In Gratitude and Celebration of the Priceless

From single mother to co-creator of a blended family, my Mom was resilient, funny and mighty.

There’s a song that the church I belong to sings quite often in its worship services. It starts off with the lyrics:

“All my words fall short, I’ve got nothing new, how could I express all my gratitude.”

The lyrics are, of course, directed to God, but I can’t help but think about those words in a slightly different context these days.

That’s because I recently lost my mother, and to describe her, my words fall woefully short of the kind of tribute she deserves. But I am infinitely grateful for the 70-plus years she was in my life.

She was an educator, an artist, an interior decorator, a friend to the immigrant and the homebound. She was an advisor and a peacemaker. And she was musical; she played the clarinet in the high school band and sang alto in the church choir. She was a gem; she was priceless.

I am grateful for her encouragement—she was supportive of almost everything I did, but I am also grateful for the times she fired a warning shot in my direction if she felt I was about to take a misstep, which, I confess, I have been known to do.

I am also grateful for her generosity. She was always giving of her time, her energy, and her material possessions. I am grateful for her unconditional love and protection of her kids, grandkids and great-grandkids, and for her devotion to the two husbands that she outlived.

I am also grateful for her strength. That may sound odd, especially for those who knew the frail wheelchair-bound woman she became in her final years, but strong is how I have viewed my mom ever since the days surrounding my father’s death in the mid 60s.

I look back on how she, in her mid 30s, was suddenly thrust into single-handedly caring for, providing for, and disciplining me, along with my sisters Lorie and Julie, all of whom were dealing with their own grief. Realizing that a substitute teacher’s wages wouldn’t provide for our needs, she pounded the pavement, sat through interviews and endured rejection until she got a full-time schoolteacher’s job, and with the help of some friends, came up with a plan to get us to and from two different schools every day. On top of that, she was able to somehow convince us kids that TV dinners were a special treat.

We got along pretty well. But the impact of our collective grief returned when we attended the memorial service of the mother of two of our friends from church, Patti and Rex. It was déjà vu all over again, sitting in the same church pews and heading to the same cemetery where our father had been buried just a few years earlier. I still remember how hard that day hit Mom.

Of course God is not only the God of comfort, but also the God of irony. So when Don—Rex and Patti’s widowed dad—started calling on Mom, I thought that was a pretty cool thing.

When the two of them were married, Mom was strong enough to realize that she was going to have to re-invent herself to some extent, after falling in love with a man whose personality and demeanor were very unlike my father’s. What’s more, she recognized she would have to get to know his two kids, whose experience and resulting personalities were basically foreign to her.

Of course it worked both ways, and although for some time my Mom, my sisters and I had already known her new husband and his kids from church and from socializing together, living under one roof presented unique challenges to my new siblings as they had to get used to being part of a newly-blended family with a new stepmother.

There’s another irony here. For the past several years my sisters and I have lived hundreds of miles away from Mom’s Texas home, while Patti and Rex lived practically down the street from her. As a result, they were the ones who ended up being her chief caretakers during my mom’s final years. They visited her regularly, and always answered the call when an emergency arose. They were heroes, putting my mother’s needs above their own. My gratitude for their selflessness is boundless.

This is why I call our blended family a success, despite how rocky it may have been in the beginning. For example, here’s a story my mom told about those initial days. She wrote it down for me, so I have copied and pasted her words here:

“We have often observed that we had a ‘blended family’ before that term was even invented. For us, ‘blending,’ was like that of a musical ensemble—everyone sang his or her own part. The harmony was not always perfect. Sometimes someone sang off key, but all in all, we are pleased with the outcome of the song.
However, one of the first incidents to try our resolve happened less than two weeks after Don and I we were married in June of 1968. We purchased a new station wagon about six weeks before—one big enough to carry five kids—a lime-gold Ford behemoth with faux wood paneling. I (Mom) was driving it, taking Rex, our youngest, back over to Handley Baptist Church to Vacation Bible School.
There was a sharp curve under the railroad tracks near our neighborhood in Arlington, Texas. Well, in order to miss some tall weeds growing into the roadway and not wanting to scratch the new car, I swerved a little too far into the oncoming lane—into the path of a pickup truck.
No one was hurt, but the car was not a pretty sight. I sent Rex back to our home to report the incident to Don and tell him that no one was injured. However, I neglected to give Rex a key to the house. So Rex had to figure out a way to get in. He found a bathroom window unlocked and crawled inside. In the confusion, he left the gate to the backyard open and Barney (our Beagle) escaped. Rex did his best to round up the dog and get him back in the yard.
All of this took much time, and as I sat in the front seat of the damaged station wagon all I could think was, ‘This marriage is doomed—it’s not two weeks old and I’ve already wrecked my new husband’s car and lost his son!’”

That was another of Mom’s strengths—her sense of humor. I always thought she was funny. She loved to laugh, and she had the greatest laugh—not a lot of volume, but it was a visual treat: her head bowed and quietly bobbing up and down, sometimes until tears came. She always laughed at my corny jokes, and she sometimes made a few of her own. In fact the night before she died, her nurse caught her laughing at the Presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, saying, “I’m just watching these two old guys curse at one another.”

Priceless.

Mom was proud of her kids and grandkids, sometimes to the point of vanity, never wanting to let anyone see anything negative or think anything ill about her or her family. For example, a while back I wrote a blog about a funny argument my wife and I once had. She read it and said, “Nicky, I wish you wouldn’t tell people that you and Barb argue.” I get that—parents always think their kids are a reflection on them.

She always said her and Don’s claim to fame was the fact that the two of them endured five teenagers in their home all at the same time. We must have worn them to a frazzle; their endurance and their patience were further examples of the strength both of them possessed. That was especially true during what Mom called my “rebellious” period, when I quit college to go on the road with a rock band. She confessed to me later that she prayed a lot for me during those days, and no doubt her prayers were effective in keeping me safe, and in bringing me back to a place where I could fully embrace the surety of my faith in Jesus.

Her prayers were instrumental in securing for me the knowledge that one day I will see her again, hug her again, and get to hear that laugh again. And I know she continued to pray for us, probably until the end. And for that I am especially grateful. For that, I especially celebrate.

I mean, how priceless is that?