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| Part of the photo display we arranged for my mother's memorial service last month. |
Today is my first Mother's Day without my mother in the world.
Barbara Louise Rescorla Brandt died quietly on the morning of Feb. 20 in her beloved log home in Jamestown, New Mexico in the arms of her beloved long-time caregiver Priscilla Cadman.
She was 90.
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| My mom, Barbara Brandt |
My father was a semi-public person, a known author of several books, long-time magazine writer and an appointed government official in his beloved Sag Harbor.
My mother was a much more private person who seemed less like a candidate for a write-up.
And so I struggled with what to write, if anything, and if she would even want me to.
But here we are at Mother's Day and here I am at the keyboard.
I was driven here, I suspect, by a clear, plastic box.
It is a box of old family photographs going back generations which was presented to me in the parking lot of Skeeter's Bar-B-Q restaurant outside Lewisburg, PA.
The presenter was my step mother, Lorraine Dusky, who was on her way to her new home in Detroit. After my father's death, she decided to sell the Sag Harbor house and move back closer to her family. She was driving all the way with her granddaughter Kim and was stopping in the middle of PA for the night. So my wife Karen and I drove up to have dinner with her and say goodbye.
Yesterday, having nothing on my agenda, I opened the box sitting on the radiator in the dining room and generations of Danish and Swedish relatives stared back at me, along with the U.S. citizenship document for my great-great-grandfather Henry Brandt.
Many of the photographs had IDs on the back, sort of: many like, "my great grandmother's sister." Without knowing who had done the writing, it wasn't much help. Especially when Karen and I discovered how similar my father's handwriting was to his mother's.
And the hats. My God the ladies' hats were amazing.
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| The contents of box of old family photos I opened Saturday. |
But I had dabbled in Ancestry.com and so had she, so we began using logic and the process of elimination to identify as many as we could. And as we did that, I began to think about all this is lost with death.
All these photos of all these people which were taken because they were precious to someone.
To keep a record.
To preserve their memory.
But of course few of us are librarians, so we make a pass at it and write things on the back of grainy photographs like "me and Brud at the farm" -- which was a real caption on the back of one of the photos. We put them in a box and stash it in the attic until the next generation finds them, cleaning out the house of our dead parent.
These captions are, of course, only good for the person who wrote them when they are alive. We're usually not thinking about our own death when we write things like that.
And I've been facing a lot of death in the past few years and I decided my mother more than deserves a tribute, some record of her life. I owe her that much, and so much more.
Besides, she put up with a lot.
My mom was born in January, 1936 outside Forty Fort PA to the late Arthur and Mildred (Jenkins) Rescorla. Her father was a stern man, the only child of a man who put food on the table by being a boss in a coal mine. A teacher recommended that my grandfather go to college which he did, the first in the family to do so, earning a chemistry degree from Penn State.
He was the quintessential self-made man and, like his father before him, he did not brook weakness in any way, hurling logs at my mother and uncle as children when they were not stacking them fast enough, so the family legend has it.
Having met him, I have little doubt that story is true.
(After meeting my mother's parents the one and only time on a trip to Florida, my wife was speechless after 15 minutes when my grandfather stood up and said "well, it was nice seeing you" and ushered us out. "I tried to tell you." I said. "I thought you were exaggerating" she replied.)
Not this time.
Arthur worked for Citi Services, a petroleum company we know today as Citgo, and he dragged his family all across the country as his job dictated. As a result, the only place my mother, who remembers living in Louisiana for a time, could really call home was her grandmother's house in Forty Fort, where she spent most of her summers and some of her school days.
She and I visited there once and the people who lived there at the time were kind enough to let us look around inside.
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| My mother as a young woman |
He was the awkward younger brother of Westfield's Big Man on Campus, his brother Charles, and was less good at football, and basketball, and had suffered from horrible acne.
My mother was the new girl in town and as awkward and tall as he was, mom was diminutive (she was under 5 feet with a badly curved spine when she died), and pretty.
The two of them needed each other. He needed a girlfriend and she needed a known name to enter Westfield teen society.
They dated throughout college. She was getting her nursing degree from Cedar Crest College and he was studying English literature at Princeton.
They married almost immediately after graduation, with my mother attending Cornell's college of nursing at New York Hospital and he attending graduate classes at Columbia. They lived in a tiny apartment on the west side of Manhattan.
