Goodbye, Mom. I love you. That’s what I always said to her in later years when I left where my parents were living or hung up the phone after a call.
I wanted to let people know who didn’t already that my mother passed away peacefully this week due to a variety of health complications connected mostly to her longtime respiratory difficulties (not related to COVID-19). She was living at Sunrise of Sabre Springs in Poway, California, the assisted living facility where she and my father moved in the summer of 2018 to be in the San Diego area nearer to me and other family. My father was with her at the end and she received helpful care from many at the facility and also from my wonderful aunt, Joan Comer, my father’s sister, who lives at Sunrise also. With careful precautions I was able to visit her for one long afternoon in her final week, and my brother and I spoke to her every day on the phone. We told her how much we loved her.
Born Marion Allen in Elizabeth, New Jersey, she was the daughter of an engineer who worked for General Electric. Because of his job they moved a great deal and she lived in a number of places, most notably Cincinnati, Ohio and Richland, Washington. Her parents later lived in other places including Oklahoma City, Springfield, Massachusetts and the New Jersey Eastern Shore.
She met my father at Whitworth College in Spokane, Washington, a Christian college associated with the Presbyterian Church. They were married in 1957, a marriage that lasted for 63 years in which they both remained devoted to each other. She and my father soon moved to Princeton New Jersey when he enrolled in seminary school there and, later, in graduate school as a historian of religious history. In Princeton and nearby, my mother worked as a 3rd grade school teacher and in various offices while my father completed his education
When I was a year old my parents moved to Washington, D.C. when my father became a university professor at The George Washington University, where he worked for 50 years. My mother eventually stopped working outside the home and devoted many hours of labor to the care of me and my younger brother Paul. Within a few years my parents had moved to a house in Kensington, Maryland, about seven miles north of D.C.
My mother loved listening to music and playing the piano and for awhile invited other women in the neighborhood who also loved music to play music with her at our house. We had a baby grand piano in the living room that she played for many years.
Unfortunately, the second half of my mother’s life was affected by a series of ailments, especially respiratory ones, that often left her in struggling health and could make it difficult for her to be outside. In her final years she suffered from significant memory loss although even in her last days she still remembered many people from the earlier parts of her life.
She always took a keen interest in the life of the world around her, although she ventured outside less over time. In her later years in Kensington she loved to watch the life of the neighborhood and became particularly attuned to the life of animals who were part of that neighborhood: birds of all kinds, squirrels, and occasional deer who would come leaping through our backyard. Most of all she loved the rabbits that were common in spring and summer.
My mother’s main values were kindness and generosity. Everyone who met her, most often at our house, was struck by the interest she took in them and the friendliness with which she welcomed them even at times when she was not feeling that well.
Sad to say, she was well acquainted with human tragedy. Her beloved younger brother Bobby died under unclear circumstances (unclear at least to me; I don’t know what anybody else knew or knows) when he was 28. Her Aunt Alice took lifelong care of her own son Lee, and when Alice passed away, no one else in the family ever knew what happened to Lee. My mother helped raise her youngest siblings, about 15 years younger than her. She was profoundly affected when one of them, Cynthia, passed away about a decade ago after living with her husband and daughter in western Pennsylvania and working for some years as a trucker.
I always wished that someone would write something from my mother’s perspective on the world. Although I’ve certainly never tried it, her influence is still all over my own writing. I learned a great deal from her about the behavior of many people, and her understanding of human motivation was often striking. She could tell startling and sometimes, I have to admit, harrowing stories that made clear what conflicts people wrestled with and what unexpected things could happen to them.
She is survived by her husband Dewey, by her brother Bruce, and by both of her sons, me and my younger brother Paul. I miss her very much and can hear, and will always continue to hear, her voice.
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