Coffee with Mom

by Mike Glenn

  And I did love her. Whatever failings she might have had—every parent has them—she always loved me. She may have been too strict and too demanding in some ways, but she had always loved me. I never doubted that. In the big scheme of things, my mother’s failures added up to nothing more than style points.

  I loved her. I really did. I loved her strength. I loved her biting wit. I loved the way she would confront people who were wasting her time or not handling a situation in a professional manner. I loved the way she could walk into a chaotic situation, immediately size it up, and then, in a matter of a few seconds, determine a course of action, and everyone in the room would follow her directives.

  One of their friends used to say if he ever got in trouble, don’t send my dad. Send my mom. Dad would come and console you. Mom would get you out of the mess you were in.

  I was the one who loved her, and that’s what gave me the right. I was the one she had been training all of my life to be prepared for situations just like this. I was the one she knew would do something when something needed to be done. She had raised me to do the right thing even when doing the right thing cost you something. I would do things exactly the way she would have done them, and I wouldn’t really care what anyone else thought about how I was handling the situation. She was my mom. I was her son. It was my call to make.

  Sometimes, my mom would get anxious. Something would happen, and she would become afraid. In those moments, she would panic a little. Her panic would be about me. Could I handle her in this moment? Was I strong enough? Remember, my mom only respected strength. If I was going to handle things, I would have to prove to her I was strong enough to do it. In fact, I’d have to do it over and over.

  In those moments, Mom would bull-rush me. She would, without warning, turn and verbally attack me. She would accuse me of felonies and misdemeanors. I would be called a liar and a thief. I would be called stupid and incompetent. She was never physical, but she was just short of taking a swing at me.

  I learned to hold my ground. I learned to stand there and not give an inch. I stood there and reminded her, this is where we were, and this is what we were dealing with. These were the decisions we had made, and we were sticking to them. We weren’t going back, and we weren’t talking about it anymore. The decision had been made, and the decision was final.

  When she realized she couldn’t change my mind and when she knew I wasn’t going to back down or be intimidated by her threats, she would relax. She would be convinced, at least for a little while, I was strong enough to take care of her.

  And I would.

  And I did.

  She was my mom. I was her son. I had the right to make every decision I made, because right then, there was no one on earth who loved her more than I did.

  I had every right to do what I did. Love not lived isn’t love at all. Love doesn’t give you the option to do nothing.

  Yeah, I know I made her mad just like she made me mad when I was little. Now, I was making her mad because, like her, I was insisting we do the right thing.

  Coffee with Mom: “Everybody says you write stuff on me. What do you write about me? Whatever it is, I know you’re not telling the truth!”

  Somehow, I thought she’d understand.

  Chapter 16

  Take Me Home

  Coffee with Mom: “I’m going to move back home. I’m just waiting for the right time. When I leave, I’ll leave a message.”

  Morning Pointe is a very nice retirement and memory care center. For Mom, Morning Pointe was a prison from which she would soon be paroled.

  “Are you taking me back to the prison?” she would ask. “Are we going back to ‘that place’?” She would always sigh deeply as if she was being marched down the hall to the “Song of the Volga Boatman.”

  “When are you going to take me home?”

  Morning Pointe was never home. Nashville was never home. When she said she wanted to go “home,” she meant Huntsville. Not only did she mean Huntsville, she meant Huntsville when my dad was still alive. She may have meant she wanted to go back to a time when I was still a little boy. She wanted to go back to a time when Huntsville was growing, but not yet big. She wanted to go to church and see her friends. She wanted to take me to school where she knew my teachers. She wanted to know the server who brought her coffee. She wanted to know her grocer and her dry cleaner.

  She wanted to go back to a place that didn’t exist anymore. I couldn’t take her “home.” Home wasn’t there anymore.

  I could take her to the house where she and Dad used to live, but she wouldn’t recognize the house. The new owners have redecorated it. The kitchen isn’t the same, and the groceries in the pantry are arranged very differently. The television is on another wall, and Dad’s chair isn’t there.

  Dad isn’t there either. The garage where she stored all of her stuff (Christmas decorations, Easter decorations, craft paints, and material) now holds three cars. Mom and Dad never put their cars in the garage. Mom wouldn’t recognize anything. Everything would be so different.

  I could take her back to the lake house, but she wouldn’t recognize it either. It’s been redecorated as well. Mom decorated the lake house by shopping at Goodwill and other thrift stores. Besides the beds, there wasn’t anything in the house that cost more than five dollars. If her grandchildren broke anything, she wasn’t going to get mad about it. She wasn’t going to spend all of her time at the lake yelling at her grandchildren. If the grandchildren sat on the couch in their wet bathing suits, no problem. We’ll just go to the nearest thrift store and buy another one. When they came to the lake, everyone was going to have a good time.

  Those grandchildren are in their thirties now. They’re married with children of their own. They won’t be coming to the lake for Christmas. We won’t be there for the Fourth of July, Memorial Day, or Labor Day. The children won’t be standing around the kitchen waiting for the ribs to be pulled off the grill or biscuits to come out of the oven. We won’t be sitting at the table listening to Dad tell stories or taking boat rides as the sun sets on the river.

