For my Mom.....

Tomorrow my mother would have been 61 years old. Every year near her birthday, I like to commit something to writing to her.

I'm not sure if it weighs on me acutely this year because of the general mood of things right now; things are up in the air at work; school is looming before me--and the question of clinicals--and I wish that it would hurry up and start, because not only does tomorrow mark her birthday, but it marks the beginning of the whole lousy spring of the year she died.

Mom was diagnosed with Stage IIIC endometrial cancer in mid-March. A mere six weeks later, on May 6, she was gone. And while the warmth and the flowers of spring remind me of rebirth and the fact that life can and does and has gone on--it sometimes doesn't make spring any easier. It seems to be going around; I talked to my baby cousin yesterday, and Amanda is very much at a cross-roads right now, too. It's a helpless feeling not being able to go to her right now; and not being able to know what to tell her. Her problems are greater than mine in the grand scheme of things, I realize......and all either of us can do is what we used to say when I was in the Air Force: "Hurry up and wait." Every other waking moment is bills.....school.....will-I-get-into-clinicals-this-time? The irritation of the work situation is helping not at all. It's driving me a little loopy.

.....just as that spring 14 years (has it really been that long since I've seen my Mom?) ago. The tests. The two surgeries to put shunts in her failing kidneys--both unsuccessful. The helpless knowledge that while we were waiting to get her functioning sufficiently to withstand chemo and radiation--the cancer could be, and was--metastasizing. Growing beyond the control of the doctors and medicine. It was over too quickly.......and not quickly enough, when I think of how she was suffering at the end. The night before she died was the longest night of my life--including the nights I was in labor with my kids; and anyone who has experienced that can tell you: those are some long nights indeed.

My Dad had sent both my sister and I home from the hospital; in spite of the fact that I was 21 and my sister 18, we would always be, to Mom I suppose, her little girls, and it wasn't the place for two little girls. I talked to her on the phone at about midnight as she took a breathing treatment. It was the last time on this Earth I'd ever speak to her, and after the relationship I'd had with her at times, it is still comforting to me, today, that the last words I ever spoke to my mother were, "I love you, Mom." My friend Michelle came and sat with me that night. I have no recollection of where Misty was, or when she got home, for some reason--but I do remember she was there when Dad called the next morning to tell us she was gone. The last thing I remember was it being four in the morning, and I had been working on a cross-stitch pattern--"Children Learn What They Live." I don't remember Michelle leaving--though she must have; she was gone when the call came. I woke up in my parents bed with Misty and Christopher--and it was storming violently when the call came. For a moment I was a little girl--storms always sent us to Mom and Dad's room. I remember the intensity of that storm, and I remember Misty's voice, and she was crying, "Daddy, tell her I love her......" she hung up the phone and told me, "She was already gone......" Christopher was awake now and looking between me and his aunt, only two years old and not accustomed to seeing "Aunt Tee" cry. I remember picking him up and carrying him to the kitchen, and the T.V. still on in the living room; the National Weather Service was warning that Campbell County was under a tornado warning. I was marvelling at the fact that I could never, ever, remember LaFollette having a tornado warning. And being in disbelief--Mom couldn't be gone. Not Mom. She didn't give up.....something that both impressed and infuriated me at times.

I didn't believe it until Dad and Aunt Mae pulled into the driveway, and I ran to the door. And the look on my Dad's face was all it took. My father, 6'2", had always, always looked huge and imposing to me, both as a little girl and as a grown woman. While he's still my hero--he's never again looked like the giant I always thought him to be. Devastation was written there, in his face, and almost appeared to have shrunk. I walked into the back hallway and cried furiously for about a minute and a half......and it was all I would cry for the next several weeks about it. I did not cry at her viewing.....her funeral....... And I didn't cry nearly as much for myself as I did for my Dad, who was clearly beside himself....or for my sister, now sobbing in my Dad and my Aunt's arms; Misty was completely lost. I dried my eyes, and I remember walking into the living room and picking that cross-stitching up off the couch. I folded it and put it in a bag......the bag from Oak Ridge Methodist Medical Center--from the day they ran the tests that would confirm the diagnosis. Mom had joked I had been working on that thing forever and would never finish it......I can remember working furiously on it the night before she died. I wanted to show it to her--before, and if, she died. I sometimes think now that I worked so hard on it that night thinking that if only I finished it........? What might have been? Of course my logical mind knows that nothing different would have happened. But....that cross stitch remains in that bag. It's never been taken out again, unfinished. While I sometimes think to myself if I took it out and finished it, maybe I could put my dread of spring behind me--again I know, it wouldn't be that way. Spring is forever bittersweet for me. And besides--not finishing it is my way of letting Mom have the last word in this one; God knows I never wanted to let her have it when she was alive.

