I Street Imaginings

HONEY, MY MOM

My mom & dad - Newlyweds

I suppose some folks might find it sappy or sentimental for someone to write a blog about “Mother”, but I am doing it today because it is March 27^th, my mother’s birthday. If she were alive today, she would be 101. I loved my mother dearly, and although I moved across the country away from her when I was twenty-one, and saw her only briefly once a year after that, she never quite left my side. Even today I remember her smell, her perfume, her pride, her country cooking, her hands, her unfaltering belief in God, and her endearing Southern accent and vernacular. (I reckon; I’ll be there directly; He makes me so mad I could spit; Good grief; Oh my; That’d be fine; Not worth two hoots; I’m going to give ya’ what Patty gave the drum; If it were a snake it would have bit ya’; Ya’ll are welcome.) I could fill a page! My mother’s sayings were an integral part of who she was and when I think of her now, I can picture her so very clearly that I have to smile.

Below is a passage from my memoir Tumor Me – The Story of My Firefighter that perhaps expresses my love for her the best:

To add insult to injury, on January 19, 2010, my 95-year-old mother passed away. Alex and Trevor lost their beloved grandmother, Honey. It was a crushing blow to all of us. My mother, Nola Jean Baird DeChesere, was two months short of turning 96 and had withered to eighty-two pounds when she died. In the last two years of her life she had become demented and confused, but she was so incredibly loved by our family, that her amazing spirit remains alive in our hearts today. My father, my brother, his children, grandchildren, and mine all know that she was an absolute Earth angel.

Alex and I flew together to North Carolina for the funeral. Trevor followed separately two days later. Our family buried my mother on a cold, January morning in a grave of dirt and sand in a quaint cemetery behind her church in Wilmington, North Carolina, not too far from the Atlantic Ocean. The loss I felt then is still with me; I realize that at some point every day, the memory of her slips into my mind, and that’s a good thing, really, because she was my ally, my confidant, and my teacher. From my mother I learned the power and the consolation of unconditional love. Her greatest attribute was her amazing ability to listen, to abstain from judging, and to accept gratefully what life had granted her, both the good and the bad. I have never met another person with such goodness.

So another year has passed. Happy Birthday, Mother. I will hold you in my heart forever.

And a note: My dad, a smart, sentimental, and challenging Italian man passed away in February 2014 four days short of turning 103. I loved him too.