  That’s all gone. There’s no home to take her home to. My elementary school is still there, but Mr. Dubose, Mrs. Snider, and Mrs. Stevens aren’t. My middle school is gone, and my high school has closed. Huntsville Park Baptist Church is still there. University Baptist Church is as well. But there aren’t many people there that Mom and Dad knew. Everything’s changed.

  I’m still here, but I’m the wrong me. She wants her son with her, but she wants me as a little boy. She wants me to crawl up in her lap and read a book with her. She wants to sing with me while I’m crawling into bed. She wants to make sure I’ve brushed my teeth and I’ve eaten all of my vegetables. She wants Dad in his chair, and my brother and I on the floor in front of the TV with her working on some project on the couch. That’s what she wants when she tells me to take her home, but all of that is gone.

  Coffee with Mom: “I just want to go home. This place is fine, but it’s not home. None of my friends are here. I just want to go home.”

  All she has are her memories, and now, she’s losing those. It’s one thing to have to let go of life and go through the normal grieving process. It’s quite another to have to let go of your life and forget all that you’re losing when you let it go.

  As I recognized Mom was unable to remember fewer and fewer things, I started remembering for her. I would tell her stories. We would laugh as we recounted details of our family’s journey and adventures. When I stopped telling the story, Mom would fade away again. She couldn’t remember what we had just talked about. She couldn’t remember that she had remembered.

  But for that moment, Mom would come alive again. She would be my mom, and even if it was for just a few seconds, she would be her old self again.

  I began coming to Morning Pointe to see her with several stories in mind.

 
“Hey, Mom, do you remember our house on Pinedale Drive?”

  She would smile like she did.

  “Do you remember when Dad backed into the tree in the front yard? He got in his old VW van, hit the gas, and ran his van halfway up that tree. Dad got out of the van like the tree had just appeared there overnight.”

  Mom and I were both laughing.

  “You used to get so mad at us,” I said, “because we always played ball in our front yard and tore up the grass.”

  “And all the shrubs and trees,” she said. She remembered. She didn’t remember for long, but she remembered for that moment.

  “Your dad used to love to walk Barney,” Mom would say. Barney was their dog. He was a black schnauzer Mom got for Dad after his first heart attack. Dad loved Barney and walked him every morning and every night. That was twenty-five years later. Barney never lived on Pinedale Drive. Mom had forgotten that.

  “When you built the house on Locust Avenue, do you remember how Dad would sit out in the front yard and watch the construction?”

  Mom smiled. “The workers called him ‘Sitting Bull.’”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” I said.

  “I miss your dad,” she would say, and then, she would drift off again. Sometimes she would come back to the conversation, and sometimes she wouldn’t.

  Mom could remember. She just couldn’t remember by herself. If I was there and told a few stories, she would remember, and she would live in that moment again. It would last only a few minutes, but she would recapture that moment. The next day, I might tell the same story again, but it wouldn’t matter. She would remember like it was the first time she had heard the story.

  And we did that over and over and over. I would tell a story. Mom would remember. Then, she’d forget. I’d tell a story, and she would remember. And then, forget again.

  And with my family, I always had plenty of stories. There were stories about growing up in Mississippi and going to school in Laurel, Mississippi. There were stories of being in the Air Force and living on base. I would remind her that I got lost on one of the bases, and when the mailman brought me back home, she squeezed so hard I thought she was going to choke me. Then, she spanked me for going somewhere I wasn’t supposed to go.

  There was the story of Hazel falling out of the car, Austin and his Pall Mall cigarettes, PaPa and his golfing, Mom and her three sisters. There were stories about moving to Huntsville and paying ninety-five dollars a month for their first house payment. Mom said it scared her and Dad to death. There were stories of the television store and politics, church friends, and neighborhood gatherings. I had a lifetime of stories, and I told every one of them to her.

  She would remember. Then, she would forget, but for that moment, she was home.

  Coffee with Mom: “I wish I had something exciting to tell you, but we just sat around and looked at each other today.”

  This was the way I took her home. We went everywhere. We went up and down Memorial Parkway. We went to the new mall and the old mall. We went from Drake Avenue all the way to Mastin Lake Road. We went from Corman’s Bakery to Michael Restaurant, from Huntsville Park Baptist Church to the Jesus mosaic on the front of First Baptist Church. We would drive down through neighborhoods where their friends had lived. We drove through Redstone Arsenal. We went back to her home in Mississippi. Back to the little church in Shady Grove where she learned to play the piano. We went everywhere in between.

  Every morning I would take her home. We couldn’t drive there anymore, but we got there just the same. We found out we could go a very long way on two cups of coffee.

  Chapter 17

  The Only Man Who’ll Need Two Votes to Get into Heaven

  Coffee with Mom: “I’m glad your daddy’s not here. He would hate to see me like this.”

