Death of a Parent

My mother at an “Old Fashioned Day” at her church, 1986.

In approaching this subject, even writing the title, I find it hard to breathe. The loss of a parent is that profound. 

My mother, Margaret Lee Ware Atanacio Elliott, died in a hospital far from me in Ketchikan, Alaska, in June of 2008, about a month before our older son Chris was married the first time. The wedding was not a problem that hindered me from attending the funeral, since unlike the two previous weddings, my role as mother of the groom was small. 

The cash to buy a plane ticket was not there, but Grandpa Ware volunteered the money so I could go, saying he was too old to travel anymore and he wanted me to represent him at the funeral of his only daughter. 

My mom (center) with her dad Lee Roy Jr. (below),

along with his second wife, Pearl (R) and her daughter Jackie (L)

I departed from the Indianapolis Airport on the Fourth of July, and stayed at my mom’s house for about a week.

It’s impossible, it seems, to have a funeral without controversy of some kind, and my mom’s funeral was no exception. The hardest part was when my brother Dan wanted me to petition Grandpa for money so he could go to the funeral too. He wanted to speak at the funeral and tell how Mom had taught him to be a free thinker…

Mom had been pretty ill for a long time when she died. 

It stunned me when we got back from Hawaii, to find out Mom had taken up smoking. She had never done that before I left home, but she and Dan picked me up from the airport when I landed in California, and Dan gave her a light. Seeing the two of them smoking in the front seat befuddled my senses. I knew Dan was a smoker, but Mom? What had happened? I cried somewhat quietly in the back seat, and surprised by my emotional reaction, Mom explained that she’d had cancer, and the only advice the doctor gave her, for control of the nausea that accompanied chemo treatments, was “Well, smoking sometimes helps.” So she took up smoking at 40 years old. Of course, she hadn’t told me about the cancer either. She said she didn’t want me to worry about it. I probably don’t have to elaborate on my response to that bit of news.

There were other things in Mom’s health history that my kids should know if they’re filling out New Patient Information forms in a doctor’s office. Mom had diverticulitis, hypoglycemia that led to diabetes, and another bout of cancer later on. Mom and John didn’t stick with a good diabetic diet, though, and both were obese. The routine in Ketchikan was to spend most of the day with the window blinds closed, watching TV. The sheer number of VHS videos in their home (mostly pirated) was formidable. John had taken the time and energy to categorize all of the videos in a simple file system on a hand-held gadget so he could find the room and shelf where each of his videos was stored. This was their major interest.

More recently, though, Mom had suffered a stroke. I knew it was bad when one day she sent me an email with gibberish. She just couldn’t type anymore. It came out wrong, like all the keys were in the wrong place. She said, in badly spelled sentences, that every time she tried to go back and fix things, it still wasn’t fixed. And that was the end of the communication. Mom was unable to think clearly enough to put sentences together. 

This was well before all the various ways to video chat, a concept reserved at the time for cartoons like The Jetsons and some sci-fi movies. And when you live in Indiana and she lives in Alaska, when phone calls are only one-way with only one person doing all the talking (me), and when there is nothing in writing ever, it’s very hard to keep in touch. 

Eventually, Mom, my once-active, intelligent, beautiful mother, was put in long-term care, and her husband visited her daily and played card games with her. (I don’t know – Old Maid?) We could only keep tabs on her through her husband, and what little information he provided. I tried to tell Dan that we needed to be friends with John, but he wanted to file a police report and accuse John of elder abuse. I never did figure out why he felt that, but somehow he thought their house was too messy and germy.

Once we talked to her pastor, who guilt tripped us because we had not come to Alaska to visit. But we were trying to raise a passel of kids on a shoestring budget, and a trip of that magnitude was simply not possible. Besides, Mom had decided to move up north on her own years ago, not really thinking about how far she would be from her kids and grandkids. What could we do?

In the end, Mom died when a heart valve burst. She died alone. She lived too far away from all her kids, and her husband was drunk at home when he got the call, with no way to drive to the hospital.

