The 88th Mother’s Day

MOTHER’S DAY

(EDITOR’S NOTE: In the 1960s, Philomena Liguore operated Liguore’s Photo Studio in Youngstown. Today, her daughter, Maryann, is a newspaper columnist in Green Bay, Wis. and has chronicled her mother’s life after a debilitating stroke.)

She lives in the past. To some, what she says may seem senseless and confusing.

From a place deep within, her thoughts emerge. Memories fly from her like bats from a cave. Whoever stands close may listen, not always remembering as she does. It all makes sense to her, as she lies in her bed or sits, quietly becoming less and less in body, of the woman she once was.

“I am rich,” she always says, “in blessings.”

There was the Great Depression, which she recalls as the happiest time of her life. “My father was laid off, so we spent our time singing together in the kitchen while my mother baked bread. We were sad when the mills started up again. We had everything that we needed.”

There was the land that she came from as a child. Life was simple, predictable as a girl of 10. The ocean called to her from her balcony. She watched the daily sunrise over the Ionian Sea. It gave her strength. She stood in wonder as the changing colors showed themselves only to those who rose when the cock crowed.

Pity the others. They did not know.

Seventy-two short years later, after what seemed like years of cajoling, she was convinced to move to Cleveland to be closer to me. The deal was sweetened when I found a condominium with a balcony that gave her a magnificent view of the Cleveland skyline and the lake.

She would telephone me, before she no longer could, to ask me if I had seen the sunrise over the eastern shores of Lake Erie.

“The colors!” she said. “I haven’t seen those colors for such a long time.” She must miss them, I think.

My mother was in the business of memories. She was feisty, 5-feet-2-inches tall, and the only female photographer in the city. She elbowed her way into the photography business in Youngstown, a rusty steel town in the 1960s, paving the way for other women with the same dream.

Her forte was peeking into the souls of those she photographed. She developed their lives in her darkroom.

Her “brides” became part of her extended family. They came back with their infants and toddlers for motherly advice, and to be photographed. When she closed her studio after 15 years, some of them wept with sadness. She had given far more than she had taken.

Life changes in an instant, and so it did.

No warning signs can prepare one for the aftermath of a life-altering stroke. Words said in the usual way are now heard differently. Routines once simple become a struggle to perform. Some days, the grief over such a loss appears impossible to overcome. Yet some survive and carry on because of will alone. She is one of them.

When we relocated to rural Wisconsin, she moved once again, to be cared for and loved.

Her world seems small now. All of those years and those memories and that laughter must somehow fit into the confines of a single room. How is that possible? Her dreams are of relatives, long ago passed, who visit her in the night.

“They were here,” she sometimes says. “I asked them to come.” And I believe that they did.

She gets fewer phone calls now, because she seldom answers the phone. “It rings all the time,” she says. Those who wish to be part of her life must now stand before her or not be heard.

She spends less and less time roaming the halls in her wheelchair and more time lying in her bed, resting from her long and full life.

Always the worrier, my mother mostly worried about family. The cigarettes and second-hand smoke took the older ones. We knew better. So she worried about whether her children would choose the right mates, and when we did, she was relieved and free to worry about the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren. There was limitless potential for worry about those things that she had no power to change. She prayed us through all of those things, and she prays still.

Now she worries about what she will wear.

“Beige, I think. I must have something beige.” I go searching through her closet for something suitable.

I am happy to do her bidding for another day and thankful for the blessing of yet another Mother’s Day together.

XMaryann Liguore is a freelance writer. She lives in rural Kewaunee County.