My Dad's Sweaters

by Lorraine Bartlett / Lorna Barrett / L.L. Bartlett

Even though it's summer, I still wear sweaters ... a lot. First, the house is often cold because of the air conditioning. Mr. L likes it around 72. I could be happier at 75, but ... I just put on a sweater.

I have a LOT of sweaters. My Mum was into machine knitting and made a LOT of them. I have a couple I wear on REALLY cold days because they are really long (I think she must have made them extra-long), and ... I couldn't bear to part with them when she died.

When my Dad passed away almost nine years ago (how can he have been gone that long already????), Mum started wearing his sweaters. He had quite a collection and most of them came from England. Marks and Spencer to be exact. I'm sure my mother picked them out for him while they were on their frequent trips "back home" in England. He wore them from the 1970s through the early 90s and then for some reason stopped. (Maybe because he gained too much weight?)

Anyway, a couple of them hung in my mother's big walk-in closet. She had anemia and was cold 24/7, so she often wore three layers in the summer. Turtleneck, sweatshirt, sweater. I'd come over in the summer and it would be broiling in the house and she'd think it was just fine.

After she passed away, it was my job to clean out the house. I gave away nearly all her clothes, and she'd already done that for Dad, but hanging in the closet were two of his sweaters. I found even more packed away in a suitcase. In all, I think I kept at least ten sweaters. And I wear them. My favorite is one of Dad's. It's navy blue and it's got moth holes. They're tiny and don't detract from the cardigan's warmth. There were two green ones, which are in excellent shape, and they are HEAVY. I didn't wear them last winter, but I will this year.

I love those sweaters. They're a tangible remembrance of both my parents.

One winter day not long after Dad died, I visited my Mum on a snowy day. I was COLD. She handed me a polar fleece jacket that belonged to my Dad and said, "Take this. And when you're sad (I was crying every day back then, and I can be reduced to tears in a heartbeat when I think of either of them now) and when you're sad, wear this and wrap your arms around yourself and it'll be a hug from your Dad.

On a day when things don't go right, I put on that jacket or his sweater and give myself a hug. It's not as good as the read thing, but it'll do.

Are you sentimental about certain items of clothing?

A little something for myself

Squeeeee! I be bad. A couple of weeks ago, I saw a Facebook ad (and I usually totally ignore them unless they are from/by an author friends of mine) for a Spode broken china holiday pendant (they also offered matching earrings). Well, I got suckered in, but isn't it PRETTY!!!!!!!!!

I now have three of pieces of broken china jewelry. (I wanted to get a pendant made from a piece of my mother's broken china, but couldn't find a place that would make it.) Mr. L gave me the first two pieces. One is a heart-shaped pendant made from Royal Albert Country Roses pattern, and I don't know the pattern of the other -- it's a round pendant with a single yellow flower in the middle.

Mr. L wasn't happy when I showed him the new pendant, because he always wants me to TELL him what I what for Christmas -- but that's no fun because I these days I can just go out and buy stuff for myself. It's a lot more fun when somebody puts real thought into a gift--or even better, makes it themselves.

I so miss that about Christmas. My parents always made us at least one thing every Christmas (I missed the "crafty" gene.) My mother usually sewed (she quilted) or knitted something.

My Dad would make jewelry or carve a Santa or something else.

Christmas will never be the same.

Do you buy yourself stuff for the holidays?

Mama's Got A Brand New Bag

Sometimes things don't work out the way you want them to. When my Mum died in June, I told the funeral director that I wanted a Thumbie. That's a cast pendant of one of your loved one's fingerprints. He assured me that he had taken her fingerprints and that it wouldn't be a problem.

You see, after my Dad died almost six years ago, I went to the same funeral home with my Mum to make arrangements and learned about Thumbies. I wanted one and my mother bought one for me, saying it would be my Dad's last gift to me, making it that much more special. It came just before Christmas and I've worn it ever since. So when my Mum passed, I REPEATEDLY told the funeral diector that I wanted a matching Thumbie. No problem! Except ... he was new to the job and had never ordered one.  And so, he called in an associate who walked him through the process.

And I waited for my Thumbie to arrive.

And I waited. And waited. And waited.

It was supposed to come in 4-6 weeks.