When Dan told me he wanted Grandpa to fund his trip, all I could remember were those times when Dan told me in no uncertain terms how much he hated Grandpa and where all his money could go. Once, when we were actually on speaking terms, he had told me that the small amount of inheritance money Grandpa had given out while Dan was still in high school – $5,000 to each of his descendents – had been invested in the necessary supplies to start a meth lab business, so he blamed Grandpa for the drug overdose that nearly killed him and his wife and landed him in a drug rehab facility. Naturally, it was not possible for me to put in a good word for him with Grandpa. I told Dan to call him himself. And that didn’t work. Grandma Pearl told him they couldn’t afford to send him too.

Because of Grandpa’s contribution to my trip, I spent a few days packing and making plans to go to Alaska for the funeral, including chore charts and lesson plans for the entire week for our kids’ homeschooling. The Fourth of July is actually a good date to get a flight. Unfortunately, though, once we were up in the air, it was terrifying to see what the passenger in the seat next to me was doing for entertainment. I couldn’t hear the DVD, since the earbuds were re-directing the sound, but glancing over, I saw a short murder scene on her screen. 

And I wept through that flight, as I focused on the clouds below.

I stayed with Mom’s husband John, at their house. There was so much pain there! He had a bear collection and she had cats. Besides the live cats and the thick mat of cat hair on the sofa where I slept, there were small cat figurines from her collection everywhere (mostly found at Leonard’s Antiques), caked with the dust of many years. In the living room, there was a familiar table – the carved coffee table our family had brought home from the Philippines, with the glass long gone and a leg or two badly nailed into place. On the walls, there were the paint-by-numbers cockatoo pictures Mom had painted when I was about five. And there was the cuckoo clock, long gone silent.

I looked through her “stuff.” John was anxious to get rid of her jewelry collection for sure so I sorted it and brought home what I thought I could use or give away – as much as I could fit in my baggage. I found the Tennessee Ernie Ford Christmas record and asked if I could have that one as it was precious to me. And I located the ceramic nativity set Mom had created during our stay at Travis AFB. I told John I wanted that shipped to me – carefully packed and shipped. And I would foot the bill for the postage.

I found out things I didn’t want to know, and I found out things I did want to know. There was a huge stack of papers next to her printer, where Mom had printed every email she ever got from me. She stopped when she ran out of ink. She didn’t know she was out of ink. She only knew she “couldn’t get the emails off the computer anymore.” I don’t know why she printed them for sure. Either she didn’t know how to scroll through a long letter or she just wanted to keep copies of my writings to read again someday.

I made a list of things to do while I was there. (What would I do without my lists?) John gave me the option of seeing my mom’s body at the morgue, but said that because she was being cremated, she didn’t look so good. I winced squeamishly, and decided not to put that on my list.

I had to write something for the memorial service. But, first I had to excavate their computer, figure out how to turn it on and get the word processor going, and buy some ink! I threw out the dead plants. John showed me my mom’s favorite restaurant, with the view of the bay and the eagles, and I bought him a nice seafood dinner. We found some pictures to use at the funeral, and some memorabilia, such as her certificate of graduation from the nurse’s aid training she finally completed to realize her life’s dream. I found Mom’s Black Hills gold ring and put it on. I picked out some jewelry for each of our daughters and Lisa’s daughters and put them in little bags.  Here’s a picture from a Career Leadership School:

And I met the pastor. Ah yes, he was the one we’d contacted a while back, who had chided us for not coming to visit Mom. It hadn’t done any good to tell him that we lived a long way away, we had a lot of mouths to feed, and plane tickets to Alaska are not cheap. Or that she was the one who had moved there on a whim, far from all family, because she and John had spent some insurance money they’d collected from an auto accident, on an Alaskan cruise, and decided they had to relocate. 

But we also didn’t tell him that the other main reason we hadn’t even let our kids come to work a summer job in Ketchikan, as Mom would have liked, was that because when we did it the first and only time with Lisa, John had been attempting to inappropriately touch her during her stay -- thank God that He didn't allow it! – which triggered all the painful memories of my own childhood again and gave me semi-murderous feelings towards him. I felt mostly reconciled with John over time, but only because he lived so far away and I never saw him. And Lisa, looking back on the experience, has recently written about being a survivor of sexual abuse.

I found my mother’s Key Club pin from high school, which was interesting, but I found the real key to her heart when I located her Wordless Book. It had some moisture damage, but all the pages were there, and it was fitting for a visual tribute. In the end, my mom was herself wordless. Sometimes in those one-way phone conversations, she would start to say a sentence in response to some bit of news I’d shared. “That reminds me of the time that … “ And then she’d stop. Sometimes I’d play Twenty Questions with her for a bit, trying to guess what time she was talking about, A few times, I could get it right. Bingo! But usually, she just said, “no … “ in a rather dejected way.

