Lessons from a mother

Faith was the most important thing in my mom’s life. She was born Dorothy Lorraine Landolt, but she spent 10 years after high school answering to the name Sister Mary Saint George.

My mom kept her Catholic faith long after she left the convent in the 1960s, married my dad and raised four kids. For decades, George, as some continued to call her, threw her energies into sustaining a church with a dwindling, aging congregation.

After my dad died, she took up the spiritual work from her rocking chair. I have no idea how many rosaries my mom said in a day, but I imagine it was a lot considering the number of rosaries I found while cleaning out our family home in St. Louis, her apartment at Belmont Village in Sandy Springs, the room where she died at Decatur Center for Nursing and Healing and the tote bag affixed to her walker.

She had standard ones in colors of white or black. There were plastic rosaries handed to her by hospital chaplains. And then there was the massive one with beads the size of jelly beans that she draped over an enormous crucifix. The beads and cross were more important to her than anything else she packed through three moves in the last two years of her life.

Credit: Ben Gray

Credit: Ben Gray

Pray on it

I don’t hoard rosaries nor am I super religious, but I’ve come to appreciate three holy words my mom often uttered: “Pray on it.”

I used to roll my eyes every time she said this after patiently listening to my woe-is-me. She spoke those words a lot in the last few years without really comprehending the particulars of my worries. Now, I realize that the details of my problems didn’t matter. She showed me that looking to a higher power to seek understanding, grace, compassion, forgiveness and love is a way to find inner calm — especially during challenging times.

It’s how I got through my husband’s heart surgery nearly 20 years ago and the long weeks of recovery. It’s how I quell the anxiety hoping that our two adult sons haven’t inherited the same cruel gene that killed their dad’s sister when she was just 14.

“Pray on it” is a recognition that some things are outside our control. Sickness and death, bruised and broken relationships, job and financial insecurity all stink. My mom taught me that when it seems like you’ve exhausted your earthly options fretting over your woes or someone else’s, you’re not alone if you look to whatever greater power you believe in.

“Pray on it” means trusting that things will eventually get resolved, but — and here’s the hard part of the lesson — you gotta accept that the outcome might not be what you envisioned.

Credit: Ligaya Figueras

Credit: Ligaya Figueras

Be a giver

My brother is a professional comedian, and at my mom’s funeral reception, he painted a laughable picture of what it was like to be raised by parents who never ceased to extend a helping hand. Jose mentioned how often he and our older brother, Miguel, had to give up their bedrooms for unexpected guests every time my mom announced we’d be hosting yet another professor on sabbatical or a visitor from a foreign country scrambling for temporary housing.

Those on the receiving end did not laugh. They were thankful. My cousin Tanner flew from Texas to attend my mom’s funeral because he remembers living under my parents’ roof for three months as a tyke when his dad was discharged from the Army and his parents needed time to get their feet on the ground.

“There are givers and takers in this world,” my mom used to say. She pushed us fiercely to be givers. And to not wait around until someone asked for help.

That’s how I met Lynn.

Lynn landed at the rehab facility because, like my mom, she’d taken a fall.

They were roommates, and Lynn kindly tolerated my mom’s relentless, audible pleas to the heavens. (“Help me, Lord. Help me.”) She was also a good audience when I played the guitar in an attempt to soothe the pain.

Lynn joked that she and my mom were going to bust out of the center and zoom down Decatur Road in wheelchairs to go out to dinner for a T-bone steak.

Since her wacky plan to be a jailbird wasn’t going to happen, I asked her what I could bring her. A Coca-Cola and some chocolate, she told me. For the next couple of weeks, my visit bag held cans of Coke and bars of chocolate. Her eyes lit up when I walked in the door with those simple treats.

When Lynn learned that my mom was to be moved to a different room to begin hospice care, she cried.

“It means I won’t get to see you no more,” she told me.

The morning after my mom passed, I returned to the center to collect her personal effects. When I reached the nurses’ station, I turned right and began walking down the hall. Someone at the desk looked up and told me I was going the wrong way. My mom’s room was in the opposite direction.

“Oh, I’m going the right way. I’m just going to say hi to Ms. Lynn first.”

Credit: Ben Gray

Credit: Ben Gray

Sing, sing a song

My mom was a member of a contemporary Christian music group that played at Catholic parishes in North St. Louis. The Chris-Tones was still in its infancy when my mom joined in the late 1960s.

“We were a bunch of punks,” said Tom Parrish, who, along with cofounder Dennis Kappauff, had the idea to form a band of New Age churchgoing minstrels when they were in their late teens.

