Mom had confused easy with fortunate. Now that I have been working with a variety of older friends, have gotten to know their own lives, how each comes at handling problems & challenging situations, it's gotten clearer & clearer to me how tragedies & misfortunes that kept Mom's life from being easy paved the way for it to be fortunate.
Background
Due to my grandfather's single-hearted devotion to securing a "New Church" education for his children, Mom's life was erratically divided between Baltimore & suburban Philadelphia. Because of the sometimes here, sometimes there aspect of her life, I think Mom never fully developed a sense of HER place.
To afford this split lifestyle, my grandfather - Bejamin Reynolds - drove himself to his limits, in spite of being diagnosed with a serious heart ailment. He died when my Mom was just 19. Later that year, the stock market crashed. Instead of heading to college to teaching college, Mom went to work, living with her mother & maternal Methodist grandfather. Her mother would be Mom's primary - her sole - responsibility until Gran's death in the mid-1950s.
Gran was no walk in the park. She expected her daughter to be at her beck & call and apparently had not even a smidgen of maternal instincts. Her endlessly needy expectations nurtured Mom's natural maternalism - Gran saw herself as a helpless dependent - while leaving Mom without a role model of healthy mothering. By the time I was born, Gran was suffering from dementia. With five children that needed her time & attention and no siblings nearby to help out, Mom made the heart-wrenching decision to place Gran in an institution. When Gran's brother made a rare visit & raked his niece over the coals for treating her mother so "heartlessly," it was too much for Mom, who suffered a nervous breakdown; as part of her institutionalized care, she suffered through electric shock treatments.
Less than four years later, she suffered the unimaginable tragedy of losing her 11-year old son to a shooting incident. Four months later, the lumberyard where Dad was a vice president burned to the ground & the owner decided to sell rather than rebuild, leaving Dad without a job.
Fourteen years later, Dad died in his early sixties. Within a few years, unauthorized investments by her financial "advisor" wiped out the money Dad had left. Oh, and Mom was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Continuity
Mom's was NOT an easy life. But it did instill in her a sense of continuity, that life may seem bleak & dark, yet the sun will still rise, the sky will again be blue (although "never again the same shade"). Life does go on.
From a young age, Mom's life was marked with tragedy & misfortune, yet every time she rose again, phoenix-like, from the ashes. As she grew older & older, that sense of continuity, of putting one foot in front of the other no matter how hobbled she felt, stood her in good stead. No stranger to loss; Mom knew it was how you respond to it that matters most. She honed the ability to sense more than the present moment stress, drawing lessons from the past & expectations for the future, to give a whole sense of unity, bringing peace of mind.
Because life helped Mom cultivate a sense of continuity, it was natural for her to later use her past to help cultivate a sense of wisdom. How she would have pooh-poohed any talk of "wisdom," although she might have nodded in agreement with "harnessing past experiences to guide us in the present."
As her daughter, I am always & forever grateful for Mom's remarkably fortunate life. In spite of - because of? - past horror & heartbreak, Mom tended to live in the present moment, appreciative of the people around her, the religion she loved, the community in which she lived, the family & friends she cherished.
Perhaps Mom was most fortunate in naturally embracing the concept of continuity, never clinging to the dark specter of loss, always - ever hopeful - anticipating the coming dawn.
Oh, to give that gift of
inner sight to all my older friends!
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