The Mother I Never Knew

A photograph can capture a moment that forever changes the trajectory of one’s legacy. 

Sitting on the edge of my mother’s bed, in a small apartment in the Michigan town where my parents spent their last years, I stared into the face of a young woman – barely fifteen years old – knowing this photograph held secrets.  The woman staring back was also holding a “secret” – one that would forever define the sorrow in her heart…and the self-loathing in her soul.

There are two things of which I’m certain regarding this essay.  The first is that I have never before written anything this emotionally challenging.  The second is that I shall never again encounter a topic as difficult to express as my relationship with my mother.

Born into poverty and prohibition in late December 1921, Verda Ardith Morse was the eighth of nine children born to Herbert (Bert) and Pulcheria (Cherry) Morse.  During prohibition, her opportunistic father – a poor dirt farmer – made decisions that eventually led him to acquire a tavern in the small hamlet of Argyle, Michigan.  Following Prohibition’s demise in 1933, Bert Morse saw an opportunity to fill a niche left vacant by thirteen years of prohibition…and blind pigs.  One problem:  Bert Morse was, by that time, so addicted to alcohol and toxic relationships that he began “giving away the store” to his closest cohorts…this, according to my grandmother.  “Free booze has always found its disciples,” she once told me.

By that point in time, due to her sense of desperation, my Grandmother acted decisively to extract her husband from the fire of his self-consuming addiction.  The year was 1935.  My grandmother could no longer attend to the failing business of bartending AND still be a mother to her remaining children at home.  Consequently, the three youngest children were divided among various family members.  My mother was sent off at the tender age of 14, to live with an older brother, establishing his own farm…while my grandmother quickly undertook the rehabilitation of a failing bar.  

The report card markings I have personally witnessed attest to a high-school freshman student achieving A’s and B’s in the first two marking periods of autumn that year.  In the third marking period, however, something new emerged:  D’s, failing grades, and absenteeism; sometime thereafter, outright withdrawal from high school.  What could possibly account for the dramatic downturn of my mother’s academic performance?  One further marking period would reinforce the academic failings of a young girl at a time in early 1936, when local rumors and innuendo – the “social media” of the day – could destroy a young adult.  Seems not much has changed in that regard.

Thus, in the second semester of her freshman year, Verda Morse – for different reasons offered to each of her subsequent children – dropped out of school.  The remainder of her high-school academic records remain sealed…not even open to her only known son, as she lay dying in a local hospice.

In early June 2002, after a prolonged illness – at the age of 81 years – my mother succumbed to the all-consuming cancer.  Her spirit, however, had been slain so many years before.

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As she lay dying in the early spring of 2002, my mother challenged all reason by asking me to take her for a ride in my rented automobile…away from the caring hands of hospice workers, to revisit some untold part of her past.  Clambering along a dusty country road, she asked questions of my childhood that I could not truthfully answer without causing her more pain.  She was already, by all accounts, in pain that defied reason for her to suffer this climb onto Calvary.  She directed me down a second, washboard-like gravel road, until a decrepit and abandoned farmhouse came into view, beyond a treelined path – a brownstone, two-story structure with windows and dreams long-ago shattered.  

What emerged in her mind’s eye was a truly haunting vision…ghosts of perpetrators and their protectors leaping forth to taunt her.  Her quivering arm arose off her lap, and a pointed index finger told me this was the site of unbearable memories…memories that were the destruction of her spirit.  I stopped the car abruptly, asking, “May I turn around?”  But she insisted we amble past, and onto the final point of her Golgotha.

When finally we’d arrived at the house in which my youngest sister and I grew up, she asked me to pull the car onto the driveway…and she revealed the horrors visited upon her many years ago.  For me, this was to become the place where I encountered revelations…not only of my own pain, but more importantly, of hers.

Reflecting upon that encounter, I am reminded of Saint Augustine’s sage observation:

Her past had been violated by sinners of the criminal kind.  Thus, her future – her potential – was violently ripped from her, like the child that would be shuttled out of her arms…but not out of her broken heart.  

And I realized that – for her -- those cruel, granite skies of a Michigan April in 2002 offered the chance to finally tell her story.  (If you, dear reader, wish to know all, you will find the full truth in a little number titled, “Charlie’s Ladder.”)

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On an early, blessedly warm June afternoon in 2002, surrounded by a few of her great-grandchildren, my mother “rallied”…sitting out on the lawn in a wheelchair, a glorious sun alighting her shriveled countenance.  The kids ran after one another, laughing and playing like innocent children do.  My mother observed it all before her, and she laughed with them.  We shared peanut-butter sandwiches – she and I – with the children.  She took a few meager bites.  Nonetheless, for a few brilliant moments on a splendid afternoon, she was again the young girl of fourteen, who couldn’t wait to grow up and take on the world.  I saw it in her eyes.  She looked up at me, and I guess she realized I was seeing something she hadn’t planned on revealing:  a soul capable of true joy.  I smiled back…but she looked away.

The following day, having lapsed into an apparent coma, she fell silent – until I approached to check her breathing.  What she said and did in that moment shocked both my niece – my mother’s loving granddaughter – and myself.  Throwing her arm over my neck, eyes closed, she drew me in and whispered, “I love you forever and ever and ever.”  Those would prove to be her last words.  Hours later, when I re-checked, there was no longer movement, no longer evidence of a listening soul.  Though I didn’t realize it at the time, that encounter would haunt me for years.  In early evening of the following day, my mother took her last labored breath.

Neither before, nor since, have I experienced such contradictions between one so deeply wounded, yet so influential over the lives of my sisters and me.  She bequeathed two gifts to me:  her love of music, and her “sixth sense,” if you will, of God’s presence. Yet, she was an enigma:  a deeply troubled and grieving soul, who’d inflicted the worst kind of childhood possible upon me.  Still, all I could feel was…pity.

I leaned over her, checked her breathing once more…and turned off the machine.  I heard my niece sob.  I felt my mother’s spirit pass through me…and out the window.  She was gone, and with her, any chance for reconciliation and forgiveness. 

Retreating to a tiny chapel, in the facility where she spent her last days, I wept bitterly for the mother I never knew.  

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For years thereafter, I was reminded of the Gordon Lightfoot song, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” – in particular, one verse:

Looking back, I know that the waves of pain that each of my sisters, and I, have endured in the years since her death compelled us to ask where the love of God had gone.  In truth, our story isn’t nearly as rare as one might hope.  This story is painted on the canvases of young, innocent children the world over…every day.

As for me, I consider myself blest to have found a photograph that was sent to my mother, after the passing of my father the previous year.  Who sent it…?  Obviously someone who remains invisible to Verda’s children.  Whoever it was already knew the true story better than I.  All that I and my sisters truly know is that we have or had a half-brother somewhere.

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To Verda’s granddaughters (eight beautiful ladies), know this:  your grandmother was a far better grandmother to each of you than ever a mother to her children…and that’s okay.  Her love for you was genuine and real.  Know that.

As for me, this is the last time I shall ever speak on this subject.  This chapter of my life – the “letting go” – is now over…past tense, if you will.  It no longer defines me.  As the noted Swedish psychoanalyst, Carl Jung once observed:

All is forgiven, mom.  Wherever you are, you know that atonement is between you and the architect of the universe.  We leave that in God’s hands.  I pray he has embraced you – that fifteen-year-old girl – and that we will one day meet again…the mother I never knew.