My mother had the strong, broad shoulders of a linebacker. She needed them. Like most mothers, she protected a lot.
In the two months since I lost my Betty, I’ve felt aggrieved, unmoored, orphaned. I’ll need big shoulders to carry the guilt I have from being 3,500 miles away when she died on January 13. I was on vacation in Costa Rica, a trip I’d been looking forward to for the past eight months. It took four days to get flights home to where we needed to be. I spent my 63rd birthday writing her obituary, a tribute I hope did her justice. At night, we held candlelight vigils under the full moon, listening to the waves, and sharing stories of her life. Those four days are now a blur to me.
Her massive shoulders were eclipsed only by her huge, tender heart. At her visitation, I heard stories from friends and family that I had never heard before or had long since forgotten, stories about the times she came to their aid, like making meals when a new baby was born, and taking care of sick family members. Stories of all the patients she nursed back to health and wholeness.
As the oldest daughter of ten children, Betty’s role as helpmate, as a little mother to her younger sibling, was already decided for her. I wonder how many meals she cooked, how many brothers and sisters she fed, bathed, and diapered long before she became a mother to me and my five siblings?
When Betty was six years old, she was hospitalized for ear surgery, and she was so impressed by the skill of the nurses and the care she received that she’d found her calling. She became a nurse in 1958, caring for patients in the emergency room, before she met my father Ben on a blind date and knew instantly that they would marry. Women of her era paused their careers when they married, and Betty was no exception. Within two years of marrying my dad, she had her hands full again.
My parents welcomed six children over the next five years. If the math doesn’t add up here, you’re astute. Her first pregnancy was identical triplets, of which I am one. Back then, it was not only rare, but it was a miracle we all survived. Our combined weight was only ten pounds, so we were in the hospital for the next two months. My own premature daughter spent four days in the ICU, and I felt like a failure. Betty recalled how difficult it was for her to go home from the hospital with no babies and she reassured me that my daughter would be fine. She knew my pain because she carried that same pain decades before me.
Six kids kept her mighty busy, but she still made time to be our Girl Scout leader, a room mother and PTA leader at our school, and the nurse for our Girl Scout camp every summer. The summer camp drew Girl Scouts from all over Northwest Indiana, and I still laugh at the girls who shouted out NURSIE, because they had no familiarity with how to pronounce Polish last names like our west side troop did.
Although we came from modest means, Betty ensured every one of her daughters got a college education. She could see the world changing and she knew a high school education and marriage would not set us up for success. Her own mother encouraged her dreams of becoming a nurse, and she did the same for us by returning to school, upgrading her degree to a BSN and returning to nursing in the fields of geriatrics and psychiatry, so college would be attainable for my sisters and me. Our Dad used to joke that he paid for college so his girls could learn the eff word, and so Mom could learn to use it in its myriad parts of speech. Betty’s favorite was the verb form, as in to meddle with or annoy!
When we lost Dad in 2011, it was Betty who held us together, despite her own grief. During the ensuing years, she also suffered numerous illnesses and injuries but never lost her sense of humor. Her devout faith never wavered.
Since her passing my aunt and sister have been visited by Betty in their dreams. Dreams of how beautiful Heaven is; of how ready she was to be free of the pain and suffering. I’m experiencing her presence in both subtle and powerful ways. I’m harnessing her strength to change situations in my life have long needed action over rumination. I’ve stopped putting up with drama and nonsense. Her strength has moved me from “it is what it is,” to, “it doesn’t have to be that way.” I started a dream job this week, and I know she had a hand in making it happen.
As kids when we left for school, Betty would tell us, “Take care of your brothers and sisters.” We’ve closed the circle of her strength around one another, and we lift each other up. Some days, I’m filled with the richness her life brought me, and on others, I’m a limp, pink dishrag. Grief is sneaky like that. Every tear is a testament to my love for her, to how much she carried me, and of how a life filled with joyful service is the greatest legacy of all. Her hearse had no U-Haul packed with worldly goods trailing it. None of ours will. But everyone remembers Betty’s caring and kindness.
The closing line of Katherine Anne Porter’s story Pale Horse, Pale Rider, as Miranda contemplates life without her beloved Adam states: “Now there will be time for everything.” I’ve read that story dozens of times, and it’s only now that I finally get it.
Music: It's So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday by Boyz II Men
