In the Year After Mom Died: August 20, 2006 to August 20, 2007

By Tom Slattery

The author deals with grief and reflects on life and change following the death of his mother in 2006. Her treasure old house and the unintended influence of Arthur Miller are followed through this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 30, 2008
• ISBN: 9780595612031

Tom Slattery

Tom Slattery was born and grew up in the Cleveland, Ohio, metropolitan area. He wandered through the world with an interested eye, a knack at seeing things differently, a fertile mind. He worked for colleges, universities, and research facilities, and lived and worked for years in Asia and Europe.

Book preview

IN THE YEAR AFTER

MOM DIED

August 20, 2006 to August 20, 2007

Tom Slattery

iUniverse, Inc.

New York Lincoln Shanghai

IN THE YEAR AFTER MOM DIED

August 20, 2006 to August 20, 2007

Copyright © 2008 by Matthew Thomas Slattery III

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

iUniverse

2021 Pine Lake Road, Suite 100

Lincoln, NE 68512

www.iuniverse.com

1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any Web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

ISBN: 978-0-595-49672-3 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-0-595-61203-1 (ebk)

Contents

Introduction

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

Introduction

This book samples a biography of a pre-electrification and virtually pre-automobile and pre-airplane woman. She was born in the first years of the twentieth century to an immigrant coal-mining family in a mining settlement in Ohio that no longer exists. She grew up poor and worked hard and struggled with life and poverty.

Amid a miserable divorce she bought an old former vacation cottage by Lake Erie because it was the only house that she could afford to raise her children. She would live in it for more than a half century and acquire a love and attachment to it and eventually die in it. She was Mom.

It also samples my autobiography because I lived in her old house for decades, and for the last two decades I steadily lived in it with her. It was not only my home but my refuge and became the place where I completed all of my writing. More importantly, the autobiographical aspect concerns dealing with the awful hollow emptiness of grief. It is a book about an old man dealing with grief and loss of a mother and friend.

The book also explores some minor effects that even a tenuous relationship to a famous person, in this case playwright Arthur Miller, has on obscure and unknown people.

I began this book in January 2007, halfway into the year after Mom died. I wanted to have access to fresh memories and write them down before they faded. This introduction recounts thoughts drifting through my mind while I stared at the blank page-image screen and wondered what kind of a book, if book at all, I might write. As I stared at the screen I decided not to keep a diary, but at the same time to record memories and thoughts as they came to me on a fairly daily basis. So I began putting down the thoughts that you see in this introduction to see where they might go, just for starters.

The book itself follows the randomness of this beginning. I added pertinent writings and documents when I found them. I wrote down events and concerns about living in Mom’s old house as they occurred, even while hoping for enough time to complete this book in those familiar surroundings. There seems, however, a vague intuitive organization other than chronology to it. Items and anecdotes fell almost by themselves into interesting and entertaining patterns.

Writing this book was intended as an attempt to deal with grief from Mom’s death. But it was also an activity to wonder, through the process of writing, about my life and where I might go with what remained of it.

When I began the book in the depth of miserable midwinter in January, I had considerable doubts that I would be able to live in Mom’s old house until the first anniversary of her death. Some neighbors had suggested that the house was an eyesore. It was old and badly deteriorated. The essential systems like plumbing and heating had been running on marginal even before Mom’s death. And last but not least, there were some doubts that the city government would allow me to continue to live in it.

In the past the now upscale wealthy suburban city government had been unfriendly not only to her but to the scattered owners of former vacation cottages in general. My two sisters and brother flatly told me that the city had allowed Mom to live in her old house until the end of her life because it would have looked politically bad for them to have condemned it and thrown a fragile ninety-something woman out onto the street. They had credible reasons for saying this.

So I spent the first two or three months after Mom’s death literally preparing to be thrown out. I sorted through my personal papers, throwing away most and packing the remainder in plastic storage tubs. As a writer I had saved and collected more papers than most people. I kept items that might later bear on my copyrights. I kept notes for new stories and copies of various drafts of my many screenplay, novels, and nonfiction books. While I was living here there had been no reason to throw these away. But suddenly I was facing imminent moving.

On the rare chance that I might be able to stay through some or all of the coming winter, I also put in considerable time and energy shoring up Mom’s deteriorated old vacation cottage for what promised to be a nasty winter. It turned out to have been a good choice. All of the work that I did, and that my siblings sometimes helped with, held up. Mom’s old house survived yet another winter, and I was thus able to finish this book.

