My mom died on February 9. I ask your indulgence about this very long personal diary in honor of her because March 31, 2007 would have been her 70th birthday. I owe her a great debt of character, because so much of what I am today is what she made me. Among other great life lessons, she taught me what it means to be a Democrat. And she is the reason I will always be one.
Grief is a funny thing. At first I tried to "be strong" and keep up a lot of my regular schedule. But the stress of unexpressed grief took a toll on my body until I was forced to slow down and accept that it was better to let the tears flow.
My very first day with the grief counselor revealed that politics was one of the most significant binding agents in my relationship with my mom. So many of my strongest and most pleasant memories of mom have political connections. She took me to JFK's inaugural parade, and to his funeral procession. In between she left me at home with my grandmother when she went to the Mall with the rest of the adults in the household to hear MLK's I Have a Dream speech at the March on Washington.
I remember the day she explained the Viet Nam war to me in terms a child could understand. She provided running commentary to the Sunday pundit shows and pointed out the distortions and filled in the information gaps and taught me how to critically evaluate politicians statements while I was still in elementary school. She made modest contributions to political campaigns on a secretary's salary, and encouraged me to give my time to political action: at 10 I was handing out leaflets for Bobby Kennedy. Our neighborhood was mostly spared in the riots after MLK's assassination, and she explained why some stores were spared while others were looted depending on which merchants were perceived as being unfair and exploitative of the black community. I have fond memories of highly charged political discussions at the Sunday dinner table, especially between mom and her brother, whom I called my "Agnew uncle" because he voted for Nixon (twice!) and repeated Agnew's anti-liberal comments like people ditto Rush today. This infuriated my mom, who disliked Nixon so much that she told me I was "a Nixon hater in the womb". But while they argued, they continued to love one another.
I remember the morning of June 5 when the phone rang in the middle of the night. In the days before people lived night owl 24-hour lives, the phone ringing at that hour was always an emergency or some kind of bad news. We had just turned off the TV about an hour earlier, but another friend who had left her TV on called to tell us RFK had been shot. Another politically motivated shooting two short months after MLK seemed to scare her a little. Mom started talking about moving to Canada if George Wallace won the presidency, and she was apparently serious. I spoke a little French, and back then you didn't need passports to cross the border. So even though, as I said before, she hated Nixon, and had voted for Humphrey in spite of his stand on the war, she was grateful Nixon won instead of Wallace. It meant we did not have to move.
I went to a progressive/alternative/experimental private school where the Headmaster was so liberal he cancelled classes so the entire school could attend the big DC antiwar Moratorium in November 1969. (This was partly practical—so many kids played hooky on the day of the earlier demonstration in October that few would have come to school that day anyway.) But everyone 12 and under had to get permission from their parents, and my mom was feeling cautious. She thought there would be violence and skirmishes with the police and the "hard-hats" (there's a term from the past) so I had to stay at school with a handful of other 7th and 8th graders while the big kids went to the demonstration. She was right—some people did get roughed up. But I felt left out of all the excitement. She made it up to me later by letting me go to an overnight election party at the same school in 1972. It was definitely not the fun night we had hoped/expected—my first electoral heartbreak. Although we lived in DC, mom had a "Don't blame me, I'm from Massachusetts" bumper sticker. Still later she also let me go on a field trip to attend the Watergate hearings which was a real educational highlight.
Even during the long stretch of years when we were somewhat estranged and barely spoke to one another, we could always connect over politics. It's the exact opposite of what fellow kogs often describe as their family experience of political discussion: politics was the safe topic, the place we could always go to agree with each other in substance. Even if she loved Jimmy Earl and didn't understand why I was walking through the North End with John Anderson, it was easier in our once a week Sunday night phone call to talk about politics than about my disastrous personal life, my impractical dreams of a creative arts career, or the unresolved issues of anger and resentment in our relationship with each other. It was much easier to hate Nixon. Or Reagan.
When my Agnew uncle died in 1991, she took it hard. He had evidently said something hurtful to her while he was under the influence of medication, and while everyone else asked her not to hold it against him, she insisted the opposite—that the drugs had made him say what he really felt, and she felt he no longer loved her. He died before they could be reconciled and the combination of grief and stress brought on a depression that sent her health into a tailspin. When she first got the news of his death she was visiting me in Cambridge, and we had the distraction of the Clarence Thomas hearings to help us avoid the elephant in the room. But after she went back to DC her health took a serious and drastic turn for the worse. She and other family members conspired to keep it from me how often she went in and out of the hospital.