But that Wordless Book formed the basis of my keynote address at the funeral. There are only five colored pages in a Wordless Book. The colors can also be represented by a Gospel Glove, which my mom tried to use in the Sunday School at the Navy Chapel we used to attend at Los Alamitos, but which plan was overruled by the chaplain, who said parents needed to teach children that stuff at home. (She subsequently left the chapel.)

My mother taught me the Gospel of Jesus Christ, as she taught many children in Sunday School and VBS all her life. She didn’t use the Wordless Book at the time, but I know that was on her heart, and I said so in that eulogy. I will never see those people in Ketchikan again, but if there were even one or two who heard my words that day and learned about salvation in Jesus, it was worth the trip for me to deliver them.

The pages are:

• Green, to represent the perfect world God created.

• Black, to represent sin, which crept into God’s perfect world through Adam and Eve, and which still plagues us today.

• Red, to represent the blood of Jesus Christ, His sacrifice to save those people who would come to believe in Him.

• White, to represent how clean we are, washed in the Blood, when Jesus takes away all our sins.

• And Gold, to represent Heaven, where lies the promise of eternal life with God for those who believe in Jesus and receive Him into their hearts.

There were some other things in my eulogy, about how she had affected the lives of others in a positive way. The Black Hills gold ring had its own story, about how Mom had inspired a Senior Girl Scout troop in Arizona to take a cross-country trip in two vehicles and visit Girl Scout National Headquarters in New York (which was actually closed the day we went to see it because it was a Saturday). The one souvenir Mom really wanted from the trip was just a little bit of Black Hills gold when we went through South Dakota, nothing much. When the Girl Scouts found out that “Mrs. A” was crying because she couldn’t afford even the smallest souvenir, they pooled their resources and surprised her with the ring, to show her how much they loved her. That made her cry even more!

My mother’s Black Hills gold ring

These memories were all news to the people at the memorial service, because none of them knew of anything earlier than my mother’s life with John. My brother had wanted to come and tell everybody how our mom had encouraged him to be a free thinker, but … he wasn’t there, so instead they heard the Gospel. Mom was not a perfect individual, but she’s in Heaven, waiting for me. And I have hung onto those things she taught me with all my might, because they have proven to be true.

Mom was cremated and her ashes were put in some kind of box that John drove around with in the trunk of his car for a while before he did something with it. Later on, after I was back in Indiana, John fed the ashes to the fishes at a little stream that led to the ocean. 

Apparently, failing to help Dan get to Alaska was fatal for our relationship, so Dan and Rennie had their own private memorial service in Oregon and then utterly disowned me. 

I did finally threaten John enough so that he succeeded in packing up my mother’s nativity set and getting the box to the post office. (The first time we sent money, he spent it on someone else.) 

And the fact that he got “tipsy” every night so he “could sleep better,” did not endear him to me. The last night I was there, he was “tipsy” enough to be belligerent, saying that my mom was supposed to live longer and he thought when he married her that she came with some kind of warranty. He also blamed me vehemently for not sending our other kids to Alaska, so that my mother was sad when she died. Needless to say, I was very glad to leave Alaska behind. Eventually, he moved or something, with no forwarding address.

On the flight back home, I was distressed and crying because the TSA agent had held up the entire flight, scanning all the little bags of bath soap Mom had made in adult daycare and checking for explosives, as well as all the jewelry I had packed. 

A fellow believer in the next seat kept glancing over at me, brought out his Bible, and finally started a conversation. I smiled through my tears at his timid but sincere efforts to help me, told him yes, I knew the Gospel well, and in fact I was a pastor’s wife! … but I had just lost my mother. He was relieved and we had some good conversation then. He pointed at the little white teddy bear with an “I Love You, Mom” heart, that I had positioned in the seat pocket ahead of me, and said, 

“Everyone who loses a parent is five years old.”

And that was me.

Mom, maybe you know how much I miss you, but I know I will see you again! It will probably be at a wedding.  And the way things are going in the world today, maybe it will be sooner, rather than later.  

Mom with my sister Rennie and me at her vow renewal ceremony at Luke AFB, 1972