Mom

My mother passed away a number of days ago. It was a long time coming. She'd been diagnosed with Parkinson's and dementia a bit of time ago, and those conditions had taken their toll; my mother was placed in hospice care months ago when her weight dropped to seventy-eight lbs and she was under regular sedation during this time. In many ways it was a relief to see her get her wish to be reunited with my father.

My mother was a lot braver and a lot more resilient than she ever gave herself credit for.  

Born February 10th, 1932, she grew up during WWII. I know little about her childhood except that her father was the village schoolteacher and that he suddenly died of some unknown ailment when my mother was around the age of ten. I presume her schooling stopped at that time. The only other thing I learned about my mother's childhood was that she learned to carry her food within her clothing and bring it out one bite sized piece at a time. If she tried to take a bite of whatever she was eating, that risked having someone bigger than her grab the food out of her hand and eat it themselves. 

She had an arranged marriage into a relatively well-to-do family in her village and she married my father and moved in with her in-laws. As far as I can tell, the entire family fled China after the communist revolution and moved to Hong Kong, where my sister was born. In the late 1950's my father left Hong Kong and went to the U.S. where he worked in a restaurant owned by relatives while my mother and sister remained in Hong Kong. My father had been adopted, and from the little I've been able to learn, they were emotionally abusive, and that behavior was extended to my mother while she stayed with her in-laws in Hong Kong. 

Eventually my father came back to Hong Kong and brought my mother and sister to the U.S. on a tourist visa - and they never returned to Hong Kong. Instead, they settled in Cleveland, Ohio; it may appear to be a seemingly odd choice, but at the time, Cleveland was still the sixth largest city in the U.S. and my father's adoptive family had opened a Chinese restaurant there and my father returned to work for them.

A few years later, shortly after I was born, my mother enrolled in an English as a Second language course for three months. As an adult I learned that my mother had been terrified at the prospect of leaving me in someone else's care, and every time during the class she heard a passing siren she would become frantic that something had happened to me. 

Taking that class allowed my mother to find work as a seamstress for a company that made parochial school uniforms. She did piecework; each worker was assigned a different piece of the clothing pattern and they were paid for each piece completed. Each piece was assigned a different rate, and over time the company assigned the more lucrative pieces to other workers in order to prompt them to be more productive. My mother never complained, and she responded by working harder doing more piecework so that she still got paid the same amount. Years later, a bookkeeper in the company showed the owners the records of how my mother had never complained each time they assigned her less lucrative piecework and instead had increased her productivity to earn the same amount, and the company rewarded her by eliminating her share of the medical insurance payment so that she got free medical insurance. I did the math on that and calculated that she'd earned about a 40% raise as a consequence including the non-taxable benefit. 

While my father had completed school and had received training as a car mechanic, my mother handled the family finances. Despite the equivalent of what I estimate to have been about a fourth grade education, she dutifully educated herself about banks and saving accounts and carefully compared interest rates to try and maximize the growth on the family savings to grow a down payment allowing the family to buy the home they lived in for 48 years before relocating to Milwaukee in 2018.

In the mid 1960's, our family had begun attending a Chinese Christian fellowship meeting started by some American missionaries who'd spent time in China. The fellowship, comprised of Cantonese/Toisan speaking Chinese, eventually become a church, merging with a Chinese church whose congregation was comprised of Mandarin speaking Chinese who'd emigrated from Taiwan. While the Cantonese immigrants were all blue collar workers, the Mandarin congregation was almost exclusively white collar, either with graduate degrees or in Cleveland studying for a graduate degree at Case Western Reserve University. My mother was very aware of these differences and she once confided to me that initially she was too intimidated to even speak with the Mandarin speakers in the church. She eventually overcame that fear.

My mother liked music, and she encouraged my passion for music; at one time I was taking three different music lessons a week and she bought a piano (for which there really wasn't enough room in the living room for it) for me to practice on. I suppose in some ways she was living vicariously through me, but I can hardly fault her for that.

My mother and father had problems in their marriage like all couples do, but when all was said and done, in their final days together, my mother was devoted to taking care of my father. Unfortunately, she developed stenosis and that limited her mobility and that resulted in her having a bad fall resulting in a broken tailbone. But instead of seeking medical care, she lay in bed in pain for weeks, knowing that if she went to the hospital, there would be no one to take care of my father. Eventually she was taken to the hospital, and when her condition was diagnosed, the state stepped in and mandated that my mother go directly into assisted living. So my mother never saw the home she'd lived in for 48 years ever again. 

It became clear that my father was not capable of looking after himself living alone, and both he and my mother were relocated from Cleveland to Milwaukee where my sister administrated their assisted living care until they both passed.