Recent days gone by in the hospital
The nurse comes in mom’s room, looks at the chart and
asks two questions:
Nurse: What’s your name?
Mom: Joyce McCullough.
Nurse: When were you born?
Mom: January 14, 1934
Nurse: Good, that’s right.
The nurse can then proceed with what she came to do,
administer the 20 or so pills mom takes in the morning, put pain medication in
the pic line that runs from mom’s right arm to the left side of her chest, give
her a breathing treatment that smokes like dry ice, or shift her in bed because
mom has complained she is not comfortable.
Mom’s skin looks and feels like the outer layer of an onion.
Her hair, always high atop her head in years gone by, now looks like the fur on
her toy poodle. Recently, she looked at me with uncomprehending eyes, as if
questioning why I was in her room; or maybe worse, that I was someone who had
done her wrong.
These hospital scenes were from late last year and early this year when mom had pneumonia, congestive
heart failure and a urinary-tract infection, just after having had her second
surgery to replace disks in her lower back, since the hope was she would be
able to walk without a walker again and continue to live independently, but now
the hope is she lives without pain or infection and can enjoy visitors to her
room at the nursing home.
Back in the day
When she was manic she would sing of a donkey,
"He walled his eyes and switched his tail and went
eyonsi-yonsi-yonsi", but as a depressive she would barricade in the
bedroom away from dad and us children. Sometimes in church she would cry tears
of joy and raise a kleenex-filled hand to the sky, walking and weeping. Among
the feelings you get as a boy of 10 watching your mother take to the sawdust
trail at a brush arbor camp meeting in Greer, South Carolina, are pride,
humiliation and bewilderment.
Like her mother before her and like my oldest
sister, mom married and began having children too early. Born January 14, 1934,
she married February 12, 1949 at 15, had Brenda Joyce on September 15, 1950;
Cathy three years later, at 19, me October 1, 1956, at 22 and John Earl on
March 10, 1961, at 27. Her childbearing
years ended a year later when she had a complete hysterectomy.
Her mothering years ran from 1950 to 1964, years
that also covered the Korean Conflict, Mickey Mantle's 1956 Triple Crown –won
the day I was born, the ‘55 and '57 Chevy, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the
assassination of John F. Kennedy. But the most significant events for her were
when dad was “born again” in 1952 and surrendered to preach in 1957. These changes ushered in the 24/7 365 world
of religion and out - everything else.
Her father had been a cotton farmer and a house
painter whose own life swung back and forth between preaching and backsliding,
the Bible and the bottle. He died backslidden
in 1972, at age 69. Her mother Lula Ivadell, lived with her sister Lula May, in
Columbia, South Carolina - dying in early 1998, at age 86. She got height and
looks from her daddy and piss and vinegar from her momma.
Mom worked in a factory called Dunean, in Easley,
South Carolina when I was a little boy, and during this time, she and dad hired
a black woman, Alberta Adeline, from down the road, to stay with us children
and keep the house clean. I guess as poor as we were, there were people poorer still
– to serve as maid and nanny.
Mom has spent most of her life dealing with
physical problems. When her tonsils were removed as a newly wed, she nearly
bled to death. Her early hysterectomy was followed by a number of other
operations, including the removal of her gall bladder and a malignant
uterine tumor. But as she grew older, there were positive signs that she might
live a long life, since she and dad would walk about every day and her attitude
toward life grew more consistently positive.
On countless Mother’s Days and other Sundays,
during the post-child rearing years, she and dad would get out of bed and she
would complain of a headache or some other ailment and decide at the last
possible moment whether or not to walk down the hill to church with him. Most
of the time she would go to church and for his part, dad would request prayer
for her, which would make his life easier that coming week, since he had
shown a measure of compassion. There would be 12 to 14 people in the service,
including mom and dad. They would sing one of about 30 songs as a congregation
and mom and one of the other ladies would sing a duet or two solos.
After church she would get some pork chops or
hamburger out of the freezer they had in one of the church Sunday School rooms.
She would fry this and fix "cream potatoes," macaroni and cheese, and
larded-up green beans. Then dad would get his Bible while she laid down for a
Sunday afternoon nap. Then early in the evening her internal debate would begin
again as to whether she felt well enough to go to church again. It would be a
close call, but ultimately she would usually go, although she may or may not
stay for the entire service.
After church she would be light-hearted
and goofy, singing "On top of Smokey" or "Yankee doodle dandy," making up a song or
telling dad a story about her daddy or the time she met the snake in the
road and gave it “the right of way.” Or
together they would reflect on the years when we children were home and end
the night declaring they would not trade their children for any in the world.
More recent days in the nursing home
I visited her this past week in the nursing-home. She
has a view of the courtyard where squirrels, ducks and birds provide her entertainment.
She sang a song she made up based on her hours of looking out the window.
The tune sounded like a church hymn and although I cannot remember all the
words, the story in the song included hawks preying on small birds – the way
the devil had been trying to kill her; and ended with her singing:
“Now I can see the tops of the trees.”
Happy Mother’s Day Mom
