May is a loaded month at our house for good and for bad. It is the month both Husband and I were born. It is the month in which Son will soon graduate college. It holds Mother’s Day. And it is the month in the year that marks my gathered sadness for the three giants I lost from my life in 2004. Both my parents and maternal grandmother died in the first five months of that awful year which also saw one of my children in surgery and the other in a life situation equally painful. Husband and I had been married about three years when this series of personal crises erupted and looking back he must have felt like a medic in ‘Nam. He was in an unfamiliar landscape surrounded by people he hadn’t known very long but truly cared for who were suffering. My kids and I drew him into our lives in a way that required powers far beyond those of mortal men. If the definition of hell is terminally ill family, kids in danger and a new marriage thrown into the most stress possible, 2004 gets my vote hands down.
When you look at the people who brought you into the world you see where many of your wonderful and infuriating personality traits originated. My mother had the most optimistic attitude of anyone I have ever met. Most of her adult life was spent struggling with a chronic neurological illness that became progressive as she aged. Despite the huge physical and mental limitations the disease imposed, my Mom always thought she had it made in life. Nothing ever brought her down, even paralyzed in a hospital bed. She had an impish smile and a bottomless reservoir for happiness she was eager to share. I know by looking in the mirror that she gave me her smile. And if my inherited ocean of optimism occasionally flows into the river of denial, well, you could choose a worse fate.
My grandmother was a pistol. Despite living to 100 and never once wearing a pair of pants, Grandma could wrestle with the best of them right to the end. She was 4’10” tall and all of it steel. She ran her own business well into her seventies beginning at a time when women barely worked outside the home let alone run an independent business. As a teenager working in her store, I watched her reduce burly contractors to whimpering rags with her unwavering will to have things done her way. You may have met her at some time in your life. She was the tiny woman shopkeeper barking, “Hey, this is not a library!” at youngsters lingering too long over the magazine rack. But I always had the luxury of observing from a golden balcony since I was her only granddaughter. For her, I hung the moon.
My father, however, would have preferred to see her hung. He repeatedly accommodated his mother-in-law’s most outrageous requests in an effort to appease my Mom who must have carried her own baggage in this area. Except for once overhearing an argument as a child where my father referred to my grandmother as “a beauty” and knowing instinctively it wasn’t a comparison to Elizabeth Taylor, any overt tension involving my elders was never exposed. Then one day as a young adult I asked my father about his father-in-law of whom I had only vague memories. By this time my Mom had begun losing some memory and couldn’t always respond so I said to my father, “Grandpa was pretty young when he died, wasn’t he?” To which my Dad replied, “He was 58. But he didn’t die, sweetheart. He escaped.”
Very shortly after my father’s death in May 2004, there was a movie on TV that had recently been in the theaters called “Big Fish”. It was the sweet story of a father dying of cancer and how the myths and legends he had created about his life had estranged him from his son who was now on a search to discover the truth about his father. Halfway through the movie I could hear someone crying and was stunned to find it was me. My father was the person with the most profound effect on my life. He nurtured my free spirit by being my anchor. He assumed the role of both parents when my Mom was too ill and never let it seem like a burden. He became enormously successful with little education and inspired warm feelings in all those who crossed his path. For me he was larger than life. My Big Fish.
Soon it will be May. I wish Happy Birthday to my husband. Happy Mother’s Day to my mother-in-law. Happy Graduation to my son. And for the three giant oaks I lost from my forest in one crash, you may be ghosts in my head but never in my heart.