The Obituary
by Dawn Bedore Proctor
The day my mother died I made my first positive contribution to her life.
My father left the news on my answering machine. Busy guy. Some people are afraid to answer the phone. I’m afraid to listen to my messages. Blinking red means danger. Unburdened by concern, his words arrived like a Pontiac through the wall. Now I know why they say “it was a real blow.” You feel physically punched. Meaning falls from brain to stomach like a roller coaster. For an instant, there is only air beneath you. And dead silence inside you, maybe for the first time ever. Definitely for me, who always had at least three voices spouting off in my consciousness at the same time. And a soundtrack.
Ultimately, it is simply information. Information you have no frame of reference for. Nothing in your heart’s history to guide you. Only the truest part of your nature can access the means to respond. You are about to learn something. About yourself.
I reacted with the embarrassingly practical realization that someone needed to write the obituary. And that someone would be me. No one ever asked me to. But, no one else offered. Never mind that of the six kids, I was her least favorite. I was least likely…. well, when it came to Mom, you name it. Certainly, doing anything nice for her topped the list. It was a good thing she was dead. The shock would have killed her.
No, I couldn’t imagine any one of my notoriously unreliable siblings caring about anything other than what they might be getting, much less the “arrangements.” Turns out, I was right about that. But for now, I focused on passing on the news in the manner society silently demanded. Which turned out to be harder than I thought.
I always read the obituaries. The little life stories. Such concise beginnings, middles and ends. Some lead with old photographs, capturing the person at their most promising or beautiful. Young people overflow the page with potential. Other pictures caught their subject off guard. Like death itself. Look at how much we change. And how much we won’t. Try to match the large, colorful accomplishments with the small black and white faces. The round, sweet, eyes of that endangered species of housewife whose days were spent playing bridge and volunteering for the church. Keep reading… she had a master’s degree from William and Mary in engineering. The disheveled scary-looking biker guy, electrocuted on the job site, leaves seven children and a devoted wife of 25 years. Send donations to the Vietnam Veterans Fund. And what were those “sudden deaths at home”? Suicide or slippery stairs? Are we meant to mourn?
Mom’s death had been completely unexpected. She went to bed and didn’t get up. A neighbor knocked until the super let him in. The coroner couldn’t say what had killed her, and didn’t seem too bothered. “She just died”, he said. Apparently, if you are old enough and no one complains, it’s that simple. But it’s never that simple.
Not everyone is surprised by death. Some people have given its overwhelming inevitability a little bit of thought …. selected a favorite bible verse or song for their own service. Some tape record messages, setting aside the sound of their voice for unborn grandchildren to know. Some even write their own obituaries. I liked to think I could spot these self-authored histories by the way they were worded. “Control freaks,” I thought. But I would soon see it made a lot of sense. Trying to obtain the details of someone’s life, when they have just died, is not only socially awkward, it yields up a sentimentally slanted view that can be a little hard to take if you are not on board. The fog of grief softening the edges of a person’s faults is thick as soup those first few days. But I didn’t have that problem. From where I sat, it was a very clear day.
It wasn’t that big a deal, at least not anymore…the way things were between Mom and I. Our relationship, or lack of it, was a fact of life. I had come to understand there was no changing it. It had been planned right out of our hands. By fate, or genetics, or whatever power we like to think micromanages the universe. Now, it was a nugget of knowing, a small, smooth rock of knowing that I had slipped into my jacket pocket. Rediscovered in the fall during frantic penny searches at the market check-out. Find one penny so you won’t get four. Searching fingers find the stone. A small surprise chased by a familiar memory. A split-second. The cashier never sees me flinch.
Ok, once in a while, it was not a small stone. Every now and then, it appeared around a corner, rising up out of nowhere, a massive outcropping, a soaring, icy glacier. Sad and immense and wider than the scope of the eye. Even worse, what lies beneath would dwarf the mountain above. Only people can make you feel the real power of nature. What kind of idiot takes a walk on a glacier on purpose? Whose life is so safe and boring that they have to seek out endorphin-generating danger? Don’t they have any family?
Lots of people go out of their way to see their families, especially on holidays. On television anyway. I never spent a holiday with my mother I didn’t have to, which meant never again after I turned eighteen. Which could be hard to explain to other people. Now, I had the best excuse of all. And they could all read it in the newspaper.