She loved the Big Dog from the very beginning, and tolerated my ABC buttons dusted off from 1976: Anybody but Carter became Anybody but Clinton—I was happy to be wrong twice! When Clinton was elected she was thrilled. She thought Carville was a genius (well, back then he was something of a phenomenon). She adoringly referred to Bill Clinton as "My President" with tremendous pride, and frequently said how good it was to feel like she "had a president again" after 12 years of R rule. I didn't catch on to how sick she was until Clinton was re-elected. I called her from my election night party and she was weak and unable to talk for long. It was the beginning of my worrying about her more and more and calling more and more often.
She retired and moved to a senior apartment building where her health rebounded some, in part because of my attention. She had a few good years there before diabetes started catching up to her, the resulting kidney failure causing awful vomiting spells that sapped her energy and left her too weak to even feed herself sometimes. I started calling her every day and visiting her frequently—flying down from Boston every few weeks while I was pursuing a mid-life Master's Degree. One memorable trip in June of 2000 I arrived to find her so listless she could barely open her eyes. "My baby's here" she said with a weak smile and a small voice, looking at me in triumph. Next to the bed I was shocked to find a nearly empty plastic gallon container of warm water, an empty tin of katydids, a nearly empty large bag of pretzels, and a small pile of eggshells. Some days earlier she had taken all the strength she had to boil a dozen eggs and carry the eggs the water and the pretzels into her bedroom. (The candy was already there, left from some fundraising effort months before.) She never admitted just how many days she had rationed this meager fare waiting for me to get there. All the while she had assuring me on the phone that she was fine. I stayed with her for the rest of summer, helping her regain her strength, as we followed the 2000 election together on C-Span. When I went back to school, we set her up with Meals on Wheels, and it was a literal lifesaver, bringing not only the guarantee of nutritious food five days a week but also someone who would knock on the door and make sure she was OK and still able to walk. Repeated Republican attempts to cut funding for that program used to enrage me. You can bet none of those guys ever came home to find their mother living on hard boiled eggs and pretzels because she was too weak to stand and cook anymore.
By the time of the "unbearable wrongness of Bush v Gore" it was clear that she could no longer live alone. I made a surprise extra visit to DC for Bush's inaugural, intending to protest, but mom asked me not to go. Shades of the 1969 moratorium—she was worried that there might be violence. The weather was bad too. "I don't want my baby to catch cold on account of that man. He's not worth it." So I stayed in and we watched it on TV. Protesters filled the streets. There were probably 25,000 protesters along the parade route. Local DC coverage had plenty of shots of them—we didn't know until later that national news barely covered them. People along Pennsylvania Avenue, where I saw JFK with my mom, threw so many eggs at the motorcade that Bush was unable to get out and walk at 15th street as several former presidents had done. One protester's rain soaked sign said "even the heavens are crying." I had made signs that said GORE GOT MORE and put them all around the TV set, including a small handmade sign that is still taped to her bedside desk. We talked that day about how she would have to move to Boston to live with me after I graduated in 2001. We talked about powers of attorney and health care proxies and all the other paperwork we would need. She said—"we made it through eight years of Reagan, we can survive this too."
But she didn't survive Bush.
When the time to move came, I hired a mover to pack up her stuff and take it to Boston in a van while I drove her to Boston in her car. Unfortunately our moving date was September 11. The movers were from a NY company, and they left Manhattan at 8:30 in the morning and had no radio in the truck. When they showed up we were sitting in front of the TV stunned like the rest of America and had to tell them what was going on. There was no way to drive to Massachusetts without going through Pennsylvania since all the bridges and tunnels around NYC were closed. We and the belongings did not get to Boston until September 13. We often talked about how she moved in with me just in time, because her health took a nosedive right after that. She was too weak to walk more than a few steps and broke her leg in a bathroom fall while I was at church without her one Sunday. There was no way she could have managed without daily live-in help if she had stayed in DC, and she quickly became too sick to even travel. She had at least one serious brush with death every year. She would have been stuck in a nursing facility down there, and I would have gone crazy trying to supervise things from hundreds of miles away. I would probably have had to move there, separated from my 30 years of rootedness and support in Boston and separated from the better quality of the Boston hospitals.
In 2002, we watched all three hours of the Paul Wellstone funeral together. We couldn't believe the lies about boos and stage directions the Rpgs planted in the media. One winter afternoon in 2003 she heard me clapping and shouting yes! yes! at the TV from her bedroom down the hall. Later I told her excitedly about some guy I had just seen on C-Span who said he represented the Democratic wing of the Democratic party. She put up with my political crush on Dean and even gave him money because I was so excited by him, but I think she secretly liked Kerry all along. She had an uncanny knack for picking the nominee early. In 2004 she had to vote absentee because she had an amputation and her new wheelchair had not come. We went from elated to crestfallen with the change in the polls from morning to evening, as everyone did. We got angry together about the footage of black people in Ohio waiting to vote for five, six, eight, ten hours. In 2005 we watched the aftermath of Katrina together for days and days. I read her the stunning first person accounts from NOLA bloggers. She was continually amazed that dKos always had news the networks didn't have, and sometimes got major stories right long before any MSM coverage.