Shoring up the house and sorting through papers consumed all of my time at first. After the death-related items and transfers and the funeral service in early October, I spent October, November, December, and January doing only this and hardly going anywhere. I was too grief-stricken and devastated to write anything lengthy or serious during those months.

After half of a year, though, the shock had somewhat worn off. The emptiness remained, but feelings of loss and grief began to alleviate. Writing had always been therapy and thought-clarification for me. In the dead of January winter I began an attempt, at the age of seventy-one, to organize my thoughts about the remainder of my life through writing this book.

Some people are born with the rest of their lives cut out for them. At the age of five Mozart’s talents were clear to him and everyone who knew him and thus he would have felt that music would be the rest of his unfortunately short life. Franklin Roosevelt probably realized his talents for persuasion and politics early in life, and not even a terribly disabling disease could keep him from leading a nation in some of its most desperate years until he died at the age of sixty-three.

But I am like most people who were born to mothers on this small planet zooming at close to a net million miles per hour through the vastness of the universe. I am like a wind chimes through which those million-mile-per-hour winds of nothingness going by play ever changing random music.

Consider this. In respect to their diameters, the atoms of our human bodies are not quite as far apart as the stars in the heavens in respect to their diameters. But it would not be wrong to visualize them as being that distant from one another. And as our small planet zooms through the great vastness of nothingness, a wind of nothingness blows at a million miles per hour through the great emptiness between the atoms of our bodies. One might seriously ponder whether it plays them like the random music from a wind chimes.

Once when I was very young, and probably after having read a science fiction story, I seemed to hear an inner voice, or perhaps an outer nonverbal voice of thoughts and concepts as if calling through a great vastness, and it asked me what I wanted most from life. The story that I had read, or whatever input had turned my thoughts just prior to that, may have revolved around the futility of grubbing for wealth, the purposelessness of romantic attractions, and the transitory nature of the most permanent-seeming architectural structures and monuments.

So in my boyish hopes to answer my inner voice as if it were a teacher that had called upon me in a classroom, I answered a single word: knowledge. I wanted knowledge most from life. Whether it really meant anything or not I have no idea. But that moment of wonder has stuck in my mind all of these years, possibly even influencing my decisions from time to time.

It was not a pretense toward omniscience. Even then I understood the limits of a human mind. And even then I knew my mind was not as good as some, possibly not even as good as most. If I might receive the knowledge of Einstein, I would not understand it like Einstein. It was simply a life’s quest onto which I was set.

And I was not one to seek knowledge for its own sake. In all of my years from then up to now I never myself sought to be a scholar seeking knowledge. I did not seek out specific or general knowledge stored in libraries or expounded from distinguished minds on revered campuses. No, this was something different.

Something seems to have guided me toward knowledge, even knowledge that I might never thoroughly understand. This guiding had little to do with what I sought with my unformed values and needs to survive and make a living. Mysterious coincidences led me into jobs for which I was only minimally qualified, if qualified at all, but which would provide me with understanding and knowledge that few people are ever permitted to have.

I came to feel that I was caste by mysterious forces into employment and association with great minds seeking knowledge through scientific thought and experiments. I was sent out into the whole wide world of nations and cultures to experience and draw knowledge from them by living among them. I was even given to invent, discover, and create, enough to understand how invention, discovery, and creativity worked.

And so in January or 2007 I sat at this keyboard in what had been for decades my writing room in Mom’s old house. I was an old man wondering what it may have all been for, wondering if that touch on the mysterious might yet guide me to where I might not have gone otherwise.

For a quarter of a century of steadily living in that old former vacation cottage an ever-increasing portion of my life had been arranged around aging Mom. In all of those years she had never been a problem. She was simply old and alone. I had to be around to help her deal with that.

As for me, my stay in her old house for those final years had been a blessing. It gave me resources to live easily and thoughtfully and a place to write. Most outstanding minds that have made creative contributions to progress have had patrons, sponsors, or money grants. I had, for what it was worth, the small writing office in Mom’s old deteriorated house and the indirect financial support that these provided. And for the last two decades small and large things around that had governed the direction of my life.

On the day I began this book, six months after Mom died, I woke up from a dream that she had opened my bedroom door to tell me it was about time to get up. When she was alive she had done this from time to time for years—when I had overslept and had to get to various and numerous part-time, full-time, temporary, and permanent jobs. And even after I was no longer working, if I might sometimes sleep in past nine in the morning she would open the door a crack and ask if I were all right.