Eventually Dad decided he did not want to teach and got a job at Fairchild Aircraft, writing a biography of the founder Sherman Fairchild and the company he founded. They moved to the suburbs, Shrub Oak, NY, and Mom got a job with the visiting nurse services of Westchester County.
Eventually Fairchild died and the company board of directors no longer wanted the expense of employing my father. So he decided to write his first book, "Reality Police: the experience of insanity in America," while my mother put food on the table.
And went hiking.
Always we went hiking as a family, often against my will and my sister's. But we went. We knew the trails in Fahnestock State Park and Piano Mountain like we could find the bathroom in the dark.
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| My mother in the 1970s in her visiting nurse uniform, with me (in the red hat) my sister Kate and Stephen and Susan Migliaccio, our neighbors. |
They were married for 15 years.
And then finally he didn't return. Sure to stick the cliche, he left us for a younger women just a few years old than my sister. (In the end, she left him and he ended up married to my step-mother, a much better match).
Never a master of timing, my father decided to inform my mother he wanted a divorce as the three of us were driving across country in an old Ford Econoline van with two seats and an ancient Greek name -- Psyche.
He delivered his news in Canyonlands National Park while I was taking photos of everything in sight and, unknowingly, took a photo of the moment he told her he was leaving.
I can tell you the drive home from Colorado is not a memory I dwell upon. We even had to outpace a tornado in that old van. It was like some kind of Victorian epic.
(My sister Kate was not there because she had transformed at puberty from daddy's little girl genius into a teenager and had been banished to a private school upstate for her teenage transgressions.)
The break between her and our father lasted decades and for much of my life, I was the only person who spoke to everyone in my nuclear family.
My mother collapsed emotionally. The worst thing that can happen to a person who spent her life in search of stability and a loving family had just happened and she had no one to turn to. Too often, it was 11 year-old me.
But somehow, she carried on. She bought a new house in Pleasantville, NY because it she wanted me to grow up in "a real town" like Westfield. She went back to school and got her masters and eventually the equivalent of a Ph.D. and became a geriatric nurse practitioner.
This training never left her and she could recite the names of her medicines until the day she died. And shortly after she died, I had to notify the organizers of a life-long study of nurses being conducted by Harvard University. Twice a year she sent them samples of her urine and her vital stats.
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| We created our own Victorian tableau in Pleasantville. |
Finally she met a man, Mike, and he moved in. He and I got along alright because he had taken a big burden off of me, my mom's emotional needs. He was not the greatest person. He was on the run from a previous marriage for not paying child support and whenever he got a job, his wages were often garnished shortly thereafter.
But mom did not have the luxury of choices.
Even when Mike read my sister's diary and threatened her with a gun after the the couple had moved to New Mexico, Mom did not throw him out. She did what she had finally learned to do to maintain her stability. She adapted.
Our visits just became trips to other places, or she would make Mike leave for a few days.
But I get ahead of myself.
Yes, I did say New Mexico.
Several days after I graduated from high school, I no longer had a home in Pleasantville. My mom wanted out of her job at Westchester and had applied for several jobs including, to my horror, South Carolina. But she finally agreed to let me finish high school before moving.
She didn't wait long.
She had found her bliss in New Mexico.
She was shocked when I told her New Mexico was not my bliss and I would be spending the summer with my dad. I was always puzzled why she thought I would chose the desert over the beach, but she saw it as a betrayal and it was one of several fault lines that grew up between us.
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| Mom outside with her cats. Her two favorite things. |
It was good for her. This was about as full a clean break with her past as she could make and it took.
She made friends that had nothing to do with her past and not even any knowledge of it beyond what she was willing to tell them.
She and Mike traveled a lot, including to South America and often to Mexico. She and my sister traveled to Africa together and mom saw much of the world. She and Mike finally married, but only so he could get on her health insurance.
Increasingly, he traveled to China for jobs teaching English and the more Mike was gone, the more my mother finally realized she did not need a man to stabilize her life, that she could live alone and, increasingly, she preferred it that way.
She bought him off and he agreed to a divorce. We got the news it had gone through during one of our annual trips to Long Beach Island, N.J.
As children, Kate and I had spent two weeks every summer with our parents at a small cottage my father's parents owned in, where else, Brant Beach, and they were among my most cherished memories. Even there, mom shouldered the load, taking us to the beach, back for lunch, then back to the beach while my father lounged and read Dickens.
