Constable: Mother's Day a matter of perspective
My cellphone rings a little late on a weeknight for a work call, so I'm figuring this call probably will be another annoying recording telling me that I won a “luxury cruise” or need to hear important information about my “current credit card account.”
Then I see Marcy's name pop up on my cellphone screen.
Marcy and Denny are the closest neighbors to my 89-year-old mom, Lois, who lives by herself on the Constable family farm in Indiana.
“Burt. This is Marcy. Everything is OK, but …”
Mom always kids me about the time I called her from the hospital emergency room when I was a 20-year-old college student. I had broken my hip during an intramural basketball game. The hospital staff pushed my gurney to the nurses station and pulled the phone close enough so I could call my parents. This was in the days before cellphones, cordless phones and even caller I.D., so Mom picked up the phone in the kitchen that night without any hint of who might be on the other end.
“Mom. This it Burt. Everything is OK, but …”
This time, Mom is the one in the hospital emergency room. She fell. Well, fell isn't exactly the right word. You hear that an 89-year-old woman fell, and you imagine her losing her balance in the nursing home lobby and breaking her hip. That's not what happened to Mom.
Having lifted her snare drum out of her car, Mom was pulling her drum cart into band practice at the high school. The wind caught the heavy metal door, which flew open and knocked Mom to the sidewalk. Members of the community band, in which she is the oldest performer, were so concerned that a pair of fellow musicians followed behind as Mom drove her car back to the farm. Marcy and her daughter, Ashley, drove Mom to the hospital, where late-night tests showed that Mom had broken her left elbow.
Jeff, one of my closest friends from college and Mom's cardiologist, makes the arrangements so I can drive Mom to Chicago for the surgery to wire her elbow together. My sisters, Sally and Nancy, keep in contact from their homes in New Jersey. Sally is flying in to be with Mom on the farm for Mother's Day weekend. Nancy is scheduling a later visit.
Not to dismiss Mom's pain, but we kids all feel pretty fortunate to be celebrating another Mother's Day with an active and sharp mom who is pushing 90 and still pulling her own drum. Other kids don't have that luxury.
“When your mom dies you're the best memory of her. Everything you do is a memory of her,” reads Sunday's heartbreaking and wise tweet from the mouth of the 7-year-old niece of dear friends and fellow book club members. The child's mom, 46, seemingly healthy and happy, died in her sleep, and her husband and doctors are still trying to determine how that happened.
For lots of people, Mother's Day commemorates what they have lost. Cemeteries can be as busy on Mother's Day as the local brunch restaurant.
Another friend, a mom with a 9-year-old daughter, has been locked in a life-and-death battle with cancer for years. The 40-year-old mom has Stage 4 metastatic breast cancer that has spread to her lungs, liver, bones and brain. She's too weak to climb the stairs to her daughter's bedroom, and, recently, friends and family contributed to her GoFundMe account. On Saturday, she posts a video on her Facebook page showing her riding the new stair lift chair, which she uses to get up the stairs so she can tuck her daughter into bed at night.
“Hi, everybody, This is what your generous donation went to,” the mom says, flashing a smile that has outlasted every injustice cancer has inflicted on her. “Awesome, huh?”
Just as we all have different expectations for Mother's Day, we all have different definitions of awesome.
“It puts things into perspective,” says my mom, who always has had a firm grasp on the big picture. There was a time when I might have complained if our Mother's Day celebration included a little drizzle. This year, my mom, my sisters and I are content, and even thankful, for the chance to gripe about a broken elbow.