My mom and dad are gone. Elaine’s mom and dad are gone. Anna’s mom and dad are gone, as are Patty’s, Danny’s, Linda’s, Tim’s, Bill’s, Stephanie’s… most of our friends, neighbors and relatives our age have lost both their parents over the last ten years.
But Joe’s mom has hung in there. She turned 91 in November. Her secret? Clean living. She eats like a vegetarian bird who flew to Italy to eat a Mediterranean diet. She eats lots of fruits and vegetables and very little meat. And she eats tiny portions. She has never smoked, has never drank, and never commits a sin. She continues to live the austere life taught her by the nuns at Holy Names where she was a resident from junior high on through a couple years of college. Her house is spotless and shining and has crucifixes on the walls.
Her fear of death is looming and consuming, for as long as I have known her. Each medical episode she comes closer to making her peace with God and says goodbye to all of us. When she was on the orthopedic floor two years ago, she was doing so well they took off the heart monitor and fed her dinner. She told me they had “unplugged everything and it was ok because she was ready to go.” She was praying in 1975 to live just long enough to see Matt, her youngest, graduate from high school. Yet here we are in 2017, Matt is 50, and she travelled to LA last year at 90 for Anthony’s graduation from dental school. She still cooks for most of the western world, making sauce for all of us, and making plates of cookies and cream puffs for the mailman, the priest, the neighbor, and the Vietnamese youth group weeding her yard.
She has been in the hospital for the last three days. This her picture with her daughter Mary. She had a scare and needed hospital care, but she is mending so we will leave on Friday as planned. She has given us her blessing to go, and today gave me a prayer list of special intentions to share with St. James. The list includes every relative for the last several generations, dead or alive, every in-law and their parents dead or alive, all our friends and their families, the medical personnel, the neighbors, the homeless, the mentally ill, the hungry, and those who need special care. That is her daily list. She cried a little as she was naming each one for Mary to wrote down for me, ticking them off one by one like rosary beads.
No one has ever had a more loving mother-in-law. She treats me like a daughter. Not like HER daughter, who has to do all the hard work like Cinderella, but like a visiting noblewoman daughter who is lauded for every feeble pruning job, every perversion of good food into a goofy healthy recipe, every dish washed out of the sink. I am proud to carry her prayers to Saint James. Her prayers shoot right above all my prayers and all of your prayers, because she is a little saint herself.
Please include her in your prayers.