I'm glad Mom's dead

and I'll tell you why

Because if my Mom were alive today, she’d be royally pissed off.

Marge (Mom) was born when the stock market crashed in 1929. She grew up during the Great Depression and then saw her five brothers leave home to fight in World War II. A teenager at the end of the war, Marge’s ambition was to leave rural Missouri and move to the Big City, Chicago, to study nursing.

The country doctor that had taken care of her family needed an assistant, so Marge volunteered. Mom told me that among the harrowing things she saw as she went on calls with the doctor — besides the mutilating farming accidents and children suffering from undernourishment, chickenpox, and measles—the worst cases were the women suffering from self-induced abortions. Usually, they were already mothers with a half-dozen children, scarce food and money, and angry husbands. The women tried to become “unpregnant” through various folk remedies (including inducing Lysol into the vagina) or they went to “aunties” for help that didn’t help. One of these poor women was Marge’s aunt who died from sepsis; she left four children (Mom’s first cousins) to be raised by their grandparents.

When Marge got to the Big City, she enrolled in the nursing school at South Chicago Community Hospital. As a student nurse, she saw many more cases of women who came to the hospital for a “D & C” because they had complications from a botched abortion. The situation was always “hush-hush” because doctors could be implicated and reported to the state authorities. The danger of prosecution and the stigma were such that women rarely came to the hospital until they were almost at death’s door.

Marge was completely without illusion when she heard people proclaiming that they were “pro-life.” After her conversion to Catholicism, she heard that a lot. But Marge had her own battles to fight. They weren’t loud but they were waged with a determined spirit. Her husband (a Cuban doctor whom she met as a student nurse) was adamantly opposed to her going back to work after her four kids were in school. As I recall, his argument was “no wife of mine will work fuera de casa.” So, without an independent identity (her Marshall Field’s credit card had my Dad’s name on it), she took care of her kids and all the Cuban relatives who came along. She finally won the battle with Dad—and her nursing job helped my sister and me pay for our educations.

I was blessed with the opportunity to take care of Mom after Dad passed away and her own health declined. We had some good talks. She was happy about all the progress she had seen in her life. Even though she hadn’t taken part in women’s activism in the 1970s, she benefited from the advancement of women and the laws that sustained it. She was very proud to have her own bank account and credit cards in her name. She was proud to have bought herself a car and to have made some good (if modest) investments. She was extremely satisfied that her support helped me through graduate school and that she could bail me out when I was short on closing costs for my first condo. Marge liked working —moving up from staff RN on the med-surg floor, to Preceptor, to Nurse Supervisor of the night shift on the ortho floor. She worked at Ingalls Hospital in Harvey, Illinois, which serves a majority Black community. Marge won over the nurses and staff on her floor by inviting everyone to her house, at 7 am when their shift ended, for a monthly brunch. She was really interested in people. Mom told me she hadn’t appreciated how hard it was for the African Americans in our community until she was working full-time at Ingalls. (“Mary, I was raising four kids during the Civil Rights movement. I wasn’t paying as much attention as I should have.”)

She started paying more attention to politics when she and Dad retired (back to Missouri.) Her Letters to the Editor of the Rolla Daily News were legendary.

Marge voted in every election. She had had her doubts about Reagan. (She remembered his movies.) She was disappointed in George H. W. Bush. She liked Clinton and thought the brouhaha over the Lewinsky thing was “crap.” But she was incensed by the Bush v Gore decision in 2000 and couldn’t stand George W. Bush. (“A no-nothing and a faker.”)

I miss her like crazy, but I’m glad she isn’t here to see the US backsliding on progress and on democracy. I’m glad she hasn’t had to see people turning their noses up at life-giving vaccines during Covid. Or to listen to talk radio guys spew anti-immigrant hate. (In our family, we have a Cuban branch as well as a Filipino branch. And some African American twigs.) Or to see hard-fought-for women’s rights set back at least a half-century.

The night before Mom died, I was sitting in her hospital room with my laptop open. I was trying to grade papers but my eyes kept filling up with tears. Mom was drifting in and out of consciousness. At one point, she saw me crying and asked what was wrong. “I don’t want you to leave!” I answered. She looked at me for a minute, then said, “Mary, I’ll always be with you.”

She was right about that. And about a lot of other things.

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