her thumbs outside her fists, as he tried to carry her away.
We held her hands, and prayed, and spoke to her, even as she fought.
Then she relaxed, smiled, and went on home.
It was a cold, wet miserable day; in one of the few trees remaining outside the hospital, a bird was perched on a bare limb. There were the beginnings of icicles on the gray-black bark. Mother would have been worried about the bird being warm enough, and wanted to bring it inside. She likely would have sent one of us out for birdseed, then written a story or a poem about the bird.
And if the situation had arisen, I’m sure she would have fought for it, too.
For Lois C. Weaver, Oct. 1929-Feb. 14, 2004.
