Follow up, December 31, 2022
My mom was tough as nails when she needed to be, but she is the person almost totally responsible for my ability to laugh when things go in the crapper. I am so proud to be her son.
Mom died January 2, 1979, while Kansas City was in the grips of a massive winter storm. It would turn out to be the coldest winter on record in Kansas City. I talked to her on December 31, but on the morning of January 1, our phones were turned off for lack of payment. My roommate had a high-maintenance marijuana habit, and bought weed instead of paying the phone bill.
I was completely snowed in, and the morning of January 2, my next-door neighbor trudged through the deep and drifting snow to tell me that mom's nursing home was on the phone. I knew what that was all about. Mom was gone. She lost this, her second battle with cancer. My formerly little round mom was gray, emaciated, and in horrible pain.
I never got the chance to tell her goodbye, but I am fairly certain that she held on long enough just to see the Rose Parade on New Year's Day. She had always wanted to visit Pasadena for the parade, but it never came to pass. To this day, without fail, I watch the parade for mom.
Mom's interment was delayed until March of that year because the intense cold had frozen the ground so deeply that her grave couldn't be excavated.
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My dad died June 14, 1974 of congestive heart failure. He collapsed at the front entrance to Dr. Wilson H. Miller's offices on the Country Club Plaza. I was working as a carpenter in Castle Rock, Colorado when I got the news, delivered to the job site by my then mother-in-law.
My first wife and I set out for Kansas City early the following morning and we met mom at Passantino Brothers' Funeral Home that night. She couldn't figure out what was wrong with the way dad looked in the casket. The masons materialized overnight and dressed dad in his lodge regalia. We pondered and wondered. Mom, my sister and brother thought the same thing, and the morning of dad's funeral, as we were sitting quietly in the family room of the funeral home listening to an organist's rendition of dad's favorite hymn, "In The Garden," it hit me.
"Mom, you've never seen him relaxed before. This is the first time he hasn't been tied up in tense knots worrying about his life and his family and whether he measured up as a man."
My mom and dad are buried together under towering oak trees in Bethel Cemetery, our family reserve out on Springdale Road in Leavenworth County, Kansas.