Always at my best with a deadline, I was ready with a first draft the next morning and faxed it to three newspapers; one in the small city where Mom was born and married, one to the tiny town where she had raised her children and made her only friend, and the last to the sprawling, sun baked metropolis where she had quietly divorced dad and, even more quietly, died.
Not one of these papers would reproduce the obituary as I had written it. And none for the same reason. I was fascinated. My mother had hated my guts.
The kenosha news
When we hit middle-age, everything about our childhood becomes tinged with magic. It comes on like the need for bifocals, overnight and irreversible. Reverence wells for the most minute aspect of our irretrievable youth…rusty lunch box, scratchy record album, or first car. Mine was a washed-out green volkswagen beetle that had to be started with a pair of pliers. It died when someone pushed it into the lake to see if it would float like in the commercials. It didn’t. The police gave me a ticket for littering. The lake. With my car. Really.
If nostalgia ever existed in Mom, she never shared it. She never spoke of her parents or her home. She never told stories of best friends or misadventures. If she had any heirlooms, they were not inherited by anyone. She was alone in the world and didn’t seem to mind. And getting away seemed more important than what was lost in the going. Writing her obituary was not easy. I didn’t know where she had been born. Or how old she was. I didn’t know the name of her father or mother. I was angling ways to get around these inappropriate omissions when a mysterious e-mail appeared on my computer.
Turns out, Mom had a sister.
Mom and Mary hadn’t spoken for forty years. Mary had attempted to reconcile with her sister several times, but had always been refused. Now, she was devastated. Their mother, Norma, had died of tuberculosis when mom was seven and Mary only five. Their father was what they used to call a “no good” and nowadays call a “loser.” Among Mom’s papers, we would find an aged but unwrinkled copy of her grandfather’s will. Delicate onion skin sheets distributing his assets conscientiously to wife and children with the clear exception of his only son, Henry, who was unequivocally bequeathed “not a thing.”
After Norma’s death, Henry stayed sober long enough one day to realize he was unable to care for his young girls. So, he dealt them out to two different families. Mary was sent to an aunt’s upper-class house with a long shady porch and the tender aromas of money and love. Older and supposedly more resilient, Mom was sent to be raised by Henry’s stern and disapproving parents who did not speak a word of English. Strict Lutherans, they did not allow music, dancing or playing cards. Satisfied to be settled in the “new country,” they slept proudly under the protection of aluminum awnings in a tiny ranch house on Kenosha’s deeply ethnic north side. As soon as she was able, a beautiful young Catherine would say goodnight and then lift herself through the upstairs bedroom window to escape silently down the drainpipe.
Mom began dating Dad at 15, married him at 17, and had three children by the age of 20, including me. Old photos celebrate her loveliness; perfect curves perched effortlessly on dad’s strong shoulders, dark wavy hair escaping a wide, straw hat setting off a sensuous smile. A smooth, self-satisfied smile. She had cast her lure and landed the fearless boy who was going to take her away from dark rooms into a bright American future. Right bait, wrong water.
Back then, Kenosha was home to a bustling Navy shipyard, with a lively downtown chock full of honest-to-goodness department stores. Each weekend, the city came alive with flocks of white uniformed sailors on leave. Young Joe grew up watching these carefree companions own the streets until they cheerfully waved goodbye from massive gray carriers. He joined the Navy at 17, a very willing enlisted man, with a wife and young mouths to feed, looking for a steady paycheck and the freedom of youth that was slipping away at an ungodly speed. Embraced by the correctness of his military service and established in his virility by a rapidly growing family, I wonder, exactly when did Joe discover that he was different?
Like many war brides, Kitty moved in with Joe’s mother. The upstairs flat was on the inexpensive end of the elegant 3rd Avenue overlooking the horizon of Lake Michigan. I was born in this house, my first memories formed imagining Daddy somewhere out in the enormity of the Lake. Grandma took daily walks along the shore facing directly into the wind. Brought together by common ground that immediately shipped out, the two women could not have been more different. Little love was lost on 3rd Avenue.