At week 9, I stopped by the funeral home to inquire about my Thumbie.  The very  nice woman at the reception desk asked me to wait while she tried to find out what happened.

So I waited. And waited. And waited.

Sometime later, the woman (quite sheepishly) approached me and and said, "We can't find a record of the order."  Uh-oh!  She said, "We'll contact you as soon as we have any information." I took that to mean that the order had never been placed. I wasn't happy but, hey, mistakes happen.  So I went home to await a call.

The call came the next morning, and not from the young funeral director I had dealt with, but the Big Guy in charge who apologized profusely. Not only had the order NOT been made, but they could not find my mother's fingerprints--no matter where they looked. There was to be no Thumbie.

I cried.

The New Comer Manager, John, very kindly offered me a replacement piece of jewelry.  This was to be a piece of jewelry that would hold a tiny portion of my Mum's cremains.

Mum wouldn't be Mum without her glasses.

So a few days later, I grabbed my Mum from off the entertainment center in my living room where her ashes had been residing, packed her off in the passenger seat of my mini van, and she rode shotgun for her second trip to the funeral home this summer.  On the way, I told her all about the changes in our little suburb.  (Holy cow, there've been a lot of them in just a short span of time.)

John wasn't at the home, but the woman I'd spoken to the week before sat me down in the same room where Mum and I had made my Dad's arrangements and let me pick out a piece of jewelry.  It was a toss up between a dragonfly (my Mum had a pretty dragonfly pin that she wore on her favorite sweater) or a hummingbird.  (Every summer she hung a hummingbird feeder and delighted in watching those tiny birds have dogfights over who got the nectar.)  Since a dragonfly is a bug, and I'm not really a bug fan, I chose the hummingbird.

They took some of Mum's cremains and said the hummingbird would arrive within the week.  When they returned Mum to me, they'd put her "temporary" box (my brother is going to make a more permanent box for me for Christmas) inside a purple velveteen bag.  I laughed when I saw it, and told the woman, "Hey, Mama's got a brand new bag."  (I think she may have been too young to remember the song Papa's Got A Brand New Bag.)  So, Mum rode shotgun all the way home, wearing her new "dress."  (And I kept singing over and over again that phrase from the song Try A Little Tenderness.  "Women do get weary ... wearing the same old shabby dress."  (My Dad used to always call out "then buy her a new shabby dress" which always made me laugh.))

Less than a week later, the hummingbird arrived.  John called and asked me to bring Mum back because they had more cremains than they needed.  So, back in the velveteen bag she went, she rode shotgun again for her third trip in less than three months to the funeral home.

John and the whole staff at New Comer have always been very kind. Not only didn't they charge me for the Thumbie, they credited my brother's credit card, and gave me the hummingbird for free.  I'm impressed by their integrity. They could have just lied and said, "Oh, we found her fingerprints" and faked a Thumbie, but they didn't.  And they made it right.

The Thumbie is approximately the same size as a dime.

 Of course ... maybe I should have gone for the dragonfly after all.  Sometimes Mr. Hummingbird's wings jab me in the throat.  Mum's neighbor, Amy, said, "I'll bet your Mom's trying to get your attention."  My Mum would never hurt me, but I laughed at the idea, and now if the wings jab me I said, "Okay, what do you want me to do, Mum?"

So, Mum and Dad are together again on my entertainment center.  It would be much better if they were really here, of course, but thanks to my Thumbie and hummingbird charm, they're close to my heart every day.

Dad didn't want to be left out of the story.

What should I do with the plants?

It's been a difficult summer. Losing my mother was just the beginning. Clearing out her house has been a monumental task. And what do I do about her plants?

This little guy is blooming again right now.

When Mum went to hospice, I asked her if she wanted to take any of her plants.  She said no.  I took one anyway. A little African violet that was blooming its heart out.  Sometimes the volunteers would water it, but usually I'd find it pretty dry and water it.  After my mother died, I went to the hospice house to pick up her things and saw the plant sitting outside and looking very unhappy.  I took it home with me and it has lived on my kitchen counter next to my cactus.

Early this summer, I gave five or six of Mum's houseplants that could live outside to her neighbor. Amy was very happy to get them, immediately planted them outside, and most of them are doing well. But what do I do with the rest of them?