  My mom cared for my dad twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Her entire life was focused on keeping my dad healthy. Then, as he weakened, she focused on keeping him comfortable, and finally, she put her full energy into just keeping him alive. She wouldn’t let him stay in bed, no matter how bad he felt. He had to get up, get his shower, and get dressed. She usually had their day planned. There would be errands to run, people to see, and projects to accomplish.

  When I mentioned to her that she may be pushing Dad too hard, she told me she couldn’t let him give up. Which to her meant she couldn’t let Dad give up anything because if he gave up anything, Dad would soon give up everything.

  Every day would be the same. Mom would get up, get dressed, and start telling Dad to get up and get dressed. Their friends would be waiting on them at Gibson’s. They had a lot to do. The rental property needed looking after, they had to go to the bank, and to the post office. (I think Mom made things up so Dad would have something to do.)

  Several times Dad would call me in the middle of the day. When I would ask what he was doing, he would wander around in his answer. Finally, I would interrupt. “You’re in the Walmart parking lot, aren’t you? You got bored and called me.”

  “Yeah, I am, son. You know your mama.”

  Whatever anyone else may think about my mom’s hard-driving style, I’m firmly convinced she kept my dad alive longer than anyone thought possible. This was confirmed in a conversation I had with the doctor who had treated Dad during his first heart attack.

  “I didn’t think he had five years left,” he said, “but he made a liar out of me.”

  Dad lived twenty years after his first heart attack. Probably because my mother wouldn’t let him die.

  And she wouldn’t leave him alone either. If Dad was in the hospital, Mom was in the hospital. If Dad had a doctor’s appointment, Mom was right there with him. Every once in a while, Mom would have something she couldn’t get out of or couldn’t postpone. Sometimes, strain would finally catch up to her and wear her down. Only after failing at every attempt to change things, only then, would she give in and finally go home to rest.

  In those rare moments, I would have the chance to talk to Dad. I asked him one time if he had had the chance to go to college, where would he have gone? He told me LSU. That surprised me. I thought, being from Mississippi, he would have said Ole Miss. Nope, he said, in that part of the country (south Mississippi) anybody who was anybody had gone to LSU.

  “What would you have majored in?” I asked.

  “Law,” he said. “I’d have been a lawyer, and I would have run for office.” He looked at me and pointed his finger for emphasis. “I’d have been a senator,” he said. He probably would, and he would have been a good one. Mom would have made sure.

  I asked him if he had thought about making the Air Force a career. “Yeah,” he told me, “I did. Then I found out my next station was going to be Greenland.”

  “Greenland? What’s in Greenland?”

  “A big radar installation. They wanted me to go up there and run that thing. I just didn’t see a future up there. Too cold for me.”

  And we would talk about death and dying. Mom never would let him talk about dying. For her, it was a sign of giving up. So, Dad learned to wait until Mom was out of the room, and as soon as she left he would start talking to me.

  “Mike, son, the handwriting is on the wall. I’m not going to make it much longer.”

  “Dad, don’t say that. The doctors say you’re doing fine.”

  “What they’re saying, son, is I’m doing fine for a man in my condition, and my condition is dying.”

  “Are you scared?”

  “No, I’m not scared of death. I’m scared of dying. Will dying hurt?”

  “I don’t know, Dad.”

  “Will it hurt like my first heart attack? I felt like someone was beating me in the chest with a sledge hammer. I don’t want to hurt like that again.”

  “I’m sure, when it comes time, the doctors will do everything to keep you comfortable.”

/>   “I’m okay dead. I just don’t want to die.”

  “I guess that makes sense.”

  “Now, son, I won’t be here to make sure things are done right. I’m counting on you to take care of your mother. Now, I want her taken care of the way I would take care of her, you understand?”

  “Sure, Dad. I understand.”

  When my dad was angry or tense, the muscles in his jaw would ripple from back to front and then back again. His jaws were in full motion. (When we were kids, this was the sign from Dad that we had gone too far.) He would also point directly at your face to make sure you were listening.

  Coffee with Mom: “Don’t think I’m not going to tell your daddy everything. And when I do, you’re going to be in big trouble.”

  And I was listening. I got every word. I didn’t have to write anything down. He burned it into my brain. “Your mama should have plenty to live on. There’s the lake house. It’s paid for. There’s the rental property. Get what you can for the land in Mississippi, and she’ll have a little from my retirement and social security. So, she should be okay. Now, you know how I want her treated. Keep her in the house as long as you can. She loves that house. But whatever you do, you know how I want her treated. You know how I want things done.”

  I did know. The problem was Dad never mentioned any of this to Mom. Nothing about the finances. Nothing about the property. Nothing about the responsibility he put on me.

  Nothing.

  “Mom, I’m only doing what Dad told me to do.”

  “When did he tell you? I never left his side for twenty years. When did you and he have these deep conversations about what he wanted done?”

  “Whenever I would stay with him, Mom, this is what we’d talk about. He left me very specific instructions on how he wanted things done.”