Mom arriving at Woodrum Field on her first airplane flight in the early 1970s.

(The following is from my memoir, "Burning the Furniture," written about 20 years ago. Happy Mother's Day, Mom.)

Laughing with Mom

The last time I saw my mother, she was resting in a wheelchair, breathing with a great deal of difficulty, mostly wheezing, attached to a respirator, tears streaming down her face from the joke she’d just cracked.

The last few years of Mom’s life, she was umbilically connected to a tank of oxygen, dragging it after her as she slowly glided from room to room muttering in past tense, reliving lost moments, whistling long-gone tunes in that oddly cheerful way she had, looking for a cigarette.

Mom was never more than a tick from heartbreak, despair, serious clinical depression. It was so devastating that she’d submitted to Electro Convulsive Therapy—“shock treatment”—in the 1950s (her shrink was a guy named Thigpen, who wrote The Three Faces of Eve; I never knew how she paid for his work), searching for a good day. Nor was she ever more than the slightest one-line setup removed from a joke, a quick comeback, an outrageous pun.

If ever God put a walking contradiction on earth, it was Mom. Her life had been hard: childhood filled with rural poverty and a tyrannical mother; bearer of eight unplanned and I suspect that given her choice at the time, unwanted children. She was the wife of an alcoholic who died in middle age, leaving her with nothing except hungry kids to raise, loneliness and desperation. I’d hide when I knew she was having one of her spells. The other kids would disappear, too.

She had agoraphobia before anybody knew what it was, fainting in public rather than facing the terror other people represented. Fainting became a common escape mechanism for her. It became so frequent at one point, that we’d just leave her where she fell until she woke up, providing she hadn’t hit anything on the way down. Why disturb her?

But always, there was a laugh at the edge of the disaster or a song in the midst of it. From the time I could walk and remember anything at all, I heard mom sing, hum, whistle, dance and do her version of karaoke to the radio, which was always on—when we had electricity. I have a deep appreciation for 1950s jazz because of that early exposure, a gift she could not have imagined giving me.

Mom had been a small and dazzlingly pretty young woman—one who simply slew my well-to-do dad, a college grad from Johnson City residential construction money who was smitten by her. She’d once had a date with my dad and another guy at the same time and the boys showed up in front of her house bumper-to-bumper, dad driving his roadster with the rumble seat, the other guy in an expensive Cord. “I was going with the one who got there first,” she later mused, grinning wide, “but they got there together and I was afraid to go outside, so I didn’t go with either of them. I told my sister Mabel to tell them I was sick and she said, ‘Little girl you got yourself into this; now get yourself out.’” Dad forgave her. The other guy didn’t. She got a good story out of it, one she told often.

She’d gotten into the car with another suitor at one point, heading toward the church to get married. My would-be gold-digging mom got cold feet. “He had an airplane,” she said one day when she was in a storytelling mood. “Rich guy. But dull! Boring. I couldn’t stand him. I never saw him laugh once. On the way to get married, I looked over at him, studied him for a minute and said, ‘Take me home!’ And I didn’t say it quiet.”

Because Dad couldn’t find good-paying jobs, we never had any money and we were always a paycheck away from the street. Our homes were rentals, usually too small, never affording Mom any privacy (me, neither for that matter; I slept on the screened porch of one house winter and summer, so I wouldn’t have to share a bed with my bed-wetting brother). Mom’d dress for bed in her closet. I never knew what Dad thought about that.

All of this led to monumental stress in Mom. Dad didn’t seem especially troubled by our poverty, tight living conditions, old drafty houses or much of anything else, even during his seven-year sober period. Dad worked seven days a week, three hundred sixty-four days a year and he usually slept or read through Christmas after the morning festivities. When he got home from work in the afternoons, he’d read a western novel, sometimes two: one before dinner and one after. Zane Gray usually. I always thought that was something admirable.

It seemed odd to me that Mom had more difficulty adjusting to our poverty than Dad had, given their backgrounds. It was wearisome for her even when she was cracking the dark jokes and I suppose the cumulative effect was just too much sometimes.

“We get to camp tonight,” she’d say as we arrived from school to a dark house with no heat because there was no money to pay the bills. Or if we came home from school hungry—as we always did—complaining that there was nothing to eat, she’d quickly retort, “We got bread, we got lard, make a sandwich.” Then she’d go to the cupboard and create a snack from nothing. Nothing at all. After Dad died in 1960 and the poverty intensified, I thought she was magic.

Magic. Now there’s a concept. Maybe Mom knew the magic was in the jokes, in the music. Maybe that’s why she died, wheezing out one final often-spoken line through the respirator. “If I ever have to move again,” she rasped, “I think I’ll burn the furniture.”