Tomorrow, July 4, 2024, marks the tenth anniversary of my mother’s death. As I wrote at the time, it felt like she was regaining her independence from Alzheimer’s. Although it was hard to lose her, she was ready to leave us.
I’ve also written before that I spent the first thirty years of my life trying to distance myself from my mother, and the decades since then (now more than thirty years) realizing how much we were alike. Still, since her death, I have also reflected on the ways we were different. Over the past ten years, I’ve been trying to find my mother, to understand the woman she was beyond being my mother.
One of the things I took from her home after my father died (just six months after she did) was a series of journals she kept from about 1998 until 2006 or so. Actually, she had two sets of journals. One was a series of travel journals about trips she and my father took. I didn’t take that set. I took the set in which she recorded her daily scripture readings, with the hopes that she would write about how those readings affected her.
But she didn’t. Or rarely did.
In these journals, she summarized the Bible readings and commentaries she read daily. She was diligent about reading daily. Sometimes in the margin of her journals, she would note “write about this.” So the journals told me she wanted to write, to publish her thoughts on life in this world and the next.
But she never did. I found very little of my mother’s personality or thoughts in these journals. All I found was her parroting back her understanding of the scriptures she read. I wish she had written more about her personal experiences and how her religion helped her cope with the problems in her life. That would have been a step toward my finding what I sought.
My own journals are full of my daily whining and occasional successes. I write about what I hope to accomplish each day, and what I failed to accomplish the day before. For the past several years, I have tried to list what I am grateful for each day (even if it is only “leftovers available for dinner tonight so I don’t have to cook”), as well as how I have tried to help others during the day. Because what we pay attention to is how we live, and I want to be helpful and grateful with my life.
My mother did many of the little things for others that I list each day. She had sad times in her life, but the period of these journals covered a fairly happy period—she and my father were free to travel and enjoy their children and grandchildren and their friends. Mother wasn’t diagnosed with Alzheimer’s until 2010, and the journals ended before then. (I wonder why they ended, or perhaps I never found the last few volumes. The last one I had didn’t contain any sign of her impending demise.)
There was no reason that she couldn’t have written more about her personal experiences and beliefs. But she didn’t.
Then, a couple of weeks ago in another box, I found a folder containing two essays my mother wrote to her friends (whom I’ll call Mrs. A and Mrs. B) in 1967 and 1970. One essay was on the subject of contentment—which Mother described as a state between happiness (which is hard to achieve) and sorrow (which we humans experience all too frequently). Mother prefaced the copy of this essay that I found with a note to Mrs. A. It had been written for a mutual friend of theirs, Mrs. B, at a time when my mother was in a difficult period of her life and Mrs. B was on top of the world. But just a few years later, when Mother passed the essay along to Mrs. A, my mother was at a much easier time of her life and Mrs. B was divorced—their situations had reversed.
The second essay was on the story of Martha and Mary, the sisters of Lazarus, who were Jesus’ friends. My mother came to the conclusion that modern women should integrate both Martha’s life of service and Mary’s life of contemplation. As I was growing up, Mother always complained she had the life of Martha, when she wanted the life of Mary. Yet here she was saying that both were important.
Many years later, Mrs. A returned these essays to my mother, and somehow, my parents retained them. When I found the essays, I unexpectedly found a glimpse of the woman who was my mother. These were the types of essays she said in the margins of her journals that she wanted to write.
But I have little evidence that she wrote more than these. I know she wrote a few pieces late in her life, but nothing as lengthy or as deep as these two essays she wrote for her friends.
I will likely scan these essays before discarding the hard copy. And I wish I had more such essays I could save. I wish I could have known how she felt at many times in her life. I’d like to know more about how we are the same and how we are different.
What do you wish you knew about your parents?
