My Mother died recently. She felt it was high time. Blessed with a strong constitution in her small frame and pleasant good looks as she sailed past age 100, she was somewhat bored with old age and missed many of her contemporaries who had gone on before her.
A gifted artist, she surrounded herself with flowers, beauty and books on Medieval history, of which she knew quite a lot.
Directing us to produce no fussy to-do for her funeral, she had the family - all five of us kids, bunches of grandkids and devoted caregivers - gather at Bayou Bernard near her home in Gulfport and commit her remains to the water on a bright and sunny morning.
Though she was not Anglican, I was asked to say a priestly prayer as a flowered, biodegradable wreath containing her ashes was tossed on the smooth dark waves and floated serenely away. Each young family member carried a flower among those my sister and I had brought, and they sailed out over the water also: one of the most moving sights I will ever recall - just celebrating her being at peace with no discomfort, going home to God.
She had lived an incredible life, surviving polio at age two with a slight limp after surgery to release a tendon in her leg, and ever after walked with a slight limp but never consented to special shoes. There is a picture of her at that age, tiny and defiant with fiery eyes and wearing a fairy costume with sparkling wings. As later on, always, she declined any defeat.
Growing up in Jackson where her father owned a suitcase factory, she was among the belles of old Central High School and graduated to attend Belhaven and then Chicago Art Institute.
Taking one of Granddaddy's suitcases on the train to a US Army base in Idaho, she married her high school sweetheart and said a too-quick goodbye as he shipped out to pilot a bomber with the "Mighty 8th" Air Force, over Europe. Shot out of the sky, he lived to bail out but the 'chute never deployed, and his remains lie still in Epinal, France along with too many thousands of other young men who flew similar missions to stop Hitler's plans to colonize America. Rest in Peace, Lieutenant . . .
Griefstricken: "I didn't care if I lived or died...." she was just 20 years old, but soldiered on: "After all my disasters, I just pick myself up again....." And she did. Remarried at last, and happy for many years raising my younger siblings next to the broad river where her ashes now lie, she contended with being flooded out, then made briefly homeless by two mega-disastrous hurricanes, Camille and Katrina.
Widowed again, she sheltered after the second storm with me at Reveillon Lodge Farm, where we watched as a neighbor's boat blew into the yard and a single, mighty oak crashed down over a fence by the road.
She did not panic, but my horses were galloping in terror, and had to be calmed through what felt like a Force Nine gale, blowing in reverse straight over the hills to the house. Angels are real, indeed, for single women and old ladies, and nothing was harmed at the farm, though her home with many memories was leveled and bulldozed.
Undaunted as usual, my mother collected her insurance money and bought a house quite near to her old one, a mile or so up the street in an area which had never flooded - yet. She was - despite being somewhat skeptical of water from former fears that one of her smaller children would fall in - determined not to leave the coast, where one of her girls still lives, though the rest of us are scattered to Europe, Asia and points north. She would determine her own destiny, including where, with whom and how she chose to live, and to die. And she did.
None of us, of course, ever fell into the bayou by accident, as my stepfather was athletic and had made sure that we could swim, dive, etc., knew water safety procedures and how to drive a motorboat at 50 mph with a skier behind it.
Last time I visited there with my niece driving the inboard, the skier was me; water, if you go in at the right angle, is not that hard to hit. Our mother had taught us all to live strong, and not look backward. All of us listened: "pick yourself up again...."
As the years passed, she entered a long denouement. Few women of 100 years are as fiercely independent as was my mother, nor possessed of as sharp an intelligence into extreme old age.
Cleaning help was useful, as were frequent visits from my sister to bring small grocery items, and our mother continued - of course! - to drive until a bone in her neck received a minor fracture and she could no longer turn her head in traffic.
Breaking her leg in a fall, she briefly consented to enter a nursing facility and immediately went home again after the injury healed. A sense of place was central to who she was, and her identity was never that of a victim.
When she turned 80, I had sent her two dozen pink roses. She earned them all.
Facing approaching death, her courage was magnificent, and my brother who visited reported that she was "cheerful". (!) Cliches never fit this woman, who was as feminine and pretty as the blooms she arranged in a friend's flower shop. She was not a "steel magnolia.” Esther was the steel.
Linda Berry is a Northsider.
