From: Lewis Brierley
Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2005 7:28 AM
To: Bruce Brierley
Subject: Mom's the word

“IT WOULDN’T HAPPEN IN A MILLION YEARS

If they were casting for Mrs. Claus, she would be perfect. White haired, puffy little cheeks, a full body and the smile of a pixie. That’s what Esther, my mother, looked like when I met her at the nursing home in North Haverhill, New Hampshire.

Carol, our daughter Pollyanna, and I sat in a small conference room as the director, Mary Tyler, told us we could have the room for as long as we liked and we could eat our lunch in privacy in the volunteers coffee room. “Well, shall I go get Esther,” she asked after our few questions had been answered.

The three of us sat in the room, all with our own feelings shooting through our bodies. I fidgeted in my seat then I saw a woman with three people behind her being wheeled from the elevator. I got out of my seat and, as I recall since at that moment emotions seemed to explode, I walked slowly towards her, kneeled down beside her and we hugged for the first time in over seventy years. We both had tears in our eyes but we were not alone. As I looked up the three women from the nursing home made it a chorus.

It was a strange moment. I’m still not sure how I feel. Unlike in the movies, it’s not the feeling of joy in the sense of jumping up and down with a gee whiz feeling. It’s deeper than that and as hard to grasp as mercury, but here was a woman, my mother, and here were all these emotions. Each of us, Carol, Pollyanna, and Esther (who likes me calling her mom, and so I do) all trying to sought out our feelings.

Esther came dressed to the nines as the saying goes. She had her hair done up yesterday by the stylist in the home she told us with some pride in her voice, and wore a blue dress with a blue flower pattern, A corsage was pinned on her, made by one of the volunteers who has taken Esther under her wing. I told her I felt under dressed in a turtle neck and khakis. She smiled for the first, but not the last time.

There were a lot of questions I wanted to ask but spent most of the first few moments just looking at her as Carol and Pollyanna conversed with her. She held a conversation with them but she was looking at me most of the time. “It wouldn’t happen in a million years,“ Esther kept saying quietly. There was no doubt we both were overjoyed to finally meet. She took to motherhood very quickly and as we passed people in the hall she’d say, “And this is my son.” Esther had four girls so I guess I would be unique in the clan anyway.

There was little awkwardness to the meeting. There were questions we all wanted to know the answers to but we knew we had three days to find those answers. Esther and I held hands as we talked, and she told me about Lou, my father who had been her childhood sweetheart. “When we were in the 6^th grade he asked me to marry him,” she said with a smile. Thirty years later she did. That was several years after I was born but I thought it was quite romantic that after all those years they still loved each other got married. He was a soldier in WW II and had been in the military some 14 years. He had lived just across the street from her as a child

The volunteers and those in administration thought there was much resemblance between Esther and I. “Mostly around the eyes,” many agreed. Since I have the eyes it’s hard for me to judge, but a day later as we went through a luggage case full of loose photos of the past my vote went to looking more like Louis than Esther. But it was an unimportant issue, hardly debatable.

The first day was spent getting comfortable with each other although that didn’t take much time. I fear over mentioning feelings, but the fact is they were there, almost interfering at time because they were so much in evidence. After all I’m looking at my mother for the first time and although she could be anyone’s grandmother, the fact I know she’s my mother makes me wonder, is it the word “mother” that give the emotions authenticity? When you think about it, in a novel they could have wheeled out any woman and say, “This is your mother,” and those same feelings would surface. Of course we had all the records leading to this moment, but it’s still a strange feeling.

A smile, a squeeze of the hand, a look and the eyes begin to tear. New names come up in conversation and I realize I have had four half-sisters, three dead by now. We find we’ve been to several of the same places but at different times of course. She studied nursing at a Boston nursing college where I had dated a girl from the same school years later. Esther was a nurse for fifty years. Louis worked in one of the town mills when he got out of the service.

Esther is ninety-five and will be ninety-six on April 4. She is a young ninety-five. She sits in her wheel chair and attends to the floor store where she says with pride, “I sold thirty seven dollars worth of goods yesterday.” No small task when you realize the most expensive item in the store is two dollars and most list at a dollar or less. She keeps busy and let’s us know she doesn’t take a nap in the afternoon “like some of the others do.”