I also remembered a conversation I'd had with her around Christmas: I had been working on that cross stitch and she had said, hearing the sleet on the roof, "I've never wanted to die in the winter." Something went cold in me when I heard it--and I realize now that I should have known then, at that moment--something was very wrong. I looked up at her, and she was actually tearing up. "Something about being put in the cold ground....." I remember that my heart was pounding. And, not knowing what to say, so shocked was I at this version of my Mom--had stammered out NOT, "You're not going to die, Mom......" or "Don't be silly," had said, "Well, uh, you know.....Mom, it's just your body......"

If I could turn back time and go back to that, I would have said something else, and again I have that thought, "If only I had said something different....." Now, I know nothing would be different, it's just the way I think sometimes. My answer had caused Mom to brush away a tear and smile quickly--"Oh, I know." God answered her prayers the day she was laid to rest; it was burning hot, and only the first week of May. I was never and haven't since--been that happy to be outside in that sort of heat.

Mom and I had some fights that the world's greatest generals are glad they missed. She was 5'1" and I was taller than her from the time I was eleven years old, but I was scared of that woman like a virgin on prom night. Bigger than her for as many years as I was smaller than her.....but she whipped my ass more times than I would care to tell you about, AFTER I was bigger than her, thankyouverymuch--and still could, because I know enough to know I would throw up the white flag the second she started in. And I say that with a smile.

There were days we could have killed each other. And tried......she had the advantage here, because I would never lay a finger on my Mom, although she laid hers on me!! (Again, smiling--laughing just a little.) Probably the sorriest moment of my life was one day when we were baring our fangs at each other and she had lit into me like flies on shit. Mom had said she would die and go to Hell before........and I had piped up and said, "Oh, yeah? You'd be in good company there!!" and the second it was out of my mouth, I was wishing the bomb would drop, because it would have been far less painful.......We could both laugh about it later after I was grown and gone, but at the time it happened, Dad and Misty stood poised to stop us from doing anything we might go to the pokey for.

And I admit, after I left home, I did things for pure shock value to Mom. I went to Mexico for a vacation. I dyed my hair (slutty, to her Pentecostal upbringing, and although she finally gave up that particular point as a lost cause, she could never stop herself from shaking her head at my new haircolor.) She would call me when it was two in the afternoon, demanding to know why I was still in bed.......and I would all too gleefully tell her it was because any movement made the room spin--and the ringing of the phone sounded like firecrackers in my ears; late night......"Don't YELL, Mom....." The time she came to see me and all I had in the place I shared with my roomies was Twinkies, Mountain Dew, cigarettes, coffee, and a half a bottle of vodka. She'd take me shopping for clothes when I was home....she hated mine, and although she hated the ones I picked out, she bought them anyway. ("That makes you look taller and scrawnier than you already are!!") She threw away every Aerosmith tape I ever had when I was a teenager--and for my twentieth birthday? She bought me Aerosmith tickets.....

Not long after survival school I was home, and she had been horrified at my appearance when she saw me...."You look like you're starving to death...." I had been ready to pack my bags and go back to Texas; we had bickered and bickered--wow!! The argument we had that stands out the most bears remembering here, because it's funny now: My mother had picked up my dog tags, where I had taken them off and laid them down. If you've never read dog tags, the following is engraved on them: Your name, Social Security Number, Blood Type, Religion and your branch of service. Mom looked at mine--and here is a classic Dora Elizabeth and Cheri Lynn Morgan exchange:

"Protestant?!" (Mom. And it didn't come out PRA-testant, as you would give the word the infliction when you're referring to religion; it came out Protest-Ant. This is important.)

"Yeah......" shrug of my shoulders, total nonchalance. I had thought nothing of it. "It's what I am...."

"You are not!!" She was really heated, and at the time, I was absolutely befuddled as to why. From the ensuing rant, I gleaned that my mother thought 'Protestant' was a euphemism for 'atheist'. And I remember saying to her--in a perfect example of why she found me absolutely infuriating......."MO--OO-OOM......I am not Catholic. I don't need a priest, Extreme Unction, or Last Rites!! I'm not Jewish, so I don't need a rabbi, or someone to say kaddish!! I'm not Muslim--so it's okay to embalm me and chunk me in a fridge for more than 24 hours before they bury me; I'm not a Jehovah's Witness--of course, if I WAS, we wouldn't be having this conversation, because I'd never have joined anyway--but just the same, they can give me a blood transfusion!! This is so they know what to do with me when they find me incapacitated or DEAD!!!"

