This Mother’s Day I Will Send No Flowers
By Monica Sharpe
I watch the deep furrows of her forehead soften with each stoke of my fingers, I sense she knows I’m here trying to reassure her like the countless times she comforted me when I was sick. I sit here beside Mama in her hospital bed looking at her jaundiced, cancer ravaged body praying to our good Lord God to please release her from all this suffering. “You know Mary, I don’t know if I can wear yellow, it’s never been my favorite color on me, but I have always prided myself at being different, and now I certainly am!” We laughed when Mama made this comment after my sister’s wedding...
Four four days after Anna's wedding, Mom’s test results revealed what I’m sure she already knew, cancer was imminent. What type of cancer it was, would only be determined by more tests. Dr. Rosa almost immediately delivered the dreaded diagnosis after a series of tests; cancer of the pancreas and liver. Surgery was scheduled and dreaded, we knew what the surgery would reveal. What we didn’t know was to what extent the cancer was devouring her, and how long I have left with the woman who had become my best friend...
How undeserving. This gracious woman who raised six, generally unappreciative children, including myself, was finally able to enjoy life when four days after the youngest leaves home she’s burdened with the knowledge she almost certainly has some form of incurable cancer. Three to six months to live was the most time doctors predicted Mama would have left after the first surgery. Time…the greatest healer. Not this time…all the sand was drained from this hourglass...
Dying, she listened to the hospital nurse read out the dinner invitation. Tubes in her arms and tubes in her nose, her body ravaged with pain she still smiled, “Oh, I think I’ll definitively be there.” Even when pain made her momentarily old, you could still glimpse the woman she had been, a great beauty, strong and proud, a woman ahead of her time. She had the endless spirit to help others, ironically, as a child I remember sitting under her sewing table playing with the scraps of fabric she used to make ‘cancer pads’ for hospital patients. What started out as an individual way for her to ease someone’s discomfort ended up with her organizing dozens of women all sewing a array of assorted items for cancer patients and for the veterans hospital in our church’s activity room...
Mother adopted ailing plants the way some people adopt puppies or abandoned kittens, nursing them back to health. She could of gardened in old teacups and did, “Don’t throw away that cracked bowl,” she would say, “It’s just right for starting that philodendron slip, just turn it around and no one will ever see the crack.” On our frequent visits she always made sure there were some freshly baked cookies with a pot of tea. Mama was never too ill or too tired to fix her nails and set her hair. She had courage, the kind of courage I don’t know that I could have demonstrated, “I had a wonderful life, a good husband and six fine children who have their own families now,” she said at the end, “I’m ready to go. There’s nothing terrible about going.”
My self-seeking reasoning that maybe Mama’s entire life was raising children and that life without Dad, now with my sister married, would only be a lonely excursion. After all, her life was her family, but where was her fine children now? Each of my brothers living in different states, my sister, a newlywed with her own hand of dealt problems, all consumed with their everyday issues. Where were her brothers and sisters? Where was her Mother? For all the people she cared for, where was anyone now? This austere hospital room should be overflowed with more than her “Mary Sunshine”...
My unselfish reasoning is that Mama deserved so much more from life. She should finally be able to go on a date, a cruise, spend time with friends and family at her leisure. She should be able to grow old and have the love and attention of her children and grandchildren. Not lying here unconscious with this disease devouring her body and spirit and her daughter singing her the same lullabies she so long ago sang to her as a child...
This year and every year from now on I will send no flowers. My mother died young. I will always remember her gifts to me. My mother was my first and best teacher. She would be gratified to see how well her lessons took. Just yesterday, I made several mistakes on a project at work, I redid it over and over and still the outcome was the same. I put it aside for a while, and begin again. My mother moves in me still. “Is this your best work?” she would ask. Whether the object was an English composition or sewing a simple doll’s dress, she rarely criticized directly. “If you used a ruler, you could keep the columns straight.” Or, fingering a rumpled garment, “The seam is puckered; maybe you could baste the pieces before you use the sewing machine.” The pressure was subtle, a combination of this is how it’s done and I’m sure, you’re not satisfied with that, and so I discovered by degrees, the singular pleasure of work well done. A beautifully finished garment, a perfect German chocolate cake, a beautifully set table, flowers planted in a garden that the colors off set each other, joy in rightness is my mother’s legacy...
What else did she teach me? Practical things, like how to slip a plant and know whether the cutting would root better in water or soil. How to lay out and create a pattern when there isn’t quite enough fabric. Whenever I cut shortening into flour for pie crust or bathe my children, her hand guides me...
My mother had no conscious philosophy of life or child rearing. But her attitude and beliefs were so consistent, so strongly expressed in her actions that I followed as if reproducing the steps of a dance. I learned from my mother that there is always something to do, the ideal being two things at once. When mother waxed the basement floors, she wrapped old towels around her shoes, a little extra footwork kept them shining. She watered plants and emptied wastebaskets on the way to other tasks. If a friend stopped to talk, she reached for her crocheting. Until the last days, I have no image of mother just sitting. Is it any wonder that I, stretched out on the lawn, always find weeds to pull?
I learned from my mother to improvise, make over, and make do. She would create a table out of an old fruit crate, and make small stool out of juice cans. She bought flour in sacks and used to bleach the sacks to make dishtowels so strong that I still have them. When sheets were worn, she made me soft camisoles with lots of lace out of the good spots and new iron board covers out of the old. What was left, she saved for dust cloths. She could extend by years the life of a special garment, by taking in, hemming or adding special added touches. When the garment was beyond extending, she removed everything salvageable, zipper, buttons, bias binding. My mother saved not just because we were hard up, but because waste was detestable to her...
My mother’s most powerful lesson was a distillation of all the others. Life is doing. I still, most every morning make a list of things that have to be done, people to contact, work to complete. Often, as I do so, I have a vision of my mother in old age, visiting me and staying in bed to avoid interfering with my morning routine. When finally when I would appear with her morning coffee, she would ask, “What my dear have you accomplished?”
Beyond all lessons, beyond the model she provided, my mother gave me a parent’s ultimate gift. She made me feel loved and good. She paid attention, she listened, and she remembered what I said. She did not think of me as perfect, but she accepted me without qualification. Today’s books concerning parenting emphasize the importance of telling a child he or she is okay. No doubt, that is helpful, but when I think of how my mother made me feel okay, I realized it was not what she said. It was her pleasure in me, visible as “sunshine”. It was the way she brushed my hair around her fingers to make the ringlets that were my six-year-old pride. It was in her radiant look when I ran in from school and in her touch when I snuggled next to her...
A quarter of a century later, in a hospital room, waving away the food a nurse urged her to eat, she said, “I’m not hungry. I look at my daughter and I am full. She is my sunshine and is what keeps me going.”
I am no one’s daughter now, only a mother now. Carrying her gifts, I think about my mother and my children with love, gratitude and resolve...
This is a picture of my mother and my daughter taken a few months before she passed away. This excerpt was taken from a tribute I wrote for her on Mother's Day, four months after she passed away in January, 1981. She's been gone for thirty years now and she still guides my hand. No matter how old I am, I will always miss her...