It’s been many years since the group performed. They see one another more often at funerals than reunions these days.

“George was a vital part of the group. Her harmony was unique,” said Parrish. “We were a tight-knit family.”

About as tight-knit as George’s green Chris-Tones reunion T-shirts stashed in a box in my basement.

When dementia took hold, she became particular about the clothes she would wear and sometimes tossed a favorite item in the trash bin instead of the laundry hamper by mistake. Her Chris-Tones reunion T-shirt was the one thing she would happily wear, so my sister had a dozen printed up so Mom could dress in her favorite shirt every day.

My mom grew up in a family that loved to sing. I think music is how she and her four siblings got through hard times, like the premature death of their father when they were in grade school or growing up poor with a steely mother who doled out criticism more readily than kisses. It wasn’t a Landolt family reunion without a cousin or two strumming a guitar with the rest of the clan sitting in a circle of aluminum webbed folding chairs singing songs like “For Me and My Gal.”

Even though I can’t harmonize like my mom and her sisters or play guitar as well as Denny Kappauff or my Landolt cousins, guitar singalongs are how my mom and I passed the time together when she moved into assisted living. I can’t play by ear, so I relied on my “Rise Up Singing” songbook for the chords. Over time, I developed a playlist of Ligaya-Dorothy greatest hits: “Sloop John B,” “Jamaica Farewell,” “You are My Sunshine,” “When You Wore a Tulip.”

It’s logical that music is one of the best forms of therapy for patients with dementia. They might not remember what they ate for breakfast, what year it is or who the president of the United States is, but old songs stick in the mind.

I met you in a garden in an old Kentucky town/ The sun was shining down, you wore a gingham gown/ I kissed you, as I placed a yellow tulip in your hair/ Upon my coat you pinned a rose so rare/ Time has not changed your loveliness, you’re just as sweet to me/ I love you yet, I can’t forget the days that used to be.

When you’re blasting your vocal cords and living in the moment with loved ones who suffer memory loss, there’s no need to ask probing questions that lead to frustration, no reason to talk about the past or ponder the future.

Time for the rousing chorus: When you wore a tulip, a sweet yellow tulip, and I wore a big red rose…

Put your talent to work

Banana bread was my mother’s calling card. She made loaf upon loaf, handing them to the folks at the dentist office and at Jordan’s Auto Service where the Saturn station wagon seemed to be parked half its life. When I was in high school, she periodically made me hand a loaf to Wardell, an older fellow who rode the same city bus I took to school every day.

Tammy, the longtime office manager at the dentist, once told me that if my mom didn’t bring banana bread when she came to get her teeth cleaned, she would give her a tsk tsk. She looked forward to my mom’s appointments because it meant food was coming.

When the weeklong parade of relatives came to say their goodbyes to my dying mother, I did what my mom would have done. I threw on my apron, pulled out the flour, eggs, ripe bananas and all the other ingredients needed to make Mom’s Banana Bread for her visitors and the health care workers at the rehab center.

In the last couple of years, my mom and I were recipients of acts of kindness just as good as homemade banana bread. An inch-thick stack of business and appointment cards in the “Dorothy” drawer of my file cabinet holds the names of doctors, nurses and other medical professionals who treated my mom, patiently answered my questions or went the extra mile. There are many caring people at Belmont Village, like Louise Blaisdell, whose cheery voice greets callers, “Belmont Village, it’s a great place to work and live.” And Raven Shabazz, who had some of my mom’s treasured songs played at one of the weekly musical performances they host for residents as a remembrance to a woman whom other folks could easily have dismissed as the deceased lady from room 105.

Letters and long-distance phone calls to my mom were their own forms of banana bread, reassurances for me that family and old neighbors hadn’t forgotten her. It became maddeningly frustrating when she no longer knew how to operate a phone, but that didn’t stop folks from trying to reach her.

When my mom turned 84 on Oct. 16, I gave her ― and the people who loved her the most ― the best gift I could: a phone call. I got a dozen or more people on the line to sing “Happy Birthday,” and they got to hear my mom’s voice.

“Wow! I wasn’t expecting this,” she kept repeating after the call ended.

The day before, my husband and our sons stopped by for a birthday lunch. I asked her if she had any goals for the year. “I guess I’ll just try to keep living,” she said.

The day after her birthday, Dorothy fell and broke her hip. Despite trying her best, she didn’t recover.

Dorothy has stopped going. So have lots of other moms and dads. Now, it’s up to the rest of us orphans to bravely try to keep going so that their memories may be a blessing. That’s our gift to them.