I wrote this in May 2005, less than a month after my mother's accident and death. She would have been 74 today.
WHEN LOVE PREVAILS
For years, my three sisters and I braced for the call: "Mama fell." "Mama had a stroke." "Something bad happened to Mama."
She was only 68. But my mother had Hepatitis C and had suffered all her life from debilitating depression, which led her to prescription drugs we know not what or how many or whether she was taking them properly. She lived alone, in a tumble-down bungalow in New Orleans, on disability.
And so the call came, but not nearly how I expected.
"Your mother has third-degree burns to her chest," the emergency room nurse at Charity Hospital in New Orleans told me.
Burns to her chest. Was she cooking? Did she fall into a bonfire? My three sisters and I couldn't figure it out. Only one of us talked to her that day, and by then, she was in shock. What we eventually did piece together was part fact, part imagination:
Sitting in the den of her New Orleans house with a whirring fan overhead, Mama had been trying to fill a cheap, 39-cent cigarette lighter with the wrong fluid. Instead of the fluid going into the lighter, though, it had dripped onto her clothes. When she went to flick the lighter, the polyester sweater she was wearing went up like a cheap paper napkin. This beautiful woman, her silky dark hair, her high cheekbones and her full smile -- even in her 60s -- likened to Sophia Loren, had run to the bathroom to strip off her burning clothes in the shower before they burned through to her skin. But it was too late. She'd already suffered third-degree burns to 40 percent of her body and second-degree burns to her face.
That was on a Monday, April 18, 2005, to be exact.
By Tuesday afternoon, 24 hours after her accident, we were all with her. All four of Audrey's daughters left husbands, jobs and children to rush to the Baton Rouge burn unit where she was transferred. We couldn't talk to her; she was in an induced coma, sedated and intubated, and bandaged from her scalp to her knees. But we stood by her bedside as often as they'd let us. And when we couldn’t be with her, we held onto each other in the waiting room. We cried. We also laughed -- a lot actually, at the nuttiness. We tried really hard to make sense of this new suffering.
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My mother had already suffered enough, you see.
Severely abused by her own mother, who threw skillets at my mother's head and wielded belts, who shrieked obscenities when Mama tried to sing, who once clawed my mother’s face because she wrote in her diary that a boy tried to kiss her, my mother had suffered plenty.
Mama tried every way she could to make the suffering go away. At the age of 17, she escaped into marriage, and at 18, motherhood. By the time she was 26, she had four girls under the age of 7.
For the first decade or so, Mama managed to hold off the demons, parenting, as she used to say, "with Dr Spock in one hand and a rosary in the other.”
She threw herself into this role that would save her for awhile, becoming a Girl Scout leader and a volunteer at the little Catholic school where she drove us every day. She made three home-cooked meals a day. She made our Easter dresses. One Christmas, she locked herself in her bedroom with her sewing machine while she made tiny Barbie clothes sets with matching purses and muffs to put under the tree.
Mama believed in family. She also believed in good education, good manners, good teeth and God - especially God. She took us to church on Sundays, sometimes to the only African-American Catholic church in South Carolina, which her rich Lebanese uncle helped build.
And then my father left. And the bottom on the picture frame fell out.
In 1968, at the age of 32, with an absentee ex-husband who refused to pay more than sporadic child support, my mother worked 14-hour days to support girls who were 15, 14, 9 and 7. This was the era of drugs and sex. Post-Vietnam. Woodstock. Self-discovery. Thirty-two years old, vulnerable beautiful and tired, Mama, who'd never had her own adolescence, got swept up in the after-hours.
There were young boyfriends. There was pot, lots of it, and parties. There was neglect, sometimes no food. There was also a lot of moving around, sometimes to sub-standard housing. Once, she moved us all the way to Napa Valley, to a house on the edge of a vineyard, where we lived with a houseful of people whose names I don't remember.
She took us with her into some iffy situations. But she always took us with her, eventually to New Orleans, where her counter-culture soul took root.
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Sometimes back then, life was almost normal. There were, in fact, deep pockets of happiness, joy and even success at times for Mama, who'd managed to earn one nursing degree when she was in her 30s and another in her 50s. Throughout her later years, she found purpose in her nursing work, especially with the downtrodden. By and through her own struggles, she developed an intense empathy and compassion for the poor and the left-behind, which led to her work on the psychiatric unit of Charity Hospital in inner-city New Orleans.
She also found joy in music, becoming a fixture at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival every spring where she would hang out, decked out in bling and tank tops with my sister, Susan, and Susan’s musician partner, Charles. Charles was her ticket into New Orleans' inner circle, garnering her introductions to the Neville Brothers, Dave Bartholomew and other greats. She loved being a groupie.
When she was at her happiest, though, was when she was with us, her four girls and our growing families. She loved being with her young grandchildren, who were too young to hurt her, whose love for her was as unconditional as hers for them.
As for her daughters, she viewed us as her best friends, sometimes her only friends. But the road with daughters-as-best-friends is not lined with fairy dust. On our own quest for wholeness and healing, we adult daughters were a pain for her already tortured soul at times, as we delved into the demons of our past: Why, as a child, did she demand I always be happy, while she got to be the sad one? Why exactly did Daddy leave? Did she DO something to MAKE him leave? Why did my older sister and I always have to baby sit the two younger girls so she could go out at night? Why, even now, was her pain always worse than mine, even on her good days?