"They're going to pray that you don't split Hell wide open!!"

NOW I understood. I had had enough arguments with Mom to realize--she didn't recognize this word 'Protestant'. "Mom.......it just means I am not a part of a faith that I am baptized, bar-mitzvahed, bat-mitzvahed, or, thank God, circumsized into, and,"--and here I said the wrong thing, "You're a Protestant, too!!" (I'm a Protestant, you're a Protestant.....would ya like to be a Protestant, too?!?!--she wasn't amused......)

Off to the races....."Your father's dog tags say 'Southern Baptist'!!" (And indeed they did.) "Well, I'm sorry--I was a little sobered at thinking about what they would think, looking at my dog tags when I am DEAD--they're not going to give a shit about whether or not I'm a Baptist--they only want to know what to do with my body!! 'Protestant' seemed sufficient!!" It went on for a bit longer before I finally, beleaguered, said, "Oh, for God's sake--I didn't come up with it. And I'll punch Martin Luther in the face for this when I get to Heaven--MOM!! The Roman Catholic Church thought up 'protestant'!!! HUNDREDS of years before you or I were ever born.....blame the Pope!!!! I promise--when they see that on my dog tags, they're not going to think I was the demon spawn of Madeleine Murray O'Hara......they're going to know I was God-fearing enough to know what PROTESTANT means!!!"

That woman NEVER looked at my dog tags again without her eyes squinting in suspicion. I still carry one of them on my car keys, and I laugh every time I think about it.

......and I had gone to bed, and drifted off into a fitful sleep.....

.....and woke up with a start, ready to start swinging at whatever woke me up--survival school in all the interesting ways they devise for sleep deprivation will do that to you--only to find that it was Mom who woke me up......

She had come in to my room to put another blanket on me, and was tucking the covers up under my chin--which was what woke me. She had jumped back when I sprang up, and said, "It's me!! It's Mommy....." I was eighteen years old. And heard not, "It's just me!!" But--"It's Mommy." She hadn't referred to herself as 'Mommy' since I was about six. And when I laid back down, she pulled up the covers.......and, in something else uncharacteristic of Mom, leaned over and kissed me on the forehead, and I could swear she let her lips stay there for a second, as if checking me for a fever.

It never occured to me when I was growing up--in spite of the fact she had cancer when I was only four--that she would go before Dad. Honestly, I thought that woman would be standing over ME (and I just might have gone at her hands.....) I had an unreasonable fear, after my Uncle Gene died at 46, that I would lose Daddy when he was that age. He had a heart attack at 44, and I was batshit with fear. Ironically--it was Dad who was 46 when Mom died; Mom herself had just turned 47. One of those little plot twists that sneaks up and surprises you in a way you never expect.

I have little reminders of Mom.....sometimes I see her in my own face. I see her in Cate--my youngest daughter is stubborn as her Me-Mom, and some of the expressions she gets sometimes are Dora Morgan made over. And Cate's got her temper!! Although Caroline has grown to be more like Bill than me, when she was born, the doctor held her up for me to see......and the line in my mother's forehead that would stick out when she was going to cry, or when she was angry--was etched in my newborn daughter's face. I had been a little stuck on a middle name for Caroline, and after that--Caroline Elizabeth Greenway she became; Dora Elizabeth Morgan's namesake. Misty looks shockingly like our mother........she looks like the Mom we had when she was young--before the cancer and the worry and everything else got her. Misty is beautiful like my Mom when she was young--because my mother was as beautiful a woman as anyone has ever seen when we were small. She has Mom's easy grin and her green eyes. She's little like Mom.........but she is Chuck Morgan's daughter. Gives not a shit about anything. She's not bad tempered like Mom (I AM!!)--I think I understand it more now; Misty was Mom's girl probably because.......well, Misty is like Dad, and after all--Mom loved Dad enough to marry him.

