Speaker for the Dead

Life, living and loving came into sharp focus for me this week.

You see, my mother died Friday night. She died while I was onstage in Blithe Spirit 30 miles away. She died to bring to an end a steep five-day decline in her health. She died shortly after my sister arrived in town and shortly after she was visited by her youngest grandchild. She died hours after being moved to the ICU. She died peacefully and with no pain.

She died from heart failure precipitated by the diffuse scleroderma, or systemic sclerosis, which had afflicted her.

She died.

It’s still hard to grasp. She seemed such a force of nature…a towering wall of impermeable granite…unyielding, unchanging, unstoppable. But, of course, she was vulnerable in the end, as we all are, prey to her own body which erred and began attacking itself.

My mother infected me with her insatiable need to read, I think. She read to my sister, my cousin and I for hours on end when we were children, regaling us with the tales of Baba Yaga and her hut on chicken legs, the Little Sister of the Sun and Harald of Trondheim battling the evil three-headed troll Askadalen in the halls of the king. “Now troll, now we shall see who shall win!” her voiced thundered when reading Harald of Trondheim. Later, she introduced me to science fiction, her greatest love, and eventually to Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card.

She liked the idea, postulated by Card, of someone who presents clearly and accurately the portrait of the deceased following their death, without glossing over their shortcomings. In that way, you remember the person and not some idealized rendering which supplants the real memories.

Here, then, is my testimonial for my mother; my attempt to be her Speaker for the Dead. Her obituary is here.

My mother was a difficult woman.

She was fiercely independent and resented authority of any kind. She had a very sharp tongue and often lashed out in reaction to conflict with others, including family members, only later taking time to reflect on the cause/resolution to the conflict.

But she loved and was devoted to her children and her nephew, and defended them with the ferocity of a lioness. She was an endless source of fascination and frustration for my father. As I’ve heard said many times by well-wishers in the last few days (and I think accurately), “there will never be another one like her…she was truly unique.”

She was extremely intelligent and, in her day, beautiful. She was very athletic, packing an inordinate amount of strength and coordination into her trim 5-feet-4-inch body. A tomboy and farm girl in her youth, she believed asking others for help was showing weakness and was steadfast in her refusal to accept aid. She had some social anxiety and was awkward and ill-at-ease in crowds of people. She often became somewhat tongue-tied or said inappropriate things. She had very strong ideas about what was right and wrong, but had trouble admitting when she erred.

She was a steely pioneer woman in an era devoid of a frontier.

Mom was possessed of a curious nature which rewarded her with encyclopedic knowledge on a variety of subjects. Her first love was plants, particularly obscure, hard-to-grow, flowering alpine plants and primroses. She worked tirelessly with wheelbarrow and shovel to create vast gardens approximating alpine growing conditions. For years, she sold cut flowers from her gardens at a roadside self-service stand…collecting large jars full of change from her enterprise, her “flower money,” to be used for purchase of the following year’s seeds.

She also loved reading science fiction and thinking about astronomy and quantum theory…one of her earliest science fiction recommendations to me was to read Larry Niven’s Neutron Star. It was immensely frustrating to her that she could understand the theory, but not fully the mathematics behind quantum mechanics. Recently she had developed a taste for the works of Dean Koontz and Tom Clancy, and was a longtime devotee of Ayn Rand.

She loved to debate family members on subjects ranging from politics to the Cleveland Browns. She refused to her dying day to admit publicly that quarterback Brian Sipe of the Cardiac Kids teams was fit to play football…Otto Graham was the only Browns quarterback worth talking about. She was resistant to change, doggedly hanging onto her black and white televisions until replacements could no longer be found. She did laundry with a wringer washer in the basement and hung the clothes on a clothesline behind the house.

She loved art and dearly wished she possessed some artistic talent. She also loved music and was on the progressive edge during the 1960s and 70s; while other parents were listening to the Beachboys, Mom had Jefferson Airplane and The Moody Blues cranked up to 10 on the stereo.

Mom also loved the performing arts, encouraging my sister and me in the areas of dance, music and theater. She was the 60s/ 70s version of the Soccer Mom, spending half her time driving my sister and me back and forth to the local arts center. She was instructed in music by her mother, a piano and school teacher, through most of her early years and played piano in a band during her late teen years.

My mother smoked too much and, for much of her life, drank too much. In that way, she was selfish; refusing repeated family requests to quit. She was, however, the backbone of the family as my father was often away at work…sometimes a considerable distance from home. My father came in for more than his share of her tongue lashings, particularly in the 1970s, but she was careful to reserve her world-class vituperation for his words; she continued to praise his integrity and intelligence after cooling down.

Her housecleaning was haphazard and her cooking, at times, dangerous (whoever heard of sauerkraut brownies!?!)

Despite her faults, I loved her with all my heart. And the world is a grayer place for her loss, for she was one of a kind.