For Mom

My Mom might have died last month. She went into the hospital at 91 with a kidney infection. She went to sleep that night knowing she might not wake up. I arrived in Washington the following afternoon to an absolutely radiant mother. She was radiant, not so much because she was still alive, as because she had willingly accepted death, had encountered no fear, and had been given additional days which she experienced as a delightful blessing.

My memory is of her face like a beautiful diamond. This was from her spiritual radiance but it was visually magnified by hair now shimmering white framed with white hospital blankets.

She’s back home now receiving some assistance but going about with her life. I thought, therefore, instead of writing about her death and what she meant to me in some future issue, I would write about this remarkable woman now – so she can read this along with the rest of you.

Certain stories, told again and again, become a family’s motif. Certain stories about the Bradley fortune and Marshall and Fields formed the motif of my Dad’s upbringing and I heard them as a child. Maybe they’ve been mentioned to my daughters but they are “people bent by money” stories and I am happy to let them fade, to be replaced with a simple story our Mom has told us of a transformative time in her life.

While a young mother, she went back to northern Missouri to connect with her, at that time already deceased, father’s childhood. Her dad, the one grandparent I never met, was the son of a slaveowner. He no longer owned slaves when my grandfather was born, the youngest in a long line of children (some already adults) to a man in his 70’s and his second wife, a few decades after the Civil War. He had the trappings of a “man of station.” However, the lives of most of his children had spun off into alcoholism or insanity, infighting and sadness.

Mom found the farm, now owned by others who let her walk around. She found family graves in what was now a hog yard. She sat there like Solomon contemplating vanity and realized that the most important thing she was going to do with her life, the main thing that would endure from her time on earth, was how she raised her children. And she came back from Missouri to do that with mindfulness and gusto. Let me share five gifts she gave as evidence of this.

She was a great one for using expert-assembled recommendation lists. So she bought our Christmas present books off of librarian lists. Therefore, we received, from England, some books no one in our town (hardly anyone in the country, at that time) had ever heard of: Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.  When Gandalf fell into the abyss, I had no one to share my devastation with. (Nor anyone who could tell me, “It’ll be all right. He survives and comes back later.”)  It was a private world I couldn’t explain to others but so real with its maps and languages and deep history. I desperately wanted to find a key or a hidden door with which I could enter Middle Earth. I wanted to be part of that world because it would inspire me to be so much more than I was, to be my heroic best. There was another world out there, there had to be, better than this world. At the time, this probably appeared like escapism. But in hindsight, it feels like a powerful inoculation against reductionism, an incubation of idealism. Now, as I live within this world, one of my greatest sources of joy and work is a strong vision of another, better world possible within this world. Every moment we have the choice of how we interact with this world and that choice includes many opportunities that lift this world upwards towards that better Middle Earth.

One Christmas she gave each of us three children a backpack and a down sleeping bag. My backpack cracked during my first summer adventuring in Alaska but I still use the sleeping bag. (Slept in it just last night and watched the stars come out from Hat Creek Rim.) Mom had never gone backpacking but for some reason she decided it might strengthen in us a sense of adventure and travel and self-reliance so she gave us some of the basic equipment that path required.

Like most moms in the 50’s, she wasn’t quite sure how to handle my brother’s devotion to rock and roll and Ray Charles and little Stevie Wonder. But by my time in the 60’s, she had learned not to resist but to help guide so, probably from yet another list (“rock and roll with intellectual merit”) I received Christmas presents of records from a singer neither she nor I knew about named Bob Dylan that I really came to like.

The biggest gift my Mom and Dad gave me was my high school experience. My brother went through our conservative small farm town’s high school in a way that convinced my Mom it was too provincial and anti-intellectual and our lights would go out in an environment of football, cars and girls. But, again from a list (the 10 best public high schools in the country), she heard of a high school 240 miles away in Portland, Oregon. She checked it out and liked it. So Mom and Dad bought a small house near that school. Dad’s business required him to remain back home. Every Sunday evening Mom and Anne and I would drive the 4-5 hours to Portland and each Friday afternoon we would drive back home and help Dad. During the week she would take us to symphonies and plays and hockey games. I learned to ride the bus downtown to the central Portland library where I could check out books on everything. And the high school was great; it changed my life and many of the goals I have for Chrysalis were born in that time.

Finally I must thank her for the spirit with which she “endured” my wandering years when I would be off hitchhiking and hiking in the wilderness without sending a postcard for months. She welcomed me with delight and great food whenever I rolled on home and blessed me when I set off again. Sometimes I would bring home people I met on the road and she would welcome them and talk with them for hours, expanding her world with their experiences. As a parent, I now realize how hard this might have been on her – not knowing where I was or whether I was alive – and yet supportive of my adventurous spirit. For all this and so much more, Mom, I thank you for the zest and purity of your life and your beautiful love for life, the mountains, and your children.