My mom, Leona Gibson, passed away last night. She turned 78 last Sunday.
An obituary would say, “after a brief illness,” but she wasn’t ill. She suffered an accident of biology, and it took her body a few days to catch up to what had happened in her brain. She would hate that I put it that way, she would say I was making fun, and I shouldn’t be sharing that anyway. She’s not wrong, she and I just had different ways of responding to life’s insanities.
She was always proud of me and my siblings, and she loved us, and my father, very very much. She never fully understood what I did for Diamond — she knew it had something to do with writing and it was important — and I was okay with that. While there is today a photograph of me holding the check for “Make-Believe” hanging on a kitchen cabinet, it was through Facebook that she really learned that I could write, and she was upset at times that I didn’t post more long-form essays on Facebook. That, not the 220 catalogs for Diamond, not the occasional short story, was the writing of mine she knew.
She worked for Waldenbooks and Hechts/Strawbridges/Macys for many years.
She was an Eisenhower Republican whose favorite president was Jimmy Carter and who proudly voted for Jesse Jackson in the 1988 West Virginia Democratic primary. She talked many years ago about wanting to go to the Capitol and pay her respects to Carter when he passed, but by the time he did her physical and mental health wouldn’t allow it.
She loved her father and her mother and her brother, all of whom predeceased her. She loved her Gardner relations and her Lancaster relations, and she proudly called herself both a Marylander (that’s the Gardners) and a North Carolinian (that’s the Lancasters).
She loved my father, whom she met at Loyola College in the early 1970s, and Wednesday would have been their 53rd wedding anniversary. They made it together longer than she thought they would; my dad had a heart attack in 1996, his quadruple bypass was good for ten years, and he ended up having 19 years of bonus time.
She loved her children, even though we tried her patience sometimes.
She loved people. She would talk to strangers about anything and everything. She danced with a four year-old girl dressed as Wednesday Addams in the Madison Heights Subway a month ago, and she talked with anyone and everyone at Walmart a month ago when I took her shopping and helped her pick out a hair dye.
Memories with me are tricky; my brain doesn’t really have a “playback” mechanism, facts I am good with, but with personal incidents I struggle. Still, I find myself thinking of some day trips we took in my youth, like the trip to Blennerhasset Island (where Aaron Burr plotted his empire) and the marble factory.
I also think of an outing we had when I was seven. We moved to Harrisonburg from Chicago in November, and one Saturday shortly thereafter she and I went out and we had lunch at Johnny Appleseed, a restaurant in or near New Market. What I have in my mind are more feelings and impressions than images, but they are good feelings and happy impressions. There was love and there was joy, and that’s enough.
She and I saw both living Beatles in concert, Paul in 2002 and Ringo (on my birthday) in 2012. I pulled up the Beatles’ last song, “Now and Then,” on my phone in her room yesterday and set it on her shoulder by her ear so she could hear it. I don’t know that she had ever heard it, I know we never talked about it. It is a song of loss and sorrow and grief that I have ugly cried to many times and has gotten me through some horrible moments these last two years, and I ugly cried at her bedside. “Now and then I miss you. Now and then I want you to be there for me.” And I ugly cried as it played by her ear.
She was my mom. I love her and I miss her and there will always be a hole in my life that only she can fill.
Our time is short, and it is never enough. To those who knew her, to those who loved her, to those who were loved by her, you were lucky to have shared this time and this place with her.
She loved. She was loved. And, in the end, that’s what matters.
The love.
Good-bye, Mommy. I love you. I would give anything for one more hug