I remember one conversation in particular, when I asked her to admit that she demanded too much of me and my sisters.
"Just say it, Mama," I said into the phone, 1110 miles away in Ohio.
"But you don't know what my mother did to me to make me that way," she said.
"Yes, I do. Just say it."
"OK," she said. "I demanded too much of you in your sisters."
Her voice was so small, it hurts me deep in my bowels now to recollect.
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I remember these difficult conversations.
I also remember the good ones - lively, intelligent talks on her good days, about religion and politics, about Saints football, about my children and their accomplishments. I always said she was the most intelligent woman I knew. She always said, if she'd had a better upbringing, she would have been a lawyer.
I remember good moments, especially the joy on her face as she met each of my children for the first time, all the pain gone, if but for a while.
I remember that one time I came down by myself to New Orleans, without my kids, and stayed for a week. Determined that I was going to get respite from my busy life, she insisted I sleep in her bed while she slept on the couch.
Every night, she’d call out to me, “You OK in there?”
“I’m great,” I’d say.
“Night night,” she’d call out.
“Night night,” I’d say back.
What I remember most, though, is the suffering.
And the depression. After my father, there would be a second marriage, and then a year later, another divorce, and the spiraling down, down, down, always down. Sometimes she was able to work. Sometimes she lived off Food Stamps. Sometimes she had electricity. Sometimes, as I sat in my comfortable home with my husband and children, I knew the electricity company was threatening to turn hers off. Sometimes I'd talk to her on the phone and she'd be my mother. Other times I'd talk to her and she'd be so depressed or doped up, she could hardly say my name. At 49, she had uterine cancer and a hysterectomy. At 57, she was told she had Hepatitis C, contracted from a blood transfusion during her cancer surgery. She was branded “permanently disabled.” Unable to continue nursing, always worrying about money, she began to spiral further and further into the haunting of her childhood, the awful reality of a loveless childhood and a wanting for the mother she never had, which would leave her in later years spending hours on her couch or in her bed, with the pillow over her head, unable to get up.
If she was left with a void, we daughters were left with the terrible pain of knowing we could never fill that void, no matter how whole we would become.
No matter how hard I loved her, I couldn't fix her.
I couldn't be her mother.
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And then there were those hours and days with Mama at the hospital.
Four days, she fought, as each of her bodily systems, first her kidneys, then her lungs, and eventually her heart, gave way. They had told us on that first night she wouldn't last 24 hours. It took her four days to leave us.
My sisters and I awaited each visitation like we were awaiting the birth of a new child. Two of us never left the hospital but slept huddled like puppies together on the hard floor of the waiting room next to a Coke machine, waiting for the next time we could see her.
When it was time to go to her room, we would go, two-by-two, rosaries wrapped around our wrists, stuffed animals tucked in our arms, pictures of grandchildren in tow.
We would stand at her bed, stroking the top of her head where her hair poked through the bandages.
We would hold her hands and kiss her feet. Thank God for her hands and feet. While her face was too raw, inflamed and oozing to touch and the rest of her body was wrapped thick with bandages, her feet and hands were blessedly open to our touch and caress.
Sometimes, she’d shake, her whole body would shake, when we were in the room with her. Whether it was because she was trying to tell us something or whether she was simply twitching from all the morphine, we don’t know. I kept wanting to take the sedation down enough so that we could know, so that we could have one last conversation with her. They kept telling me she would be in excruciating pain if we did.
And so, because they said she could hear us and because we needed for her to hear us, we would talk at her. We told her stories about her grandchildren, about our homes, the weather, our jobs. We told her how much we loved her and wanted to take care of her now.
And we sang.
The acoustics in the room favored by angels, on the Thursday night before she died, Audrey's four girls surrounded her bed in the dim light and lifted the voices she let us have. Nurses standing outside her door later told us we brought them to tears, as with Charles accompanying us on guitar, we sang her favorites -- James Taylor, Emmy Lou, Alison Krauss, Bonnie Raitt.
"Now we get to be your mama," I whispered into her ear that night.
A few hours after we sang to her, eight days before Mother's Day 2005, Mama's heart quit. No longer able to maintain her heroic clinging to life, she moved on to that place people keep telling me about.
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Before this happened, I had planned to write a special column for this Mother's Day, about the love that even a wounded mother can inadvertently teach, perhaps by and through her own suffering.
As it turns out, I was busy the day my column was due, delivering one of several tributes at the funeral of this complicated woman, which I capped with a personal note sent to me by a close friend, also a mother, in the tender days just after my mother's death.
"...Although I did not know your mother, I keep feeling that somehow I have glimpsed her, because I have watched you be a mother. It seems to me that in some way, your wonderful and intuitive mothering, though chiefly a testament to you, is also in some ways a testament to her. And I can only think that wherever her spirit is, this fills her with joy."
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"Weeping may endure the night. But joy cometh in the morning." As seen on a holy card taped to the wall over her bed.
