My mother died on this date, April 6th, 18 years ago. She was 74, and the cause of her death was congestive heart failure. Her heart was overburdened, with fluid, with age, with years of work, with lack of money, with taking care of everything. But her heart was not overburdened with love. She had the capacity of the Alpha and the Omega to love. No end to it, no boundary for it, no edges. She loved. Emphatically!
Her name was Mary Irene Phyllis Bisbee McElfresh, and she was born on April 13, 1917, at home on Indian land in Oklahoma. Her mother, Lucinda, and father, Lewis, were farmers. She attended elementary school until 1930, when she and her siblings stopped school to work, the family needing all able workers to survive the Great Depression.
During the Depression, Irene grew and sold vegetables, hewed logs into railroad ties, taught school, and waited tables. She was a short pretty woman with dark hair. When she was in her twenties, she worked in a war factory, a Rosie Riviter of a sort, during the 1940s. Her sister, Letha, introduced her to my father, M. K. McElfresh. MK was a wild kind of guy, good looking, black curly hair, blue eyes, tall. He and Irene were married and four years later, I was born.
I am an only child. Mom had a hard time with her pregnancy and was never able to have any more children. I am fortunate I was born a female because my male name was decided in advance: Abraham Lewis McElfresh. Luckily at the last minute I came out a girl and was spared that horrible moniker.
My dad had the knack of making money. He owned property in Kansas, winning fields and farms at cards. He owned a Chevrolet/Cadillac/John Deere agency and supplied cars, trucks, and farm equipment to Western Kansans. He owned a line of trucks that hauled livestock and agriculture. And he gambled and drank the money away as fast as he made it.
For most of my childhood, I was privileged. I had music teachers and vacations in Denver and early education at home. My mom taught me herself. In addition to writing and math, she taught me to cook and sew and gave me her love of reading and music. We did almost everything together, from listening to opera on phonograph records to planting the garden and canning the tomatoes. I can recall few childhood memories that do not include my mother.
There were some difficult times with my father because of his drinking. Eventually, as he squandered the money and drank away his senses, Mom decided to leave him. When I was twelve, we loaded our Chevy station wagon and left Kansas for Arkansas, where her parents lived. At 46 years old, my mom became an poor single mother.
I was not an easy teenager. I was a spoiled brat to be blunt. I expected to get what I wanted when I wanted it, and I lied constantly about my activities. My mom worked as a practical nurse at the local hospital. She also took extra shifts looking after private patients. Sixty to eighty hours a week were her norm. Usually she worked nights and slept while I was at high school. I did well in school and did what I wanted while she was at work.
I was married when I was eighteen. My mother was supportive as always, even if she didn't think it would last, and she was right. It didn't last. She was disappointed I didn't finish college then. But Mom never let my personal choices affect her love for me. She was there for me, all the way. I knew I could count on her. And I did. Believe me, I counted on her so many times in my life. Like most children, I needed my mom.
I had children later in life just as she did. My twins were born when I was 33. Mom was there, helping, loving, approving, supporting. She was my tall timber, my main sail. I went back to college, had a heart attack, went to work. As I think back, I don't recall a single time in my life when I needed her and she wasn't there. Can you imagine having a constant like that? Someone who never failed you?
Mom wasn't a healthy person, but she kept going. She had myasthenia gravis, cancer of the parathyroids, rheumatoid arthritis, crushed legs from an accident with a drunk driver, injuries from an accident with a freight train, and somehow she came back from all that to her last job walking around town visiting retired people in their homes.
Mom began to fail about the time the girls entered first grade. Her big heart was having a hard time supporting her little body. Eventually she had to be hospitalized and before she could be transferred to an "old age home," a prospect she dreaded, she died. My two cousins Melanie and Georgia Lea and my Aunt Jean came out to help with the funeral and closing up her apartment.
I couldn't deal with it. I closed down emotionally and did only what I had to do. I didn't cry. We took her ashes to the Oregon Coast to a place called Seal Rock where we had often gone for picnics. Mom loved the coast, clam chowder, crab, seashells, the salt air. Once she tried to talk a sailor out of a King Crab and she almost got him to give it to her! I can't go back to Seal Rock yet.
The girls were seven and devastated at the loss of their grandma. Did I mention she was the best grandma in the whole wide world? She was the Best, capital B. I wish she had lived longer to see how wonderfully they turned out. Both are strong and talented and beautiful and incredibly intelligent. But then you knew they would. After all, there's a lot of her in them. And there is a lot of her in me. We look alike. God, I miss her.
