My Mother Lived to 92. Here’s What Her Friends Got Wrong.

Part 1 of 2

My mother passed away last month at 92. When friends heard the news, most of them said some version of: “Well, she had a good long life. And she was so healthy right up until the end.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell them they were wrong on both counts.

Mom had serious autoimmune conditions and chronic illnesses that would have put most of us in the permanent complaining department decades ago. Her personal philosophy — pick yourself up, put your clothes on, slap a smile on your face and head out the door — was not something she said. It was something she lived, completely, until her final weeks. You would never have known she had a pain bigger than a bug bite. That took considerable will. As for a good life — it was a complicated one. Which is different. And more interesting.

My mother was many things to me depending on the decade.

Mom believed that the first five years of life, everything is set in stone. So she devoted herself to stuffing us with activities and conversation that would advance our minds, build our character and make sure we knew God. From activities that awaited us when we woke from naps to marching us to Stations of the Cross every Friday afternoon with age appropriate books on Jesus. There was no rest for the weary yet it all felt fun, logical and worked for four children under aged eight.

In my pre-teen years she was the moral compass. No grey in her opinions. No wiggle room. The nuns may have been jamming the Baltimore Catechism into our heads on Tuesday afternoons, but all other minutes of the week were subject to the Church of Mom, which was far more scarier and stricter than the nuns. She ran a tight operation and she ran it well.

In high school she was the chauffeur extraordinary — for two reasons. She let me play whatever radio music I wanted, which was a significant concession. And she was completely up for strategizing whatever activity I was currently consumed by. No subject was off the table in that car. I did not fully appreciate this until much later.
College years she drove up to Holyoke most weekends while I worked through homesickness at Mount Holyoke. Then she enjoyed a brief respite during my Georgetown and Northwestern years, when the Jesuits and the business school gurus took over the scaffolding and I stopped needing the rides.

From my mid-twenties on, the turning shifted. I had enough Jesuit support and enough life under my belt to navigate with God as my co-pilot. Mom became the one I was supporting rather than the one supporting me.

Our weekly dinners since I was a newlywed were her opportunity to share her grievances and worries. I listened. I did not burden her with mine. As we both aged and the lists got longer on both sides, I went with the “age before anything else” philosophy and kept my own concerns to myself. For 42 years I was, in some ways, more of a mother to my mother than a daughter. I say this not as a complaint. It was simply how it arranged itself, and I would do it again.

After my father died suddenly, and then one of her ten grandchildren — losses that reshaped her from the inside — Mom became the keeper of the family record. She had telephone tag down to a science, able to recite what all nineteen of the rest of us were doing at any given moment. She rarely offered opinions unless asked, or unless she thought someone was seriously going off the rails, in which case she could not help herself and did not try. She was usually right. What she never lost, right up until the end, was her FOMO. Fully operational at 92. Anyone who wanted to visit should have the chance to do so — that was her position. Pink champagne was chilling. Italian pastries were at the ready. She said her final goodbyes in considerable style, which was the only style she had ever known.

The best time I ever spent with my mother was her final eight weeks. Once she heard the hospice verdict, something released in her. The worries, the responsibilities, even the advice-giving role — all of it fell away. What was left was just her, basking in the love she had spent a lifetime building, as it came back to her from every direction. Children. Grandchildren. Friends. Colleagues. Neighbors. People she had quietly held for decades, now coming to hold her back.

I have walked with a lot of people toward death in my work as a spiritual director and a hospice volunteer. I have rarely seen anyone do it with more grace than my mother did. But that is Part 2.

→ Coming next: What My Mother Taught Me About Preparing for the Death of a Parent