A devout Christian Scientist, Grandma lived to be ninety-eight without ever seeing a doctor. She died of injuries inflicted in a car accident when my dad ran a yellow light while she was in the passenger seat. When I wanted to dispose of her ashes in Lake Michigan, I asked Dad to mail them. A year later, a small box appeared on my front steps neatly labeled “3/4 drill bits.” Opening it, I came face to face with Grandma. Gray-white ash with strange lumps in it. There was no note. I’m pretty sure it was her. She was the only corpse I was expecting. I poured Grandma out on the waves of Lake Michigan where she dissolved into a more lasting trail of white than I thought she would. Loss gripped my heart so hard I couldn’t breathe. Turns out, memories keep very well in a box of drill bits.
The Kenosha News did not publish the obituary I sent at all. Instead, my draft was clear-cut into a news story for the next morning’s edition. It appeared on page three, complete with a small, but still shocking headline. A Bedore was dead. I couldn’t stop looking at it. There were ads for Ace Hardware’s Christmas sale on the same page. Even they knew more than I did. We are all a member of some community. We do not live apart from others, though no one tried harder than my mother to do it.
As for Mary, I hoped being mentioned in the newspaper was some comfort to her. The e-mails stopped as suddenly as they had begun. Turns out, Mary was also dying. I wondered if I should reach out to her, but my father was adamant. Mom had carried her grudge against Mary to her grave. “No one,” he insisted, and especially me, he implied, had the right to indulge in any healing on her behalf.
Twin Lakes Gazette
I was three when Mom and Dad moved to Twin Lakes. Though only 45 miles west of Kenosha, Grandma never forgave Mom for being the driving force behind this rebellion. No other child of hers had dared leave town.
Twin Lakes was a small town by any standards. Officially unincorporated, we were too inconsequential to count. It was the last posting for a now renown pedophile priest, who, after being rotated through more important communities, was relegated to this innocent little hamlet where the Catholic Church reigned supreme. He presided over nearly every wedding and funeral in town all the while molesting more than forty boys from the high school. Which was pretty much ever boy I knew. Now, that’s a small town.
Still, I couldn’t have predicted a call from the “Deaths and Births” editor of the Twin Lakes Gazette to say she was startled by the “big words” I had used in writing Mom’s obituary. That’s what she said. “Big words”.
I am the third of six children. Mom told me once that she had six children in case the first five were killed in an accident. She had read a story in the news about parents camping on the beach in California who let their five children sleep outside on the beach under the stars. During the night, the tide had silently swept them away. My youngest brother was tide insurance.
As a toddler, I appear quite lovely in old photographs with curly hair, even features and cute cotton dresses. My younger sister and I were inseparable and good to each other. We couldn’t imagine ever missing the other’s weddings. Neither has ever made it to a one.
When did mother’s love for me begin to wane? There is no evidence it ever existed. From earliest memory, her rejection was as reliable as sunshine and as natural as rain. As you grow, you learn. A stove is hot. A sidewalk hard. It wasn’t that way for the other kids. It would be my own unique experience. It was rarely questioned, never confronted. Witnessed by family. Hidden from friends. Nurtured by acceptance. As I grew, what had passed for neglect matured into open hostility. I tried to stay afloat by excelling in school. Until my father threw me a lifeline. I was ten years old.
Easily voted least likely by any physical standard, my husky, hairy, can-fix-anything father harbored a deep yearning to escape the narrow limits of his life. So, he would dress as a woman. From time to time. About once a month. There were clubs he went to. In Chicago. He said I couldn’t imagine how good he looked, and how good it felt. He got that right. He explained that Mom was always angry because she couldn’t understand this special thing about him. I didn’t understand either, but I approved anyway. “This is our secret.” he said, “If she knew I told you,” he hesitated, picturing her perfect rage. “Well, you know.” And I did. It would remain our secret. For a long time. Years later, when I was chosen homecoming queen in high school, my father took me to his favorite boutique for my dress. And I do mean favorite.
Twin Lakes was a power boat-infested miniature jewel of sparkling water set in one of many rural towns that form the suburbs of the suburbs of Chicago. The locals hibernate all winter waking only to sullenly welcome jolly families of the big city back to their sprawling lakefront “cottages” complete with guest houses that would eventually be overtaken by the teenagers. These boys of summer had fast boats, convertible cars, straight teeth, and the easy, athletic ways only money can buy. We locals were uneasy in their luxuriously ugly homes, where mothers gripped glasses of scotch as fathers watched golf on television. These same dads were quick to warn their sons to have their fun, but be sure to avoid “knocking up” the local girls they believed stalked them like prey with free passes to a better life. In all fairness, those world-weary dads had a point. Only ten percent of Twin Lakes teens went to college. The majority were content to be married, respectably within a grade level or two, in a hurried fashion when back seat diversions gave root to the next unambitious generation.
