![]() Six more years of life-of loving your husband, watching your kids grow, keeping an eye out for whatever those people who dreamed up the computer might come up with next. All I ever saw of the short, stout woman called Nana were a few photos and a death certificate I came across when I was cleaning out some drawers.įrom 48 to 54 is six years. What was the matter with her? Didn't she want to live? It was almost as though she'd been expecting this all along. I'd only just gotten over writing hateful poetry about her I was ready for an adult relationship. She was about as far as you could get from raging against the dying of the light. She said no thank you to the holy water her friends proposed, no thank you to the doctors' experimental treatments. We had to coax her to eat, to take her pills. But when cancer came knocking, she didn't burst out of her corner swinging. Even her name, Marcella, came from the god of war. She'd been a fighter, dammit: for women's rights, civil rights, the little guy. ![]() I'd always thought of my mother as a fighter. And then she got very sick, very fast, and died of cancer eight months after the diagnosis. She saw all her kids earn college degrees. She left us notes about how to make dinner, written on the backs of punch cards. And when something called a "computer" appeared, Mom glommed on instantly and went back to school to learn programming. He couldn't build a guinea pig hutch, sew Halloween costumes, or make the world's best cookies. He couldn't rewire a lamp or fix a faucet. There were lots of things my dad couldn't do. No wonder I grew up thinking there was nothing my mother couldn't do. Mom caught Dad's hand and said, "Come on, let's get out of here." The night before the wedding, the priest balked at performing the ceremony unless Dad agreed to bring the kids up Catholic. The daughter of immigrants, she'd hauled herself into night school at Temple University, where she met my father. More from Prevention: What NOT to Say When Someone Dies Carol Burnett, for one, and anything else that was "vulgar." Rearview mirrors ("Who needs to know what's behind you?"). There were lots of things Mom didn't have time for. People always say that, I know, but it was true. She'd never see me married, hold a grandchild, rock into the sunset with my dad on the porch she loved. I was 23 at the time, and what I remember most is being struck by the unfairness. I'm now just four years away from the age my mother was when she died.
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