Mom was able to keep the peace while raising a reasonably normal family
We lost my mom last week at the age of 99. I guess she just didn’t want to live in a world without Angela Lansbury.
It happened on a day when an angry wind whipped through the mountains, stripping beautiful fall color from the trees, which seemed fitting enough.
Like so many women of her generation, I suspect, Marcy was a fan of “Murder, She Wrote” because through the heart of the last century, women who managed to thrive in a man’s world were dismissed as curiosities.
No man, however, could have done what she did, negotiating the world with sweetness and grace, under the most challenging circumstances. She complained of nothing, loved everything. She never voiced displeasure but was no one’s fool, relying on Grandpa’s witticism, “I ain’t sayin’ nothin’ but you know what I’m thinkin’.”
Above all, in an age of increasing greed, her credo was to put others ahead of herself. When she entered nursing care last month, she was asked about her end-of-life directives. She tracked as long as she could, until, as the nurse overwhelmed her with questions about feeding tubes and resuscitation she finally said, “Oh, whatever would be easiest for you.”
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Marcy’s cross to bear was my dad Chuck, a brilliant but sadly diseased individual who could open his mouth at noon and go on a three hour rant about anything from agribusiness and nuclear fission to bar codes, organic gardening and the long list of people he felt was out to get him.
When he died, he had long since quit the church for going “soft,” so Mom and I had to delicately describe Chuck to the minister who would deliver the eulogy. The church was packed that day, everyone there for Mom, not Dad. When the reverend opened the service with the line, “Charles was a different kind of man,” the entire sanctuary roared with laughter, leaving the poor minister wondering exactly what kind of corpse he was dealing with.
No one laughed harder than Mom. She had told my wife Beth she had married him because he was different, adding “I just didn’t know how different.” Mom remained devoted, even as he increasingly tried to control every aspect of her life, going so far as “forbidding” her from driving the seven miles into town to have lunch with her friends — an order she tolerated until she didn’t, a sign of her growing defiance. One of the happiest days of my life was when I found a pack of cigarettes hidden under the seat of her car.
I had felt it a crime that so much of her identity was driven by her matador-like parries with Dad: keeping the peace and deflecting his toxicity while raising a reasonably normal family.
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Yet like those bright snowdrops that bloom in frozen ground, she still managed to piece together a fascinating career. She worked for Norman Rockwell in Vermont, staffed a fire tower in Oregon, helped Navajos in Arizona. She cleaned cabins at Yellowstone and taught at a two-room schoolhouse in West Virginia. She served her country in the WAVES during World War II, wrote articles for the Christian Science Monitor and became regionally famous for her pressed-flower arrangements.
When Dad died, she spent a year with her friends in Berkeley Springs before moving in with my brother and sister-in-law, Bruce and Mary, on the shores of Lake Champlain. After a stirring life with Dad, she savored the peace of watching “Jeopardy” with Mary and going on Saturday drives with Bruce.
I don’t believe in much — I would have made a good lawyer. But I believe that when one light goes out another shines, and that somewhere in a crib is a baby girl who will go through her life bringing joy, warmth and humor to others, treating each and every one not with basic tolerance, but with genuine love. Hello to you little one, wherever you are.
And goodbye Mom.
Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Marcy Rowland complained of nothing, loved everything