We break our get-together into two visit’s a day. We could stay the whole day but the meeting weighs heavy on me and I need the break, so we’re there from ten in the morning until nine at night with a two hour break to plop on the bed and let out a long sigh.

The afternoon of the second day Esther asks if I play cribbage. Cribbage is a peg game where points are made when cards add up to fifteen, and/or you get a run of three or more cards. The last time I remember playing cribbage was in high school, but I said I’d give it a go. Now this kindly little white haired lady with the Mrs. Claus look takes out the peg board, puts in the pegs and starts to shuffle the cards. A Grinch smile crosses her lips.

Shuffling the cards is difficult for Esther because of arthritic hands. Card tumble to the left, then to the right, but she keeps shuffling as I pick up the wandering ones. She starts to tell a story and continues to shuffle until I think the numbers and faces will disappear from the cardboard. She deals out the six cards. (Two will be discarded into the “crib” for the dealer to add to their points at the end of the hand.)

Esther picks up her cards and I hear a soft “Hummhum,” and a smile crosses her lips. I won’t go through each hand other than to tell you too many times I’d put down an eight and she’d lay down almost ceremonially a seven and say, “Fifteen for two,” and peg two notches. When she counted her score at the end of each hand it sounded like the man on the old Lucky Strike shows with, “Heyabeeabboooblanoonddn, sold American” The fifteen-two’s and fifteen-fours and a double run is….. It was almost impossible to keep up with her math. I questioned her a couple of times and she gave me that smile again and took me through her cards two at a time until I saw her points.

The “son” bit wore off when the cards were dealt. No longer the loving little white haired woman I had met the first day. She still looked lovely dressed in another fashionable dress, and her eyes still sparkled but she was now a card player who was competitive. She settles her cards in her hand and then, again with a smile on her face, displays them to Carol and Pollyanna, and I know I’m in for another devastating hand. She’s beating me, her son. Time after time I lay my hand down and count maybe getting fifteen-four and then nothing in the crib, and Esther would be say things like, “Oh, you’re not doing TOO bad are you.” And when she’s about to go out winning the game and I haven’t taken the last turn on the peg board and about to be skunked, meaning she’s a whole long row ahead of me, she says, “Now that’s not too bad. It’s your first count and you’ll get around that corner.” All this from a little ninety-five year old white haired woman with arthritic hands and her trying, not too hard I must tell you, to keep a smile from flashing across her face as each card is laid down.

One time I was ahead with the next hand finishing the game and you could see the competitiveness in her eyes as they wandered over her hand deciding which cards to hold and which to throw into my crib. A huge smile spread over her as she pegged out winning the game. I told her I gave her the game because she was my mother. She said, “Yes you did,” with that are you kidding me attitude. We were asked to close the door to her room because someone was making too much noise in the room. Actually I thought I was being quite calm over my losses.

For a ninety-five year old woman, Esther is sharp. She may tell you a story and repeat it the next day but little if anything gets by her. I made a photo album of our family starting with me as a kid, (I only have a few photos of me then) Carol and I, and then Pollyanna and her family since Pollyanna is a granddaughter to Esther, and my other two daughters family and my two sons so she could at least see how the family had grown.

It was interesting to watch her go through the album with us because if I was in the photo no one else seemed to matter. Good taste on her part I thought. There was so much for each of us to absorb about the others family that it was like studying for a final exam. While going through the photographs I asked Esther if she thought we ought to send out birth announcements. She let out a big laugh then said she thought it might be a little too late.

The worst thing about last days is you think about it from the first. It hangs on a person like a heavy cloak, and when the day comes, stretch it out a long as you can it still comes to an end. I’m trying not to be dramatic but to me it was like waiting for the warden to come down to your cell and saying, “It’s time.” When nine o’clock came we led Esther to the hallway in her wheelchair. “Will you stop by in the morning,” she asked hopefully. We explained we had to start driving to Manchester at 7:30 in the morning and wouldn’t have time. Carol and I told her we’d try to be back in May but that didn’t lighten her heavy load of us leaving.

For the last time I knelt by her wheelchair and gave her a long hug and a kiss as tears flowed. A final kiss and the double doors closed behind us. Separated again. As we started out the parking lot we looked back at Esther’s room. There she was looking through the window, waving. We waved back and headed down the dark New Hampshire road.