Stephanie Van Horn

Oregon Writing Project

June 25, 2001

Oh Pioneer

It has been nearly two months since my eighty-six year old mother and I had one of those mother-daughter moments ö the ones during which one of us says or does whatever it is that irritates the other the most and suddenly whatever is said has the sting of jellyfish barbs. It has been over a month since I've tried to tell her what to wear or cleaned her kitchen sink. I've learned to manage her finances without comment. And she in her turn brags about my teaching to her new friends and praises my clothing to my face. We've changed. For my part, I've been learning to live with my mother, as I said to a colleague, as "an exasperating but dear older friend," one who is now my neighbor here in Oregon instead of a voice on the telephone or at the other end of a plane trip.

Our life together now is much different than it has been for the last three years, years punctuated by first my mother's cancer, then my father's death, then her stroke. During those three years, I accumulated frequent flyer miles traveling to New Jersey, theoretically to visit, but really to help after the cancer surgery, to bury my father, to supervise caregivers, to straighten out closets and check finances, and to reassure my extended family in New Jersey that my brother and I would share the burden of keeping my mother's life on track. Within a year of the stroke, which happened on New Year's Day 1999, six months after my father's death, four days after she returned from a visit to Oregon during its coldest, snowiest Christmas season, my brother and I realized that her life was off-track. When the telephone rang, if it was one of my New Jersey relatives, I tensed. With cause. Each phone call itemized whatever was going wrong that week. I usually needed my brother in Alaska to put into perspective whatever I'd heard, that in spite of her complaints and their complaints, she was fed, clothed, and financially stable. But no one was really happy. For about six months, we had a caregiver who accepted my mother's independence and disorganization. But even she called me one night, soon after the diagnosis with breast cancer that would take her from my mother, to urge that I move my mother to Oregon.

It took another two years for that move to occur. My mother agreed to give up the house. We looked over what I had to offer and what New Jersey had to offer and she decided to stay there, choosing an institution where friends and family had gone for years. Of course, the room she would be given would not have held her desk and her genealogy files. And I worried that its distance would mean fewer visitors for her. Ten miles from the town where the rest of my relatives live seems short unless it's snowy, or unless her sisters and brother become unable to drive, or unless my cousins cannot set aside time to drive there rather than their usual habit of stopping by my mother's house on a main road a few miles from all of their homes at least once or twice a month. It seemed to me a recipe for boredom and frustration ö which results in complaining and anger in my mother's temperament. But giving her the choice still seemed the best choice. So she chose House of Good Shepherd, and just for insurance, I kept her on the waiting list in two places here in Coos Bay. And I agreed when she said she wasn't ready to move in 2000, even though her savings were fast going into the pockets of caregivers.

Late October 2000. On my voice mail is a message from my brother, a voice I seldom hear from on that telephone. Within seconds, my heart goes on emergency alert. But it's not my mother. It's a sudden heart attack and immediate death of her seventy-year-old younger brother in his real estate office. It's the death of the person she probably loves best, who is physically, mentally, and emotionally most like her, the person who brings her books, actually sits for lengthy visits, who loves and appreciates her most out of all her family there. She and her sisters hide their grief by notifying relatives and finding pictures for the service and any other chore his three big sisters can take on. But within a week, she concludes what I concluded within five minutes of my brother's call, that the future has been sketched out for her. He will not be there to visit. Her sisters are mortal, too. And all around her, change confronts her in the shape of small things, a church population she no longer knows, the small-town pharmacy that closes and turns her prescriptions over to a chain, and in larger ways, the farm community of her childhood turned into stockbrokers' bedrooms, her dwindling bank account and lessening energy. She lets go of home, and tells me she thinks she'd better come to Oregon, if that's all right with me.

So my brother and I begin an organizational task that seems equivalent to running a small country. So many details. I persuade her to move in March, ahead of her schedule, so that my brother can stay with his work schedule at Denali National Park and I can earn a 4% raise by taking summer classes. I feel hard-hearted and guilty. I feel hard-hearted and guilty most of the year. No, you don't have room for all your filing cabinets. No, there is no oven in the apartment to bake in (reserving the comment that she is no longer capable of baking anyway). No, we really can't put this move off any longer. Yes, you will miss spring.

