“Yes,” I told her, “she sure was.”
Mom’s faith came from the church, but her strength came from inside. She simply wouldn’t give in to anything. Not pain, not tiredness, not sorrow. When Mom fought her third bout with breast cancer, her stepmother, Lucille, drove her every day to Sioux City, four hours round-trip, for eight weeks. Radiation treatment in those days was much worse than it is today. They basically blasted you until your body couldn’t take any more. Mom was burned to a crisp. She had an open wound the size of a large pancake under her arm, and it was so chewed up Dad would get physically sick when he changed the bandages. After more than twenty years in Hartley, my parents were retiring to a house on the lake. Dad wanted to postpone the move, but Mom wouldn’t hear of it. She came home from Sioux City every night and cooked, cleaned, then packed boxes until she fell asleep, dead tired. In the middle of radiation treatment, she organized an auction to sell off most of the possessions she and Dad had gathered in a lifetime. The auction took two days, and Mom was there to say good-bye to every last spoon.
Mom raised me to have that kind of strength. She knew there were no promises in life. Even when things went well, they never went easy. Mom raised six children, and she didn’t have a bathroom in the house or running water until the fifth one, my sister, Val. She had boundless energy but limited time. She had chores, meals to cook, a house full of children, her chicken and egg business, and an entire community of local kids who thought of her as their mother. Mom never turned anyone away. If a child needed a meal, he’d sit with us at our table. If a family was struggling and she knew their little one liked peanut butter, the jar of peanut butter would disappear from our pantry. She had room in her heart for everyone, which didn’t leave much time for any one person. Most of the time I spent with Mom growing up, I was working beside her. I was her alter ego, her other half, which was both a treasure and a burden. When Val arrived at the house after Steven’s death, Mom and Dad ran out to hug her, and they all cried together. When I arrived, Dad hugged me and cried. Mom hugged me and said, “Don’t you cry. You have to be strong.” Mom knew if I was strong, she could be, too. And I knew what was expected of me.
Mom said she loved me all the time. There was never any doubt about that. Dad was the sentimental one; Mom showed her love through pride. She cried at my college graduation when she saw my summa cum laude sash. She was that proud of me for kicking off the shackles, standing up, and walking. That was her adult daughter up there, and in a way, that was her up there, too. A college graduate. With honors.
Dad couldn’t attend my graduation because he was working, so my parents threw a graduation party for two hundred people back in Hartley. Dad had worked for a month to make me an apron out of a hundred one-dollar bills. One hundred dollars was a huge amount of money for my parents. In those days you were considered rich if you had two five-dollar bills to rub together. I loved that apron. It represented Dad’s love and pride, just like Mom’s tears. But I was so poor, it lasted only a week before I took it apart and spent it.
When my mother rallied from leukemia, no one was surprised. She had survived breast cancer five times, after all, and she was a fighter. She was on radiation treatments for years, but they never broke her. When radiation stopped working, she switched to IGG, in which parts of someone else’s immune system are injected into your body. She’d have good periods, but eventually it became clear she wasn’t going to win this time. She was almost eighty years old, and her strength was running out.
Mom wanted a huge party for her wedding anniversary, which was still months away. The biggest parties of our lives were for Mom and Dad’s anniversaries. We four remaining children put our heads together. We didn’t think Mom was going to make it to her anniversary, and besides, in her condition a huge party was out of the question. We decided to throw a small party for Mom’s seventy-ninth birthday, which was only three days before Dad’s eightieth birthday, just the family and a few close friends. The Jipson Family Band got together one last time and played “Johnny M’Go.” All the children wrote poems in honor of Mom and Dad. Poems are a Jipson family tradition. Dad wrote poetry at the drop of a hat. We made fun of him for it, but we kept his poems framed on our walls or buried in our drawers, always within arm’s reach.
The children agreed the poems would be silly. Here’s the poem I wrote for Dad. It refers all the way back to the time I broke my engagement just out of high school.
MEMORIES OF DAD
I had broken my engagement,
John and I would never marry.
It was the hardest thing I’d every done,
Emotional and scary.
Mom was quite upset,
What would the neighbors say?
I shut myself up in my room
To cry the pain away.
Dad could hear my sobs;
This was the solace he gave:
Leaning on my doorknob, he said,
“Honey, do you want to come and watch me shave?”
But I couldn’t write a silly poem for Mom. She had done too much for me; there was too much to say. Would I get another chance? I broke down and wrote the kind of poem Dad was famous for, the awkwardly sentimental kind.
MEMORIES OF MOM
When I began to pick a memory,
One day, one incident, one chat,
I realized my fondest memory
Had more substance than that.
The 70s lost my marriage—lost everything,
I could feel my life unwind.
I was depressed and struggling,
Quite literally losing my mind.
Friends and family got me through,
But with a daughter under five,
Jodi paid for all my pain
As I struggled to survive.
Thank God for Mom.
Her strength showed I could recover,
But her most important role
Back then was Jodi’s second mother.
When I had no more to give,
When I fought to get out of bed,
Mom took Jodi in her arms
And kept her soul fed.
Unconditional love and stability
In that Hartley home;
Swimming lessons, silly games,
Jodi didn’t have to be alone.
While I built my life back,
Studied, worked, and found my way,
Mom gave Jodi what I missed,
Special attention every day.
I was a mess while raising Jodi,
But when she fell, you caught her.
So, thank you, Mom, most of all
For helping shape our daughter.
Two days after the party, Mom woke Dad in the middle of the night and told him to drive her to the hospital. She couldn’t take the pain anymore. A few days later, after she had been stabilized and sent to Sioux City for tests, we discovered Mom had colorectal cancer. Her only chance for survival, and it was no guarantee, was to remove almost her entire colon. She’d have to spend the rest of her life with a colostomy bag.
Mom had known something was seriously wrong. We found out later she had been taking suppositories and laxatives for more than a year, and she had been in almost constant pain. She hadn’t wanted anyone to know. For the first time in her life, Mom didn’t want to face down her enemy. She said, “I’m not going to have the surgery. I’m tired of fighting.”
My sister was distraught. I told her, “Val, this is Mom. Give her time.”
Sure enough, five days later Mom said, “I don’t want to go this way. Let’s have the surgery.”
Mom survived the surgery and lived another eight months. They were not easy months. We brought Mom home, and Val and Dad took care of her around the clock. Val was the only one who learned to manage the colostomy bag; even the nurse couldn’t change it as well. I came over every night and cooked dinner for them. Difficult times, but also some of the best of my life. Mom and I talked about everything. There was nothing left unsaid. There was no laugh we didn’t share. She slipped into a coma near the end, but even then I knew she heard me. She heard all of us. She was never too far away. She died as she had lived, on her own terms, with her family at her side.