My Mum had a green thumb. Me? Not so much. But I try.  In fact, I've been taking care of the rest of her houseplants and, so far--so good.  But what do I do with them?  I already have my own houseplants.  Mum left behind two more African violets and at least seven orchids.  After she died, one of the violets exploded with blooms.  Two of the orchids have bloomed (one just last week, and another is going to bloom soon--she had wonderful luck with orchids).  They like the eastern sun exposure, I guess.  But I already have five orchids of my own.  My brother doesn't want them. Mr. L doesn't want to feel like he's living in a conservatory, and I can't bear to throw out a living plant that hasn't every hurt anybody.

So, what should I do with her plants?

I lost my Mom

If you've been reading the Cozy Chicks blog on a regular basis, you know that Maggie recently lost her mother.  Well, now so have I.

Maggie's Mom was in relatively good health until recently. So was my mother, except she'd been living under a death sentence since August, with the oncologist (a particularly unpleasant woman) telling her in September that she had six months to live.  My mother took the news with grace. She said, "I've had a wonderful life and I feel very lucky." She never cried. She never felt sorry for herself, and she rarely even mentioned when she was in pain.

So, we made the best of the time she had left. We spent time at our family cottage (until it got too cold). We went out to lunch and had toasts. She made her famous bread stuffing and creamed onions for Thanksgiving, and again for Christmas. She was happy. She had the greatest attitude.

I wish I could say I felt the same way. I woke up every day with dread. When will I lose my mother? 

Mum did well until mid-February when she started saying, "I don't feel right." The cancer was beginning to spread, but we went out to lunch one last time and she ate her entire fish fry. I think that was the last decent meal she ate.  Soon after, she had to deal with nausea that wouldn't go away. Those in chaerge of her care kept insisting my mother use over-the-counter meds. They didn't help. She started losing weight. She lost twenty pounds in about three weeks because even the thought of food made her nauseous.

I did everything I could to find something she could eat.  I even learned to make the perfect poached egg Julia Child style. (Although it was actually a Gordon Ramsey video on YouTube that make that possible.)

Then she entered hospice care.  A nurse came to visit her twice a week. Things didn't get better. The nurse had no better luck at getting someone to treat Mom's increasing pain and the nausea.  I had to throw a temper tantrum to get SOMEBODY to listen, and my mother was finally put on a different medication that made a world of difference.  But by then she'd lost the will to eat.

Mom started feeling weaker, so my brother and I asked her to abandon her cane and use my Dad's old walker if she was alone in the house. A week later, we hired home health aids to stay with her at night, while my brother and I kept after the social worker about finding a bed in a hospice home.  Ten days later, Mum was invited to go to Mt. Carmel House.  A place to die.

The day I drove her away from her home of 15 years for the last time, she never even looked back.

For me, it meant I no longer had to run down the road four or five times a day to make sure she was okay. That she was eating, that she took her meds. To put on and take off her compression stockings. I was pretty frazzled, but then suddenly -- she wasn't in my care anymore. Though I went to visit her twice a day (put a lot of miles on my car and listened to a bunch of audiobooks on the way to and from the home), it was very stressful ... because once she went to Mt. Carmel, she gave up. Every day she slipped away a little more. Every day I left Mt. Carmel in tears. 

Mum stayed at Mt. Carmel for six weeks. Six weeks where I felt helpless and like I'd failed her.  Our last real conversation happened about ten days before she passed.  In her own way, she knew if she didn't say what she needed to say, I would never hear it. It was difficult for her, but she told me she loved me. She told me she was proud of me.  She told me she wanted me to have a lot more success in my career.

The nurses gave her exceptional care. I know how my Dad suffered in the hospital and the nursing home. The care he received was adequate (by their terms, not mine). The nurses and volunteers at Mt. Carmel were absolutely selfless. If there was anything my mother wanted (such as Bird's Custard), someone jumped in the car, went to the grocery store, and bought it. She wanted lemonade? They made her lemonade.

Mum passed away last Saturday evening, nine months and three days after the oncologist gave her six months to live. She used to joke that she didn't know if she should die sooner or hang on much longer just to thwart that woman who couldn't seem to muster an ounce of compassion.  (Believe me, she will die horribly in one of my future books.)