And while I don't look like her, and while I have dispensed with most of Mom's terrible temper--I am Dora Morgan's daughter. I think sometimes now that Mom didn't like herself very much, and I don't understand why, because when she wasn't in the death grips of one of her moods, Mom was a great person. She was pretty and funny, and she had a great heart. I think Mom sometimes saw the things in me that she liked in herself the least, and she tried--sometimes literally--to knock that out of me. When I was a teenager in particular, I was quiet, moody, and more inclined to be interested in what Mom considered 'dark'. A bookworm and a loner for the most part, it's easy to see why Mom didn't 'get' me sometimes, looking back. Mom became a believer in the saying, "It's the quiet ones you've got to watch," and I was the reason for that. I turned out to be the only Hell my Momma ever raised......sometimes I'm proud of that, sometimes not.

God has granted me life reminders--in 2001, my cousin Bonnie gave birth to her daughter on what would have been Mom's 52nd birthday. And Mom got another namesake that day--Carsyn Elizabeth Denney was born on February 26, 2001; and the very next day, on Bill's mother's birthday came my youngest child. I think that was God's way of making the month of February more bearable.......I know He was smiling twice as hard at our family that week.

On May 8th, 2004, I stood at the same cemetery where we had laid my mother to rest eight years before, to the day..........to lay her oldest brother to rest. Mom's mother had passed only weeks before. And while some might think that particularly cruel......I like to think that God would have it so that I don't have another painful reminder: My uncle died May 5th, 2001. Mom died on the 6th......the first week of May hurts very badly--and while it never goes completely away, it is eased away with the coming of summer.

I find myself thinking more of the good these days. I think more about times like.........when we used to go pick up Daddy from work--when I couldn't have been more than three, and I thought ALL the sailors were Daddy ("There's Daddy!!" at every single one I saw.......and Mom and I would sing, "Daddy, oh Daddy, where are you?!")......and Daddy would somehow manage to sneak around my watchful eyes and pop up in the back window and yell, "I GOTCHA!!!" And Mom and I would would scream, "DADDDDDY!!!!"

I keep my favorite picture of us near my desk.....one of me in a little white dress with navy blue polka-dots, sitting in her lap and beaming like the little ham I was at two years old--and her smiling a little wryly--either at the fact (as she said) that she wasn't exactly dressed for a picture or at the little turd she's holding.

I think about the last time we were stationed in Memphis--Chinese food every Friday night. I think about when she used to work third shift and would grin at us on her way out the door and say, "Oh, boy!! Full moon tonight......"

.....or the time we were on our way to Ohio, and, "Don't get off here!! THIS IS EXIT 69!!"--roared laughing and smacked me playfully on the arm after I spit Pepsi all over the steering wheel AND the windshield and yelled, "MOTHER!!" when I realized in horror that--yes, my mother was full of sexual innuendo when she said it--and more horrified still that she knew what a 69 even was.....and she said, "Well!! I graduated in 1968--and we used to say, 'At least we're not graduating in '69!!!!!" She laughed the rest of the way to Dayton.

....her howling laughing at me when my Mamaw Morgan, when Bill and I began to discuss marriage and the possibility of having more children later told me--"Girl, you'd best tell him when he gets to acting like that to find a slab of meat or a hole in the fence....." and I said, "Mamaw!!!" Mom laughed till she cried and all I could do was sputter. "She's speechless!!" I don't know what Mom thought was more funny--what Mamaw said, or the fact that her oldest daughter was speechless.

Or when I was in labor with Christopher. My pulse went up over 200--and I don't remember squat about it except ALOT of doctors, Mom telling one of them she wasn't leaving, and the last thing I remember about it was.....looking under one of the doctor's arms, and seeing Mom. Her eyes were squeezed tight, her hands were tightly folded under her chin, and her lips were moving in prayer......and I know I saw a tear. Her laughter when, in the delivery room, the first contraction in there brought "PUSH!!" out of all the doctors, nurses and Mom.......and Mom added, "Chin to your chest, honey!!" and I said--and the only reason I got away with it was I was in labor; 21 hours into labor and EXHAUSTED--said: "Mom, shut up and get the f--- away from me......"and she cried from laughing. The second he was born and they held him up, she said, "Oh, my poor baby--that kid weighs ten pounds if he weighs an ounce......." and then she squealed, "Ohhhhhh......HE'S GOT RED HAIR!!!!" while trying to give me a squeeze--which I was struggling to stay out of....."Go with the baby, Mom!!! Don't let them lose him!!"

So.....in closing: I once heard the expression "Everything is okay in the end. If it's not okay--it's not the end." I hope Mom went knowing that everything was okay......or at least in the process of being okay. We are.....

Happy Birthday, Mom. I love you and I miss you.

"Where is the light that I recognized.....gone away.....
...But I won't cry for yesterday; there's an ordinary world somehow I had to find."