3/8/2009
Saw this on TCM early one morning last week.
It's an illustration of how much we've changed, and how much we've failed to change, in the way we deal with death in our society. It's the story of how a young wife finds out she's terminally ill and quickly dies over a matter of months. The doctor tells her. That was pretty advanced for the 1950s.
My five sibs and I were never told our mother was dying until the night before it happened. We were at home on Sunday of labor day weekend 1962. She was up in the Sacred Heart hospital in Allentown Pa. Our baby sitter was a young postulant of the Carmelites, whose services were obtained courtesy of a family member. We were roughhousing, my brothers and I, and this girl was getting frantic. She wanted us to quiet down so she could watch Bonanza. Her frustration came to a head and she screamed at us: "you kids should be ashamed of yourselves, behaving like this when your mother is lying in the hospital dying!"
The quiet that came over us was a sudden chill. I think my big brother and I, the two eldest (10 and 12), had sort of known, but tacitly. She'd brought it out in the open. Our youngest sister was 6. She started crying and ran to her bed. The rest of us slowly put our stuff away and never made eye contact with her again. She went downstairs. We went to bed.
The next morning my father came home about 6 AM. "Your mother's dead" he said to Patrick and me. "Kev, put gas in the car for me." He tossed me the keys.
Wordlessly we rode into Quakertown and went to mass, and wordlessly went to our customary Sunday morning breakfast at Myers Restaurant on Route 309. I had a nickel, and I played a song about "Big Bad John" on the jukebox. My father sat over at the counter, away from us, and quietly talked to my mother's good friend, wife of the owner of the joint. Then he paid the bill and asked everyone to finish. Still wordless, we got in the car, and began the long process of letting our lives disintegrate, out into the sunshine of the late Pennsylvania summer.
We never knew in time to say goodbye to her, or she to us. I think we're all still -- 47 years later -- a little out of breath because of that.
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