Mother, Something of a Mystery

Mother lay in bed playing canasta, smoking her

Kent Cigarettes. She would alternate her card game

with reading in bed every day. A small frame on her

nightstand contained a picture of Mother of Per-

petual Help holding her son, Jesus. Mother would

also pray every day. Most of her days were spent

that way—in bed, smoking, canasta, reading and

praying.

The illness she claimed was a liver disease, but as I

later came to understand, it was mostly the tremen-

dous weight of anxiety and depression to which she

was held captive.

Weekly trips to a physician who gave her benzo-

diazepines for her melancholia, and B-12 shots to

support her liver condition diagnosis. There were

also numerous trips to the hospital when her an-

xieties became too great. Years of chronic mental

and physical pain were spent that way.

Mother loved baseball and her St. Louis Cardinals

which in spring and summer she tuned in on the

radio each and every game. Bob Gibson was her

number one ace on the mound. Lou Brock was her

favorite at bat and running the bases.

Mother had a shaggy, terrier dog she named Gibby

after her favorite pitcher. Mother was divorced from

our father, but the onset of her illness came long

before that.

My two brothers and I pretty much fended for

ourselves growing up. Oh, there was a period

earlier on when she would do what she needed

to do to care for us, but as we grew old enough

to take care of ourselves, mother became less

actively involved in our lives.

Once a week Mother would talk on the telephone

with her lifelong friend Lois, her sister Molly, and

a nice lady named Teresa, a retired secretary to

her father when Mother was a child.

She once told me that her favorite classical piece

was Intermezzo by Dvorak, but I don’t recall her

ever listening to music on the radio, just Cardinal

Baseball as she would lay one card down after

another on the bedspread, playing her games

of canasta and smoking her Kent Cigarettes.

Mother died at age fifty-nine.

Other than what I have stated here, Mother

and her illness were a mystery to me. There

must have been a reason for who she was

and that which she came to be, a traumatic

incident in her life, perhaps, or a genetic

chemical imbalance, which was passed along

to me.

The longer I live, and knowing now what I know

about myself, I understand more about mother

than I did when she was alive. Some of who she

was still lives inherently in me. One thing is for cer-

tain, though, I don’t have the canasta gene running

through my veins.

                                   -30-

Chris Hanch 8-4-2020