Fall Closing Moon
Awoke this morning and looked at my e-mails to see that my sister, Mary, had e-mailed me a photograph of Mom’s obituary. October 25th, 1964. Mom’s been dead 50 years. It is, as Mary said, hard to imagine.
The obit was by Bud Zink, the publisher of the Alexandria Times-Tribune, the daily newspaper which my father served as editor for many years. The obituary said the whole town mourned when Mom died. Mom volunteered at the church, did substitute teaching in Alexandria elementary schools and was well-known and well-loved. In a town of 5,000 you can be known by almost everybody.
Her whole life was her family, Bud wrote. And that was true. Seems hopelessly old-fashioned now. She never learned to drive. Cox’s Supermarket was only a couple of blocks away from home. Downtown just a block further.
Feminism has looked back in anger at such narrow lives, or more accurately, at lives lived that narrowly by sexist fiat. Because I was 17 when mom died, I never had a chance to ask her how she felt about such things. They weren’t in our consciousness yet. Her eagerness to finish her teaching degree, which she was doing in the period immediately preceding her death, makes me think she might have had other ambitions.
In World War II, as a WAC, she traveled to Italy and Algiers with the Army Signal Corps. I still have small framed pictures of Capri where she spent some time during her posting in Italy. So she was a world traveler in her 20’s and for a woman in the 1940’s that was not common. Her horizon must have been broader than I know; she had been exposed to a life different than that of the rural Indiana in which she grew up.
She died 50 years ago and in her death showed me that this most feared and mysterious reality of the human journey is ordinary. Nothing is more ordinary than dying. And in that, perhaps, is its greatest power. That something so final can be so ordinary.
