My Mother's Birthday

 Mother and me - 1951

My mother was born on March 10, 1920, one hundred years ago today. But we won't be celebrating. She died in 2004 at age 84. 
She was born in a farmhouse in the Splatter Creek Community of Greene County to a farmer and his wife. She was the 9th of 13 children and the first to be born with the help of a midwife. She was also the first in her family to graduate from high school. She was salutatorian. She told me at the end of her life that she would have been valedictorian if she hadn't done the French homework for person who finished above her in class rank. That person was her nephew, son of a sister who was 19 years her senior. She would have been the first in her family to graduate college. She was offered a full scholarship to Tusculum College. But she had something else in mind. "I wanted to get married." She and my father married a week after her high school graduation, slipping away from Decoration Day at the local cemetery and getting married in the living room of the First Baptist Church of Kingsport's manse. . 
I was living with her, taking care of her, when she died 16 years ago. I wrote this column as my own little tribute:

I’ve been writing my mother’s obituary for the last two years, since that summer day in 2002 when my aunt Nola called me in Louisville to tell me that mother was at her house in Greeneville.

My mother had been wandering her own home for the previous few days, disoriented, leaving the phone off the hook, getting her medicine and its dosages mixed up. She was in bad shape and her friends had intervened, transporting her to her sister’s until I could arrive.

I got there as quickly as I could and I found my mother, as strong a person as I have ever known, quivering. I knew what I had to do: I would have to take over her care. She had been living alone, a widow, for 16 years. But she would no longer be able to do that. She couldn’t remember phone numbers; she lost track of her medicine; and she couldn’t handle cooking her meals.

That night I lay awake composing my mother’s obituary, that’s how different she was from the woman I had visited only a month earlier.

For the first time in my life I saw my mother’s mortality. The woman who had spoon-fed me, dressed me, sent me off to school, met me at the bus stop, now had trouble dressing herself.

I knew that soon - I didn’t know how soon, I didn’t want to think about how soon - I would have to write her obituary.

I struggled to think what I wanted the world to know about her.

That she had the biggest heart and the gentlest nature of any person I had ever known.

That while she sometimes couldn’t open a jar of jelly she was so strong that she endured almost constant pain from broken vertebrae, bones crushed by osteoporosis.

That she kept a stack of coconut cakes in the freezer awaiting the call that someone was sick or someone had died.

I started and restarted her obituary countless times that fitful night.

But I could never find the words.

At daybreak I knew I couldn’t write her obituary because I couldn’t stand the thought that my mother might die.

I moved back to Kingsport to care for her, to phone her friends, to wash her clothes, to cook her meals - that last one a joke. My mother, the most wonderful cook in the world, never taught me to cook. She preferred to do it for me and I was content to lick spatulas instead of stirring them.

But her appetite and her tastes had so narrowed that she raved about my grilled cheese sandwiches - two slices bread plus one slice processed cheese in toaster oven. She bragged to her friends what a wonderful cook I was.

I should have recognized then that her mind was slipping.

I’ve started her obituary over a hundred times in the two years that I’ve been back in Kingsport.

Must mention her desserts. Especially cream puffs. Don’t forget her French fries. Her years of rising before dawn to bake wedding cakes and prepare country ham biscuits for wedding planners Mildred Faris and Gladys Porterfield. Her love of clothes and fashion and Dean Martin’s crooning. How, after I went away to college, she adopted Theresa Bellamy and Michelle Free as the daughters she never had.

But I was never able to find the time to tap out a few thoughts into the computer. I knew it wasn’t because I didn’t have the time; it was because I didn’t want to write my mother’s obituary.

But now I have to.

My mother died Saturday morning at Indian Path Hospital, two weeks after suffering a stroke. It was peaceful and painless and all the things we all hope for in our own deaths. Her last breath was as gentle as her life.

And now I’m searching for the words and phrases to explain a lifetime of love, of unselfish, undemanding devotion.

And I can’t find any. I’ve been a professional writer since I was 21 years old but I can’t find the words to explain the greatest tragedy of anyone’s life, the loss of a mother.

There are no words.