Mum asked me not to talk about her publicly until she was gone. She didn't want her Facebook friends to feel sorry for her, as a bunch of them were also my readers. That was the kind of person she was. She never wanted to stand in the limelight, but she supported me in everything I ever wanted to do.

But my Mum was a superstar to me. She and my Dad both were. My mother could sew. She made a lot of her own clothes when she lived in England, and when I was a little girl, she made a lot of mine, too. She once worked in a tailor shop and learned a lot. She made beautiful quilts, like this one I gave to Mt. Carmel so that other people would know that Valerie "Pat" Bartlett was an extremely talented needlewoman. She like to hand- and machine knit and made some beautiful sweaters. (For more than forty years, she hand-knitted all my Dad's socks.)

Mum was a great cook.  Her prime rib dinners were the stuff of legend. The only thing that eluded her was baking cookies. For some reason, hers never came out all that good -- but who cared, because everything else was great.

My Mum also had two green thumbs.  She was a great gardener. She could grow anything. She and Dad were organic gardeners long before organic became mainstream. Her orchids bloomed again and again. She kept African violets for years and they bloomed and bloomed and bloomed, too.

My Mum gave me the wonderful gift of a love of reading. She introduced me to mysteries (well, romantic suspense) when I was 11 or 12.  I was bored one summer day and she thrust a Readers Digest Condensed book in my hand and said, "Read this."  It was Ammie Come Home by Barbara Michaels.  I loved it so much, she bought me the hardcover (unabridged) edition (and probably another eight or ten of Ms. Michaels books--in hardcover!).  I'm a writer today, because I came from a house where reading was encouraged. We took both newspapers, Time and Newsweek (and a bunch of other) magazines, and our house was filled with books. When I brought Mr. L home to meet the parents, he knew he was going to like them because there were so many books on their shelves.


Not many people I know would have wanted to take a vacation, let alone 10-15 vacations, with their parents.  But I did.  Mr. L and I traveled with my parents to England (Scotland and Wales) twice; Italy, Canada (several times), Washington, Williamsburg, San Francisco, Lancaster PA, Bar Harbor, Portland, Boston ... I can't remember them all right now, but we kept going with my Mum and Dad because they knew how to travel.  We always had a great time.  Mr. L did not have a happy relationship with the in-laws from his first marriage.  He considered my Mum and Dad to be his best friends. (How lucky is that for a daughter?)

My Mum was almost 80 when she got her first computer. She loved to play Mahjong and do jigsaw puzzles online. She checked her email a couple of times a day, and she loved to read about what family and friends and her favorite authors were doing on Facebook.  (The last book she read was Duffy's Demise in Denim. She told me, "That Bruce Willis is always up to something!")

I have many, many happy memories of my mother. Like this picture that I took last summer at our family's summer cottage during a "girls only" weekend. Look at that smile. That's how I want to remember my Mum.

But right now I'm hurting. Like Maggie, I haven't been able to do much writing for the past couple of months. Back in January, I started a piece that came out earlier this week. Thinking about death so much, I knew the only way I could get through what was to come was to write about it. I turned to Jeff Resnick to channel my upcoming grief.  I literally wrote that story one paragraph at a time.  One day I might write 100 words, the next I might write only 25.  I kept going and tried to work on other projects, but as my Mum weakened, it was all I could do to get through the day.  (Thank goodness I have the most compassionate and the best editor on the planet.)

As Maggie blogged earlier this week, she's trying to adjust to the new normal without her mother.  Me, too. Like Maggie, I'm trying to find some structure, a new routine. It's still too new and raw, but I'm hoping that I can find that new normal and adjust. Time is my best ally right now. I need to get back to writing. It's what keeps me going. What keeps me sane. Tricia and Angelica are waiting. So are Katie, Tori and Kathy, and Amanda.

Mr. L (and Leann and Ellery) keep telling me to stop beating myself up, and it was actually Mr. L that said something that really resonated. "No matter what you or anyone else did, the outcome was going to be the same." And I can hear my Mum telling me, "Oh, Lorraine--please don't cry."  (But I still can't help it.)

I'm not the only person who ever lost her Mum, and many people left lovely condolences on Facebook that made me cry and made me smile. The ones I like best were the shared memories of their mothers.

Do you have a memory of your mother you'd like to share?  If so, please leave a comment.

(P.S.  I promise to have a shorter post next week.)