At least she lived to see us take back the House and Senate in 2006, and she was very proud of voting in person for Deval Patrick last November (the aforementioned "new wheelchair" did not arrive until August 2006 because of various healthcare red tape). But it was clear right after the 06 election that she was not going to outlive the Bush Administration.
Even at the very end of her life when she was so weak that all she could do was lie in bed unmoving, she would watch me at my computer from her bed on the other side of the living room. "What's on the blog?" she would ask, and I would read her my latest post, or something from the front page. When she was up all night in pain and I needed to turn her every few minutes, I'd blog in between to stay awake and to feel less alone during these all-night emergencies. The blog is always there.
Three days before she died when we took her to the ER for the last time, the pain was making her incoherent. She screamed out things that didn't make sense in between calling out the names of her dialysis nurses and begging for more pain medicine. After we had been waiting in the ER hallway for several hours, she suddenly screamed to no one in particular: "THE PROTESTERS! THEY DON'T WANT THE WAR!" I had been sitting and waiting with her, holding her hand as I always did when she was out of her mind with pain, but this outburst of lucidity called for some kind of acknowledgment. I stood up and embraced her the best I could given her twisted position on the hospital gurney. "That's right, mom" I said, hugging her tight. "We don't want the war."
I've spent a lot of time reminiscing about Watergate these last few weeks. Rushing to check the blog in the morning reminds me of waiting for the Washington Post to arrive—what will Woodward and Bernstein have on the front page today? She followed Watergate so closely. She knew the names of every single bit player on the Watergate organizational chart. She stood in line to buy the Nixon tape transcripts from the GPO for $9 (a lot of money then—more than five times the minimum wage of $1.60). The night Nixon resigned was one of the most politically satisfying moments of her life. For decades afterwards, at the slightest provocation she'd go into a long explanation of who she thought Deep Throat was, and why. She was wrong—but I'm glad she lived to see that secret revealed. Still, Gonzogate and the impending constitutional showdown over the unitary executive and war appropriations are putting a Watergate level excitement in the air. Are we going to stop this war? Will there be high level resignations? Will we impeach this president? I'm pissed she is missing it. But as I watched the GSA Administrator hearings today (just one more scandal in a long list of scandals) and screamed at the television set, I felt her presence with me. Maybe she's not missing it. I know she's enjoying her birthday more wherever she is than if she had lived another seven weeks in constant unrelieved pain.
Right after she died, when I looked through her personal papers to find her will, I found an old yellow Washington Star clipping of a letter to the editor I wrote in 1979, and an op-ed piece I wrote in the Washington Post in 1986. Right then I knew how I wanted to spend her birthday. She always encouraged my writing. She was a very expressive writer herself and would have made a great political columnist. No matter what else I do to honor her for the rest of her life, I will always find her next to me whenever I am writing about politics, or talking back to the TV.
She taught me that it was important to vote in every election. I've never even missed an off-year primary. She taught me to keep up with the news and to "know my enemy" by consuming news media favored by the opposition. She taught me to always research things for myself, especially when someone is trying to tell me what to believe about my country or the constitution. She believed there were some good Republicans, and always admired Elliot Richardson for his role in the Saturday Night Massacre. She was a proud "yellow dog" Democrat, but she also taught me all about the Dixiecrats and the racist legacy of Democrats in the South. She said the Republicans are the party of preserving the wealth of the rich and the Democrats are the party that cares about whether workers get a fair wage. "Republicans only care how much it costs when it benefits poor people." She never crossed a picket line, and neither have I. "We'll know the world has reached true equality when blacks and women with mediocre qualifications get the same job opportunities as mediocre white men." She was snarky before there was such a thing as snark. She believed that public service was a noble way to spend a life and she was proud of her years as a competent, efficient, government bureaucrat. "One person plus the truth make a majority—never be afraid to stand up for what you know to be true." If I listed all her political sayings I could go on for another 3000 words. But, as I said at the beginning of this diary, she taught me what it means to be a proud Democrat. And I'll never vote Republican again.
Well this turned out to be a lot longer than I expected it to be. I know few people will read it all. But I hope I can be allowed a vanity post under the circumstances. If you have read this far, maybe you could share about the people who made you a Democrat, or about political events that mark turning points in your own life.
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