Occasionally, a misguided teenage liaison would force the uncomfortable co-mingling of Chicago and Twin Lakes parents, mercifully assisted by top-shelf alcohol and the heavy perfume of summer heat. My mother was the unanticipated life of these awkward August gatherings. Cursing all the while she was getting ready, she would emerge from her bedroom with catlike eyes and full red lips. Uncharacteristically comfortable in a crowd, she would be warm, charming, and funny. At home, she swore whenever anyone came up the driveway and refused to answer the telephone. Cornered by the expectations of those she barely knew, she was an ideal host and a better guest. It was a good time to ask for something.
The Chicago-land girls were larger than life. With names like Cindy and Judy, they filled out the tops and overflowed the bottoms of pink checked bikinis. Planted in the sticks for the summer against their will, they missed their boyfriends and wrote long, strawberry scented letters with heart shaped signatures. They cut my hair and introduced me to big city radio stations, go-go boots, Monkee’s albums, and Newport cigarettes. Each June they returned, more fleshy, and experienced in every way. Slowly but surely, their salacious sophistication made its way into the arteries of the little lakes. Those of us touched by their world would work hard to maintain the mood of music, sex and drugs after they left. As time went on, Twin Lakes grew into a sleazy little pit stop on the state border, with a half-vacant main street, more bars than businesses, and lottery tickets for sale everywhere.
But Twin Lakes hadn’t lost its’ small-town innocence when it came to publishing an obituary. It was a very Mayberry, bumbling transaction, free of charge and full of apologies for the abandoned “big words” and the adjectives that were not allowed. No adjectives in the obituaries. Paper policy.
Mom without adjectives. Impossible. That might read as normal. Five foot three inches, 145 lbs., black hair, brown eyes, bad heart? That you couldn’t see. Or was it broken? Broken so young she never knew what life could have been like. She was a watcher. She would sit and watch for hours. Watch people with whole hearts. Wholehearted people fascinate the rest of us. Light, like birds, they can take off any instant and find the whole wide world at their feet. They can decide. Watchers have decisions made for them. Watchers breed watchers. It’s like looking through a dirty glass window. A dusty, oily distance between me and the rest of the world.
Adjectives were essential to the essence that was Mom; smart, funny, curious, ferocious, eventually pudgy, burnt eyes set in stained sockets in a face so furrowed it could have been humorous; self-reliant, aloof, well-read, cruel, capable, hardworking, and philosophical. An emotional orphan. A suffering soul who believed in reincarnation and was sure this nightmare of a life was but one stop in a much longer journey that had to be made. A dutiful wife? A restless mother. A calculating relation. A frightening opponent. No, Twin Lakes never knew her. It was too unimaginative to recognize these footsteps in this attic. Qualifiers were necessary, but fitting Twin Lakes didn’t think so. While I could always sense the distance between us and other families, it wasn’t until I didn’t live there anymore, that a friend confided my mother did indeed have a reputation around town, being widely and wisely regarded as a real “Bitch.” Too bad it was a big word.
As for Linda Miller, Mom’s only friend, her death was a great shock and real loss. Linda was tall to Mom’s short, blonde to Mom’s dark, spontaneous to Mom’s resolute. In the thirty years they shared life in Twin Lakes, Linda was the sole witness of mom’s reality. And the only person to know her true feelings. After mom died, Dad announced that from now on, living in full drag, he would like to be known as “Linda.”
The Arizona Sun
A few weeks after I left for college, my family moved 2,000 miles to the southwest. It was supposed to cure Dad’s bronchitis. It ended his marriage. Though separated, Mom and Dad would never live more than a few miles from each other and talk on the phone every week. Dad remarried within a year to a flamboyant, platinum blonde nurse.
The relief provided by transcontinental distance cannot be overestimated. So why then, when I heard Mom was back in Wisconsin for a few days visiting an aunt, did I go to see her? Had I read one too many fairy tales, watched too many Oprah’s? It is widely rumored that forgiveness is a good thing. Even if I didn’t know what I’d done, I was willing to be sorry for it if it could bring us together somehow. Our cautiously crafted meeting disintegrated rapidly. I may have seen angry, but I had never seen mad. Ranting, rabies mad. She got right to the point. “I can’t stand the sight of you. You are everything he’s trying to be.” I drove away as fast as I could, all the car windows open and soft, all-the-way from Arizona wind blowing hair off my face. I remember thinking it was rude to leave without saying goodbye.
