forgotten woman

On Sunday evening, July 29th, 1945, Mom writes--"Mother has been quite ill for several months and over two weeks ago we took her to the hospital." She writes these words to my father while he's serving in the South Pacific on the U.S.S.LAWS. The letter is handwritten in Mom's even penmanship, the thing she lost control off years ago. I have heartbreaking samples of her foolscap from two, three years ago. Writing has been difficult for Mom for quite some time.

This letter is one of four letters I have from her during this time--letters to my father that were promised in whispers and tears just before Dad was inducted into the Navy on July 15, 1942. She promises that she will write "every other night" and, per her report, Dad promises to "write often." It's impossible to tell how well they followed this bargain prior to February 18, 1944 (my father's birthday, by the way), as the years 1942-1944 go unmarked, unrecorded by letters in Mom's archives. By February 1944, however, Mom is on the warpath. They aren't married, but Mom reminds Dad that they have an understanding--what she refers to as "all these dreams for the future which we've been counting on." Her letters are full of "honey" and "darling" and "Paul, dear." Obviously she loved him. Mom's report is that Dad has turned her into a "forgotten woman...the little forgotten brunette who lives in the white house on 39th" (Letter dated Feb 13, 1945). She chastises Dad resoundingly in every letter I read. In her February 13th letter, she writes that she hasn't heard from him in three months and that "you certainly can't think that our love will last under conditions like that can you?" On February 18, 1944 she pleads petulantly--"Maybe you think letters are unimportant, trivial matters but they mean an awful lot to me. I can't help thinking that if you don't take the few minutes that are necessary to write a letter to me, you really can't think of me much or care for me at all." Whatever has gone on, it's clear by early 1944 that Mom has had enough.

None of Dad's letters survive, so I can't know just often he wrote; all I have is Mom's report about scant numbers of letters written and then the silences when the letters don't come. And what I also have is the knowledge that Dad was really rather busy while Mom is complaining about the lack of letters. Dad kept a war diary, or rather a war record on paper so thin it's translucent. He's typed every entry and there are no mistakes, a feat considering the absence of PCs at the time. Painstakingly he lists out every place they went in the U.S.S. LAWS, every battle they were in, every ship that was lost, every plane that was incinerated, every "bogey" they "shot down." The detail is breathtaking. So, for example, on July 29, 1945--the day Mom is writing about her mother's illness (and also adding a jab to Dad that it's been two months since she's heard from him and hence "I just don't rate")--Dad is in his destroyer off of Okinawa and has been on picket duty for over a month. He writes of "being under attack" and of rescuing ninety men from the Callaghan, a ship which "exploded" and "went down shortly." Several weeks before, he'd been to an island where they'd had a "recreation party on the beach" but where they'd seen "dead Japs" who "smelled something terrible."'Saw what was left of a few of them," he reports.

It's hard to imagine what such experiences were like for my father, even with his diary, as there's little personal commentary. And then to juxtapose these scenes of gore, destruction and fear with Mom's scoldings about why he isn't writing. Really, they just lived in different worlds, not connected by much of anything except memory and an ephemeral future. From Mom's perspective, life was moving on, despite Dad being in the war. Mothers were getting very ill and university classes were being attended and hearts were being broken. All of these seemed "real" to my mother in a way that stinking bodies could not, even if she knew about these bodies, which she didn't.

And then there's the fact that Dad's Mom, Mona, did get letters from Dad...and Mom knew about these, as she kept in contact with both Mona and Dad's sister Lu. Why did Dad chose to write regularly to his mother but not to Mom? There was some down town, time to write a letter or two. For example, on February 18, 1944, the date of Mom's scolding, Dad is on "liberty in Honolulu." He types that he "was somewhat disappointed" but that he "saw many nice looking natives, though." What does this mean--"nice natives"? A euphemism for nice looking women?