At Christmas, I come back to begin some packing, and we have several mother-daughter moments, one a fight because I want to discard some medical supplies left from her cancer surgery. She wants to give them to Hospice. I don't even know where the Hospice office is and the roads are covered with ice. She seems determined to take almost everything to Oregon, discard very little, and give the remainder to people who don't want it and whom I don't know how to find so that they can come and get whatever the item is. She complains constantly about everything and everyone, it seems to me. I'm not looking forward to having her live with me from March until whenever space opens up on the waiting list at the place she's chosen. I don't even ask my partner if he's looking forward to it. I can't afford to.

In March, I take personal leave on top of my spring break. I pack. My brother arrives a week later, packs with me, and stays a week after my mother and I leave to see her many possessions onto the moving truck. The Mayflower representative says, "A wonderful lady, your mother," and her move gets first class treatment. A one bedroom apartment in the assisted care units has come open a month before, a corner unit that overlooks woods and invites the hanging of birdfeeders, so we've rented that. A realtor who was one of my uncle's coworkers negotiates a wonderful price for the New Jersey house, but the septic inspection fails. My cousin in excavation cashes in his markers with the county inspector's office and installs a new septic system at a speed unknown to any contractor. Through it all, my mother's historical society friends come and visit, letting her be Mary in the living room while my brother and I Martha it all over the house. She says goodbye to her doctor. And then to her sisters. And then we are on the plane.

The factor which helps children from difficult backgrounds most has been defined as resiliency. I should have realized that that is my mother's greatest strength, more than her intelligence and her energy and her passion for new experiences, although all of those traits are part of resiliency. Now that she is here in Oregon and I am no longer trying to solve everyone's problems long distance or checking items off of endless lists, I can look at what she has accomplished in her life. She left her safe teaching job in World War II, first to work at Picatinny Arsenal, then to join the Women's Reserve of the Marine Corps and become base librarian at Camp Pendleton, three thousand miles further than anyone in her family had ever traveled, checking out books to go with men who died at Guadalcanal, Tarawa, and Iwo Jima. Afterward, she married a man she'd known all her life, and when it turned out that the unknown factor was his post WWII depression, she worked beside him in his dream of self-sufficient farming, then visited him at the clinic after shock treatments, moved with him to California, supported him and raised his children, moved back with him to New Jersey even though she had friends and a life in California free of the limited definition of her that her childhood and her family imposed, remade her life there, and then survived his suicide fifty two years and two months after their wedding. And now she is demonstrating that resilience again.

Her apartment is half a mile from my office. When I stop by, she is usually at her desk. She has a list of information for me ö what she thinks should be done to the facilty's library, who she walked with this morning, who called her or wrote to her from home, what local history she's learned this week, and what she needs me to do for her to make her new home just the way she wants it. We're working out our rhythms carefully because, as she says, we can't live in each other's pockets. But though at first I felt overwhelmed by the change to my schedule, an hour here shopping, an hour there hanging pictures, I now see us in the rhythm of both our childhoods, when a family member was sure to drop by nearly every day so that details of our lives could be a texture to depend on and enrich us, the texture of telling each other whether gold finches come to her feeder, whether my aging dog needs to be put to sleep, whether my nephew, her grandson, is walking, which piece of which genealogical puzzle she's solved this week, and which class I'm struggling to explain poetry to today.

When a cousin called me recently, I couldn't truly explain why my mother is different here, although my cousin and I tossed around explanations of acceptance and feeling independent again. I help my partner cope with his mother's failing intelligence and health, inadequate caregivers, and stubbornness about leaving her home. And then I visit my mother and see who it is I am willing to be at eighty-six, maybe a little controlling, maybe a little absent-minded, probably just as fussy about food, but also like the person who loves to drive down new back roads and who helps me through my beloved dog's death with wisdom our formerly strained mother-daughter moments had not let me see she had. Two years ago I planted a rose from her grandmother's garden in my yard and it bloomed for my mother this June, Harison's Yellow, a rose whose history includes being brought across the Oregon Trail, two pioneers, blooming in strange soil, prickly and tough and eager to live.