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As it says on the tin: my mom is gone. She passed this morning, in (as I understand it) a morphine-assisted slumber; may we all go as easily and painlessly.  

This one's going to be a bit deep, a bit informative, certainly retro- and introspective. As a bad man with some good intentions was wont to say, there you are, and here I am; shall we?

(A brief note: I'm composing this through a nest of secure shells, perhaps 180 miles or more from the disks that house these files. I'll clean up formatting issues later.)

My mom was many things, like all of us. Among those things, she was:

  • a country girl from south Georgia
  • the baby of her siblings
  • a chemical engineer who worked in both the oil and paper industries
  • a provider, first for my father, later also for I and my brother
  • a loving daughter, wife, and mother

More than those incidental things, born of life's context, she was:

Spiritual

K. believed Something, greater than we and beyond our understanding, Exists. That it cares about our own existences, and would see us healthy, happy, and loved.

She and my father, my brother as well, shared this view. I don't. To say that this caused some frisson between us at times is understatement. 😉 As best I understood, she felt a Creator and the Will of such a Force gave life meaning. I feel that "meaning" is the stuff of life's after-action report; that, Existence being a fact, our first priority is seeing how others exist, building informed opinions, and living in ways we hope will offer meaning to ourselves and others.

They're not incompatible views. We found a shared respect for each other, and I'll forever be grateful we did. Having those discussions as a parent and a teen, as I still attempted to put word to thought and emotion? Not easy. Anger on my side: at feeling press-ganged to adopt a position she had no chance of empirically proving. Frustration and sadness on hers: that, absent my own "miraculous" or deeply affecting experience of the Holy, I would never share in her Salvation.

Finding our middle ground took ages. C'est que c'est.

Determined

My mom survived polio as the child of poor farmers in south Georgia. She survived being hit by a car, literal days before beginning her first post-college engineering position with Amoco. She bore the attitudes of a workforce that still, in the late '70s and early '80s, acknowledged and respected her presence and her expertise only hesitantly, sometimes not at all.

K. knew who she was, knew what she knew, and knew what she was about. She made it clear to all who had eyes to see it, and earned others' respect.

Giving

I cannot think of a time she refused, flat-out, to help others when she was able. I hope others will say the same of me at my own end.

Absent

For all that she might have thrived in a labaratory environment, developing new chemicals and compounds, making new discoveries, my mom often ended up in a sales position. It's understandable, given the greater circumstances; each team that traveled to a refinery or paper mill hawking their employers' wares needed its smooth talkers, and also vitally needed an anchor, well-versed in the "why"s and "how"s. Someone able to speak Chemistry, guide trial runs to their desired results, and demonstrate concrete advantages to spending more money on an altered process and production flow. As a woman in her position, in those years, she was well suited to being an important member of teams led by men in male-dominated industries.

Such a person is rarely home to sit at the dinner table or witness a bored child ostensibly "playing baseball", more accurately standing oblivious in left field, blowing dandelion seeds.

Inquisitive

K. loved learning, loved the progression of knowing nothing, to knowing a little, to practical fluency, to relative expertise. She never feared being bad at something before becoming good at it, and never hesitated when encouraging my brother's or my curiosity—some big ol' "Satanic panic" exceptions aside. (Let's not digress too far there.)

The woman worked in two wildly different fields of chemical engineering, took up and learned to play multiple folk instruments, dabbled in drawing and watercolors, helped keep her family's history alive in memory, and attempted to understand my "black box"-ass self. Those efforts cannot be denied.

Fierce

I visited my parents in October at their request. K. wasn't anything close to active or energetic, but she was still very much herself—simply reduced by failing health and lack of energy. Despite that, there was a moment when her desires and mine were at odds, and that woman got spittin' mad. 😄 Only for a moment—I quickly understood why, and we quickly understood each other—and, for all its evansescence, it was a strong sign that the woman I knew still lived inside her. As many times as she fought me, she also fought for me, and she was not someone to be carelessly denied.

Loving

All those near her experienced her love for them. Means and methods of display might rankle, but her intent was always clear: to mirror her Creator's caring, and see us healthy, happy, and loved.

K. will forever inhabit the wider spaces and oft-forgotten cracks of my life. She shaped me in ways good and ill, through positive application and negative reaction.

She was a mom, after all.