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My mom on Long Beach Island with her two grandsons, Eli Gunther and Dylan |
We were in one of the fancy beach houses in Loveladies (which are much cheaper if you rent in June, but boy is the water cold) when she got word that she was done with Mike. We ate chocolates and drank champagne.
It was then that Mom really seemed to flourish.
Her friend circle grew, she joined a group trying to get the nearby city of Gallup to recycle; she became more active politically and, as he said at the memorial service we held for her last month, she taught my son generosity.
Every birthday, he received no gift from her but certificates for money donated to others in his name. She often let him choose the cause and there are many a healthy African goat who have the two of them to thank for a full belly.
Which brings us to the one constant in my mother's life.
Animals.
In most cases, she would choose animals over people and even when she chose people, it was a near thing. If I told her a story about how I was almost mauled by a bear, she would ask "is the bear OK?"
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| From left, Merlin and Oliver (I think) |
Much of our family's life can be divided up into eras defined by the cats we had at the time: Shelly, Oliver, Portia, Prudence, Guinevere, Merlin (changed from Lancelot when we learned what a coward he was).
And that was just the east coast crew, most of whom were Siamese, although some made the transition to New Mexico.
She learned some hard lessons out west when she lost a few cats to coyotes.
But because her cats were always outdoor cats (she could not bear the thought of keeping them indoors), she actually had a fenced and netted enclosure built on her property with a wooden, above-ground tunnel connected to the house so the cats could go in and out as they pleased.
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| Mom and Kate at the little stairway over the cat tunnel at her house in Jamestown, NM. |
Her favorite cat was Cindy-Lou, who went on her daily walks around her property or up the road to visit the horses kept there.
My mom also had a rather unusual sense of humor.
She laughed in the midst of daily disasters. When I would be on a trip with her and the car would be near to running out of gas in the middle of nowhere, or the power went out, she would burst into hysterical laughter.
We learned that if you heard her laughing, you should come running. The only time it was safe was when we played the game she loved best, Trivial Pursuit. She was not very good, but found her wrong answers hysterical.
That was always a fun time.
In addition to her cats, she loved the amazing friend group she had amassed.
They are among the most stalwart group of people I have ever met. As she aged, they would drive her places, shop for her.
And, after she returned from the hospital to die after being diagnosed with heart failure, they rallied in a selfless way to oversee her care 24/7 until my sister could cobble together a group of professional caregivers to supplement Priscilla's daily routine.
I tried to help, but it turns out I am better at dealing with all the bureaucracy that accompanies the modern American death. Kate is better organizing people. "Women are collaborative," she said simply and I watched in amazement as a group of about eight women worked out the schedule and I realized my best contribution would be to stay out of the way.
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We will never be able to thank Priscilla Cadman enough for the love and care she showed my mother over the years. |
We had never been a religious family, although both my parents were raised in the Methodist church.
My mom's church was the outdoors. And when she discovered she could do her Buddhist practices outside, she was all in.
In many ways, this was her greatest discovery beyond her own self-reliance.
After so long a life trying to make herself happy, Buddhism began to expand her perspective. She was seeing beyond herself, examining herself and trying, as she said to me once, "to be a better person."
This was when I was most proud of her. She had been through so much, endured so much and done it in, dare I say, a very unapologetic manner. Now she was seeing past herself.
We should all be so enlightened and willing to make that journey.
Below are the remarks I made at her memorial service last month, which I wrote that morning in a moment of stillness.
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| About 20 friends gathered for my mom's memorial service. |
There was rarely any doubt about her opinion on anything.
I recall having a Facetime chat with her and letting her know my son Dylan had taken in a cat named Shamrock and she said "Oh, that's a stupid name" and Kate, who was sitting beside her could be heard to say quietly “don’t say that.”
She was equally decisive and it could take effort to get her to change course on anything.
But she was genuine. There was no artifice in her, so when she told you she loved you, you knew it was true.
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| Mom on one of her walks |
After she began to explore Buddhism, which opened her mind a bit to the perspectives of others, she took those lessons to heart.
She would say things to me like “I shouldn’t say that. It’s hurtful.”
That she never stopped trying to be the best person she could be made me very proud of her.
She had a difficult childhood and the first half of her life was very fraught.
But it is, I think, through and with the friends she met here that she found a path to her best self.
She died how she wanted to, where she wanted to, and that is as much as any of us could hope for.
I believe she is happy wherever she is."
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| The rock meditation garden where my mother was buried naturally, with no embalming, so her body would reunite with and feed the desert she loved so much. |
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