Love
of a Lifetime
By
Laura McCollough Moss
I was three-and-a-half years old in
July of 1965. My brother Dan was two, and together we contracted whooping cough
that summer. We had raging fevers and coughed
continuously, violently and to the point of vomiting. This posed a problem for our very pregnant
mother, because our brother Gil was on his way, unwilling to hold out until our
crisis was averted. He was born on July
22nd, too new and fragile to be exposed to us. That’s when Grandma
Dorothy, my Dad’s mother, and Grandma Chase (given name, Ella), my Mom’s
mother, sprang to the rescue. Dorothy traveled to our house and became
full-time nursemaid to Dan and me. She cleaned up all that spewed forth from us
and slept between us in bed at night. When we coughed to the point of near
strangulation, she reached for us in the dark, pulling us to an upright
position by the hair of our heads if she touched that first. Terrified, she had to get us to sit up and
resume breathing by whatever means necessary. Ella’s contribution was that of
picking up newborn Gil at the hospital and taking him to her house. The first order of business was soothing her
crying, post-partum daughter through the separation from her baby and the
return home to tend to three kids, two of them sick (brother Rick was eight,
and healthy). Then, for two weeks she endured the sleepless nights of a new
mother; feeding, changing, burping, cuddling and coping as best she could. We
were lucky to have such loving and involved grandmothers. These were not women
who phoned the job in, writing postcards from tropical vacations and signing
birthday cards. They were there for us whenever we needed them; as we so often
did throughout our growing-up years and beyond.
Fast-forward to the summer of 1979,
the year I swooned over the seat of a young man’s Levi corduroys as he bent
over, hard at work in the frozen food section of the Super Duper where we both
worked. We had been dating for a short
time when, one day, Mike’s father called him.
“We’re going to go and take my Dad
some money,” he told me.
I was eighteen, and the idea of giving
my parents money, although we’d never had much, was foreign to me. “Why?”
“He asked me for ten dollars for food,” Mike
said.
I went into his bedroom to fluff my hair or
whatever I thought would make me appear a suitable companion for this man’s
son. I walked back into the kitchen to
find my twenty-three year old future husband making a sandwich at the counter.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m packing him a lunch,” he
replied quietly.
“But I thought you were taking him money for
food?”
He folded the paper bag closed. “He’s going to
drink with the money. I want him to have something to eat.”
I know today about alcoholic families and
co-dependence, but what I witnessed was a child’s unconditional love.
I was a young mother in 1982. My
Katie was just over a year old, and I had enrolled in nursing school full-time
in addition to my part-time job as a checkout girl. Mike did a great job taking
care of her and keeping things in order at home, but I was often overwhelmed
with work, guilt and responsibility. One night I had gone to bed exhausted.
About an hour later, my baby was crying, and I went to her. I had a city bus to catch in five or six hours,
but I sat rocking my daughter while the world slept quietly and time stood
still. Held tight against me with her feet in my lap, she was the perfect
height to rest her head on my shoulder, breathing softly into my neck. I told
myself that I would remember that night forever, and I have. That was the night my life’s priorities were
clearly revealed to me.
My son Jesse made the scene in
1988, and was two or three years old when I gashed my finger doing dishes. Dan,
a bachelor at the time, was staying with us, and assured me that he had
everything under control while I took myself to the Emergency Room for
stitches. He busied himself finishing the dishes and, soon afterward, Jesse
called to him from the bathroom.
“Uncle Dan, I need you to wipe me,”
Jesse yelled.
Dan would go on to have two
children and wipe many, many a fanny, but on that particular day he was a
rookie.
“Sorry, Dukie,” he chuckled. “Uncle
Dan doesn’t wipe.”
The kid cried, and Uncle Dan had no
choice. The situation was addressed, however gingerly and reluctantly, and I
returned home with my finger-splint just in time to hear the tale.
“Sorry,” I laughed.
“No problem,” Dan said. “What could
I do? He needed me.”
Love is easy when all is going
well, but it is one of life’s profound, humbling lessons that few people love
you enough to wipe your butt.
My father was diagnosed with
Squamous Cell lung cancer in August 2009, and the news rocked our worlds. Mom had had breast cancer fifteen years
earlier and had survived gratefully, but with the nagging fear of recurrence.
His diagnosis took us completely by surprise. That evening, as we sat together
absorbing the news, Bud said “I never thought I’d get cancer. Did you, Sue?”
Without missing a beat his wife of
forty-nine years quipped, “Nope. I thought your driving would kill you.”
Bud got through surgery with a
Stage 1b diagnosis. He had some post-operative complications, but within four
months had come through the worst of it and was improving. We dared hope that life would return to normal. Literally the next day, Susie was also diagnosed
with lung cancer. She had started with a harsh, nagging cough as my Dad
recovered at home; she called it her ‘sympathy cough’. It seemed impossible that this disease could
strike us again within such a short time, but strike it did. Mom’s outcome was very different, with far
more extensive surgery, a Stage 4 diagnosis, a difficult post-operative period,
medical rehabilitation, home care and, finally, Hospice care. We took care of her together; my Dad, brothers,
Aunts and Uncles, and me. When she was
feeling her worst we’d lie in bed with her, within easy reach. My grandmothers’ legacy of loving care had
come full circle.
Susie died at home as she wished,
in the wee hours of a Sunday morning in May 2010, at the age of seventy-one;
within five months of her diagnosis, and nine months after my father’s. Gil and I watched her draw her final breath,
and although the pain that followed was unlike any we’d known, we realized that
the love we shared hadn’t gone with her.
She had left it with us.
Throughout the time we had spent together there had been no drama, no
arguments. We laughed and cried on a daily basis, and our bonds were
strengthened, just as she wanted it.
It seems, on the subject of love,
that it has shown itself to me in a million ways over my lifetime. There was not a singular moment when I
understood its impact, but rather an accumulation of moments; each a small,
transient miracle of its own. I have
been merely a conduit for the love that has come to and through me, and it is
my happy privilege to pass it along.