It would be ten more years before a card arrived in the mail. It wasn’t for me. It was addressed to my son. Other ragged attempts at reconciliation would pepper the last years of Mom’s life. An Easter card in July. A badly wrapped video game bought for fifty cents at a garage sale. Spiderman pajamas on sale from K-Mart. She never could bring herself to do anything for me. She simply wasn’t able. Near the end, she tried to visit me at home, only to leave abruptly and without explanation each time. She just couldn’t stay put. My husband liked her and she liked him. I was jealous of their friendship. So uncluttered and possible. After she died, I learned her apartment building had been sold and she, along with all the other tenants had been ordered out. I think she just didn’t want to move.
Mom never remarried. She would tell anyone who asked that she had never stopped loving “her Joe.” As for my brothers and sisters, their love was expressed as a desire for ownership and control of the little she left behind. Until they found out Mom had not written a new will after the divorce. Her Joe inherited everything she owned. And he took every penny.
The Arizona Republic surprised me by printing more of the obituary than anyone else. They were also the only ones who charged. By the word. What kind of a system demands people weigh the value of a word when describing the deceased? A profitable one.
Mom didn’t want a service. She didn’t really believe in dying. Beware of newborns. But I had ignored the obvious. Death produces a body. And with the way things had been going, I would be the one disposing of it. Soon, another set of ashes arrived on my doorstep. My mother’s own mother, the mysterious Norma had been lying in an unmarked grave for sixty years. Grandview Cemetery had no grand view but was storybook lovely with gray stone walls and worn iron gates. I selected a pink granite stone adorned with naked cupids that reunited their names, if not their souls. I surrendered Mom’s ashes to uniformed staff on a chilly Sunday. They had set up 10 white chairs for people who wouldn’t come and I had neglected to invite. It was done. We headed home. I was tempted to fill the crematorium’s empty box on my lap with 3/4” drill bits and have it delivered it to the front steps of my father’s house.
The Arizona Sun
December 20, 2013
Bedore, Catherine Mohr
Catherine Audrey Mohr Bedore, “Kitty” to her family and friends, passed peacefully into her next incarnation on December 11, 2003 in Phoenix, Arizona. Born in 1935 to Henry and Norma Mohr, she lost her mother at age seven, was separated from her only sister, Mary, by her alcoholic father, and raised by German-speaking grandparents. She attended Kenosha High School, where she met and married Joseph Bedore. Kitty and Joe raised six children in Twin Lakes, Wisconsin, where she held a variety of part-time jobs to help support her family, including waitressing at the bowling alley and cashiering at the IGA. Some of her favorite times were spent sharing jokes and drinks with her female friends at our subdivision’s beach on summer afternoons.
An expert garage sale shopper, Kitty achieved nirvana in the 1960’s when she established her own secondhand consignment store on Main street in Twin Lakes, giving her first crack at the best already loved items the area had to offer. After thirty years of marriage, Kitty and Joe moved to Phoenix, Arizona. and divorced a few years later. Kitty enjoyed working for nearly twenty years for the K-Mart Corporation as a bookeeper and cashier, close to even more bargains. Despite several marriage proposals, Kitty lived a very independent life in her later years, still working, trolling for garage sales, and traveling the country to visit her children.
She is remembered for her unique personality and complete unpredictability, her not-so-great but surprisingly addictive casseroles, her uncanny ability to get lost no matter how far she was going and how many times she had been there before, her reverence for bingo and nickel slots, her complete lack of pretense, and her tremendous curiosity in the people and about the world around her. In spite of a staggering array of emotional defects, she dedicated her final years to growing as a person, striving to understand, forgive, and be forgiven.
Kitty is preceded in her journey by her faithful dog, Booboola. She is survived by her six loving children. Kitty was convinced of the spiritual phenomenon of reincarnation and confidently shared clear memories of her past life experiences. Rather than mourn her passing, she hopes loved ones will consider the power of this phenomenon and simply wonder where she will turn up next. At her request, there will be no services.
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
We love you, Mom