Category: Family

 My mom died Sunday November 22 and I returned to Bakersfield
the next day to help make funeral arrangements and to keep my dad company. My
mom’s real life, the one she loved, had ended some months earlier, so the end
of this unwanted phase was as big a relief to us as to her.

There are advantages and disadvantages to living on opposite
coasts from the rest of my family (my parents, brother, sister, and children).
My mother’s decline and death and the tasks we all face when members of our
families die was an occasion that brought us all closer together emotionally as
well as occasionally physically. My brother, who is the only one of my siblings
who lives in Bakersfield, had been the most disconnected from the family and
became the rock we all relied upon. My sister and I increased our phone
conversations (I hate the phone and she hates email). We are closer and our
relationships stronger going forward.

My dad and I sat together for many hours each day and ate
many meals together at Rosewood, the retirement facility in which he lives and
my mother had died. We reviewed documents, spoke to the mortuary and to his
church, and contacted insurance companies, banks, pension administrators, the
fund administrator, etc all between incoming and outgoing calls from and to
friends of my parents’. My father would occasionally get frustrated with
automated answering systems (turning those calls over to me), but generally
every place we dealt with was well prepared to assist us through the required
steps at the time of a death.

My mother is—was—a planner and she had spared us any doubts
about how she wanted her funeral and every thing about it conducted. This was
indeed much appreciated by us. Mom had even prepared her own and my dad’s
obituaries as much to insure that we had the relevant facts at hand as to
insure it said what she wanted said. Some revisions were naturally necessary.
For example, being six years younger than my dad, mom assumed that he would die
first. “Warren preceded her by (?) years,” was changed to “She is survived by
her husband Warren,…”

One evening, sitting next to each other, dad in his usual
rocker and I in my mother’s, dad suddenly launched into a renaissance of his
own life. He told me of a life of greater trials and disappointments than my
mom’s. But he is a quiet and loving man, who did not mind at all living in mom’s
shadow. With better health as a youth he would have lived a very different
life. He never complained but now he wanted me to know of some of his bad luck
and promise unfulfilled. This will be another story at another time.

Mom’s funeral was lovely. We celebrated her life and
furthered the emotional adjustments required of us. We were thankful that her
strong wish to die at this point had been granted. But there were moments,
often provoked by some little act of tidying up, that forced our hearts to
focus on what we had all lost. One such was removing the colorful sign on mom
and dad’s apartment door that read: “Happy Anniversary – Sue & Warren
Coats, 68 years and still sweethearts!!” My struggle to remain composed while
removing that sign was matched only by my effort to smile when I replied to a
nice old lady waiting next to me for the elevator in Rosewood who asked
(recognizing me—sort of—from an earlier visit): “Do you live here or are you
just visiting.”

My mom passed away around 6:30 Sunday morning November 22,
2009. This came several months after she happily said her good byes and
expected and hoped to leave us after what she called a wonderful life. It
deserves to be called a wonderful life, but it was not always an easy one.

Her father, William Penn (the great, great grandson of the
founder of Pennsylvania), died when she was two. Her mother remarried an older
man when she was three and half year old and within the year he had a stroke
after which they all moved to Bakersfield (where I was born) for his health. He
was unable to work and was abusive and my grandmother divorced him. The Great
Depression struck soon after they moved to Bakersfield, and my grandmother fed
the household of my mother, two older sisters, a brother, and my grand mother’s
mother, by sewing cloths and eventually teaching sewing for the Singer Company.
At 14 my mother managed the household’s meager budget, cleaned, and cooked for
the household (her two older sisters were in a government sanitarium for the
undernourished—not because of my mother’s cooking I hope—her mother was working
full time to pay for the food, her grandmother didn’t do anything useful, and
brothers didn’t cook in those days).

My mom grew up tough in many ways and vulnerable in others.
She had strong opinions about what was good and right but she was never
dogmatic. She was always open to new ideas and loved learning as much as she
loved teaching. If she encountered facts that challenged her opinions, she
reconsidered her views. After my brother, sister and I had left home for
college my mom finished her high school equivalency exam and started classes at
the local Jr. College (which I also had attended for two years before going to
U.C. Berkeley). She loved it so much that she kept going and graduated with a
teaching degree.

Teaching became mom’s passion. She loved helping people and
especially kids and especially those who struggled. She could and would squash
anyone who hurt a kid (or anyone else) in any way and for any reason. Though
she hated what modern reading and teaching methods were doing to move
California from #1 in the nation (in reading scores) to #50, she recoiled from
hate mongering and those who spread hate. She gladly took the worse discipline
problems in school because she never tolerated or had discipline problems in
her classes. She believed that kids wanted to succeed and responded to
realistic hope that they could. Within days she had the worst of them working
with her to make the class room a fun and exciting learning experience.

From her teaching experiences with remedial readers, she
developed a reading technique that produced dramatic results with even the most
deficient readers. “Bungy Jumping Into Reading” LLC offers her technique, which
uses word games as the core of the approach that disarms non readers from their
fears of failure and draws them into a competitive challenge that is fun (and
has been VERY SUCCESSFUL).

Yes, she did have a wonderful life. She and her husband of
68 years, my father, had many friends, enjoyed life, and spread goodness and
light wherever they went. Mom was a fighter; she fought with love. I, and many
others, will miss her.