Over the course of the four letters I have from Mom, her scoldings turn into warnings and I can't help but wonder what Dad thought of these no-longer-veiled threats. Mom writes on February 13, 1945 that "Honestly Paul, I think the situation is far more serious than you think it is...you certainly can't think that our love will last under conditions like that can you?" And then--"I'm pleading with you to write for I know what will happen if you don't start writing and writing often." What can she mean? Is she going to dump my father for someone else, despite their "dreams for the future"? Perhaps this is when she's dating "Bob," the serviceman from Minnesota who attends the UW during part of the war. There's no evidence of him in her letters or her cards she's saved....there's just the dance cards she kept from her sorority functions where "Bob" appears frequently and then disappears entirely. Bob is Mom's second marriage proposal. My father has yet to propose to her; this doesn't happen until 1948. Mom's report of this time is--"We didn't write much...you know...in the war" suggesting that somehow Uncle Sam's monitoring of the mail is responsible for their lack of correspondence. But, as it turns out, Mom does write, and so does Dad...and her letters are everything but impersonal. They are full of love and reproach and perhaps unreasonable expectation. They are the words of a lover for her beloved. This is the story Mom has yet to tell me, the words that probably won't ever slip free from between her lips and teeth, bound as they are to her shame. Something in Mom feels utter shame in regards to Dad's courting of her--first Tommy and then Bob, the two men who proposed but who were refused. Mom held out for Dad--that should mean something, despite the fact that she seems to have been a tease, seems to have dated more than one man at a time. Shame is how she sees it. Not something that can be uttered out loud. Not fit for public consumption.

But of all her words in the war letters, what keeps my attention is what Mom says about her mom, just days before what turns out to be Berentina's death in early August of 1945. Mom writes: "Our doctor," the infamous quack Mom resents even to this day, "still does not know exactly what is wrong, but they have taken a number of laboratory tests, from which we should have results soon." Mom then reveals her worry--"Mother is very sick and each day is a little worse." While she doesn't say this in the letter, Mom tells me often how regretful she is about how little time she spent there with her mother. And yet, I wonder if it's entirely the quantity and perhaps more about the quality, as Mom reveals that "They have her drugged up quite a lot. I spent the entire day with her, doing a number of things to make her feel a little better. She isn't aware of very much because of the narcotics they giver her." So during what time she did spend with her mother during those hospital weeks, she did not really have access to her mother. Berentina was a stranger, someone who looked like her mother but whose essential self was already someplace else.

Mom is confronting death, like my father, only their geographies are different. Dad is fighting for survival while surveying "dead Japs" who "smell something terrible." Mom is watching her own life collapse as her mother drifts into death: "If she has what the doctor thinks she has there is nothing they can do for her." Mom is inconsolable and writes to my father that "Believe me, it's awful hard to sit with her hours and hours watching her suffer...She's lost a great deal of weight and doesn't have interest in anything." Mom almost chastises Dad that "you'll never be able to know just how discouraged we have all been. Nothing seems very important any more." The irony here is poignant--my mother watching her mother die, alone without my father, and my father wondering if he is going die, amidst the carnage of the war in the Pacific.

Mom current bitterness over Berentina's death perhaps stems from what Mom saw (and still sees) as the injustice of her mother's death. She writes--"Mother doesn't deserve being so sick, cause she's always doing something for someone else." But what mother does deserve to die and what daughter could wish to be motherless?

My mother's words haunt me, particularly when she writes that "It's awful hard to sit with her hour after hour watching her suffer as she does." It occurs to me that this is something Mom and I share, bearing witness to our mother's passing. There is nothing easy about this, nothing "natural" despite how people quip about death being part of life. Platitudes. Watching your mother leave you brain cell by brain cell is gruesome, at best. And now I know that Mom did this too, watched her own mother leave through a haze of morphine, a drug stealing away Berentina's thinking self before her body was ready to be gone. Berenetina's consciousness was long gone before her body passed in early August of 1945. There is grief in this, I know.

Two images--A young nineteen-or-twenty-year-old Mom anxiously watching the postman approach her white Craftsman-style house on 39th street in West Seattle, willing a letter from my father. She writes with a bit of bitter humor on February 12, 1945--"Our mailman isn't being worked hard enough." Instead, she "come[s] home from school day after day expecting to find a letter" only to be disappointed. And then this--A twenty-one year old Mom waiting for her mother to die amidst the clatter of summer school, sorority life, a lover (my father) who rarely writes. Before her is her mother but she's hardly recognizable--emaciated, drugged, barely breathing with the fluid in her lungs. I wonder at how she found her way through, how Mom willed a new life for herself, post-war, post-dead-mother. My father was never a sure thing for my mother. Not then, and not later, after they married. He left her too--suddenly in 1979 and again with no explanation. My mother was the one left standing.

A woman who is everything but forgotten.

Deeply, a mother's daughter
-this is alifewithmom--