The Last Pages of My Mother's Decades of Diaries
Tonight, I went in search of Shirley Temple, but I could not find her. In the last week, I read the account my mother wrote about Shirley Temple Black, by this point the US ambassador to Ghana and my father's supervisor. Black was traveling to California, where I am from, and my mother made sure my father gave her my grandmother's name and number. The two later spoke on the phone.
But archives are complex, and I couldn't remember exactly where this story was slipped in among the hundreds of pages of my mother's and grandmother's papers.
Instead, I ran across the story of my mother's death, a strange little story about desires and responsibilities, and one filled with foreshadowing. A story she wrote before she died. The story of her death.
My mother traveled to Millbrae, California--essentially my ancestral home--on May 1st, 1999, to care for her mother, and she recounted the usually mundane events of her day in her travel diary. My mother's plan was to leave on May 25th, my 39th birthday, so she could attend a bowling banquet and baseball games back in Nashville.
But she almost didn't return.
Two days before my mother would leave, she wrote this in her diary:
Mom is so sad besides being in a lot of pain and I don't know whether to leave on Tues. or not. I'll see how tomorrow goes.
If she'd stayed, she might have lived another decade, until emphysema took her down just as it did her sister twelve years after these events.
She recounts the events of her last day with her mother up to the point when her plane takes off. Back home, she doesn't add any note in her home diary. She's probably tired. She has spent much of her pencil writing about being tired. The diary pages for my birthday are blank.
Once home, she returns to her routines, but she also has the "radiator" in her car replaced, attends her banquet and a baseball game. She is still tired, once her tiredness is preceded by VERY.
I'll note I assume the radiator in this story, is an alternator. She is alternating between California and Tennessee, between life and death. She is permanently tired.
I realized only tonight that she always told me stories about the deaths of children: one in Millbrae, when I was no more than four, of a girl nearby who had been run down by a car on her street. I always think of that girl and what she was never able to be. One about a woman who had beaten her son to death with a broom on the SS Constitution. She told me that story as we were traveling to New York to travel across the Atlantic on that same ship. One she told me in Portugal (the reason we boarded that ship) about a German shepherd that had killed a young boy, maybe two. I've forgotten the details.
Death inhabited her thoughts. Deaths of children, apparently, churned within her the most.
So I wasn't surprised to read about death in her diary:
Hear[ed] on the news about the accident on Briley PKW we saw on the way home last night. A female, probably drinking, lost control literally flew over the median landing on top of a car going the opposite direction which killed the driver. It wasn't more than 15 min Rick passed that place to get me. The road was clear. If he hadn't been late we could have been the victims[.]
Foreshadowing.
My second sister added this detail to the story:
She [my mother] asked [my third sister] why someone inebriated would survive an accident but a sober person would die in a similar accident. [My third sister] told her an intoxicated person wouldn’t brace for impact.
This second sister of mine told another story from mother tonight:
She told me a disturbing story about me being stuck in a house on fire. The set up was to ask what I would do if the house was on fire. I was five or six at the time. I said I would find my doll and run. She told me I was too late and died in the fire trying to rescue my doll...
The pattern is not simply that people die, as we must all. My mother's stories often concerned the deaths of young children, maybe because that made the realities and possibilities more painfully real to her, or maybe because these stories scared us the most. I almost believe either is possible.
The next day in my mother's life but written on the second page of the day before, she writes about other deaths, having encountered the funeral of one of the recent dead. Note how close she has come to death, to multiple deaths. She arrived home the day before.
On the way home from Longhorns, a 5 min drive, I ran into detective Hicks['] funeral[.] He was shot to death aiding [in] a domestic dispute. The ex wife was also killed by the ex husband. It took me an hr. to get home. Too tired to do anything the rest of the day.
My mother is still tired. The world is wearing her out. She has visited and cared for her mother, a couple of thousand miles away, and she is tired. She has been traveling to California since January to help care for her mother.
She spends the next two days trying to contact the mechanic fixing her car, who had promised to have it repaired days before.
She continues to knit throughout this story, in one case knitting a blanket for her gardener. By the 28th, her car is still in the shop and no-one answers when she calls. She says,
Ripped out knitting & reknitted[.]
She is alternating between states. She is in and out. She is making a transition to another mode. She doesn't realize this, but this is what she tells us.
On the 29th, she hurts her toe. This is her fifth day home.
After eating breakfast I cleaned the top of the fish tank. The glass was full of algae[.] Put it on l. [livingroom] floor & walked into it. Split[t]ing inbetween [sic] toes. Gross. I decided to go to Nini's clinic. A hard area to stitch. They taped it & gave me a tetnus [sic] shot. Went to Kroger's. Knitted.
On the 30th, she attended one of her baseball games. By this point, she may have concluded she had completed the tasks she wanted to reach at home. Her team, the Nashville Sounds, lost this contest.
A hard rain dampens her already soggy mood, as she drives nearly blind through a Middle Tennessee torrent, at night:
It began to rain. In the dark I was scared all the way home. Couldn't see.
What scares us, she tells us, is serious injury, and death. Even if buckled tightly inside one's car.
The next day, she awakes early and tired, and she cares for herself:
As soon as I got ready & said my prayers I went to the clinic to have my toe checked[.] they [sic] asked me to come back today. Toe is infected so I need antibiotics. It's a good think [thing] I went in.
The Sounds win their game. They alternate, between losing and winning.
It is a good thing, she says.
The first of June is the last entry she writes in her diary. She probably did what diarists often do. They put off writing for a day or so and then catch up. The diary never tells us she retrieved her station wagon, but we know she does, because that car is where she died.
She died because she was scared of Dickerson Pike, and that is the road that killed her. She was afraid of Driving out of Goodlettsville Plaza, watching for traffic on her left and the right, pausing in the two-way middle lane, and moving to the right and turning right onto Shevel Drive at the next corner. I told her, emphatically, this was the safest way to cross the street. But she insisted it was better to exit onto Shevel and cross all three lanes in one movement. I told her that was too dangerous, noting the giant utility pole to her left would obscure her view of the closest oncoming traffic.
So she crossed Dickerson without seeing the car heading right toward her, and the woman driving at my mother didn't see my mother's newly repaired car because she was looking for her phone on the floor of her own car. The Dickerson Pike car T-boned my mother's car right where my mother sat. The woman who killed my mother sued our whole family for damages.
My mother was fragile. She fell once on our lawn in Cedar Beach, Ontario, and broke her arm. That is when I started to cook.
I know she died instantly. One of the first people on the scene was my third sister, a nurse. She frantically tried to help my mother, but the police officers held her back. My mother was dead anyway.
I do not love my mother. I never have. Never really had any affection for my parents, except when I was a small child. They didn't know how to care for people. Neither have I wished them death. If my mother had survived, my life would likely be radically different now, because she had an effect on my life even from the distance of one thousand miles I made sure was between us.
I can only guess what my life might now be if she lived. I can only imagine the slow death my mother would have endured.
ecr. l'inf.
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