So it was a pleasant dream, and it did wake me up. But it was also a reminder that she was gone, and now a different direction in the remainder of my life loomed. I had steadily lived in this minimal but cherished old house and off-andon for years prior to that. My life, Mom, and the old house had been intertwined.

But that day in the dead of winter, in the chill of the coldest cold snap of the year, the old house had an echoing emptiness. Without Mom there, her old house seemed only a skeleton of itself

Her house was, and remained in my mind even that morning five months after her death, her house. She had been the living warmth that had given it its character and purpose. After her death it seemed like a seashell on a beach after its resident sea creature had gone, a hollow artifact in waves and sand.

It had been her pride and joy, her security, her hopes and dreams. That I have been a beneficiary of these does not separate the fact that I can never have the same pride in it and joy from it. She was the one who bought it and who struggled mightily to keep up the payments and to keep it functioning. Having no significant money, no other valuable holdings, and no family, it was her desperate sole security. And around it she built her hopes and dreams.

Among those hopes and dreams for her many years in her old house were hopes and dreams that her pride, joy, security would continue on through me. Wrapped up in these were her decades-long struggle, some imagined and some real, to keep acquisitive elements, some in the real estate field, from snatching this highly desirable tiny plot of property near the shore of Lake Erie. I am sure that her fight to keep them from winning stretched out her determination to live long and survive to ninety-eight.

And though I felt some small joys in living in this small plot of land with a pleasant view of the lake and the wafting of cool lake breezes in the summer, I did not have her pride of having bought it, paid off its mortgage, and fought for it. As a structure that is more than a half-century older and more deteriorated than when she acquired it, it had at the time of her death become more of a threat than security to me. In addition, I had no children and thus no hopes and dreams of leaving them an asset against adversity.

It filled her with sadness in her final year to realize that her beloved house would not last much longer and therefore could not be that security for me that it had been for her for more than a half century. We both worried that it might not last even as long as her little remaining time on Earth. I repeatedly assured her that I would try to stay and live in it for at least a year after she was gone and that I would then use what I got from it to find security and purpose somewhere else in my old age. With understandable regrets, she accepted it.

When Mom died I had lived in Mom’s old cottage, off and on, for thirty-seven years. Except for two winters, I had lived in it for thirty straight winters. I had done virtually all of my writing in its unheated former porch area. I had written or rewritten six novels, four of them self-published and sold on Internet book sites. I also had written a self-published collection of short stories that does not include all of my short stories, several self-published non-fiction books, seven feature-length screenplays and several shorter screenplays, a stage play, and numerous articles, many of them published.

In short, in this old former vacation cottage near the shore of Lake Erie I wrote, rewrote, or polished for publication virtually everything that I had written. And in that fact is some of the motivation for beginning this project. When I began, this house was more than eight decades old. Due largely to poverty, it had been poorly maintained over the more than half century that Mom owned it. What had been done in the way of repairs in recent years had been done to make it last for Mom’s lifetime. It had been done with as little commotion and interference with her frail elderly life as possible. As a result, it was no longer cost-effective to completely restore it, and thus it could not last much longer as my home and writing place.

In addition to being a place for me to write, Mom’s old house contained fragmented items that recalled memories from the whole of my life. For instance, next to my homemade writing station in the cold former porch area was a six-foot tall (two meter) walnut secretary with a drop-front desk, three bookshelves above the desk, and three drawers below it. It had been a wedding present from my father’s parents to my parents, and thus it had been in Mom’s possession since before I was born. I had seen it, played with it, and used it in five different houses where she had lived.

One memory of it that has stuck with me for most of my life is from a long-ago Easter. I was a very small boy. My parents had given me a large and friendly-looking chocolate rabbit. I think World War two was just over and sugar and chocolate were no longer rationed. This was a chocolate rabbit the likes of which I had never seen. I could not bear the thought of eating that nice rabbit. I hid it atop the secretary. And it stayed there through the spring and into the summer. And there Mom found it after dusting and cleaning and took it down. It was full of maggots. And I confessed to her what I had done, and she understood.

So sixty-five years after I hid my chocolate rabbit on top of that seventy-twoyear-old secretary, and as I began writing this book, there it still was sitting beside me. It held that and many other reminders of my childhood. Dad kept his treasured books behind its glass doors above the drop-front desk. The little knickknack drawers and doors behind the drop-front desk were fabled little places where Dad kept fountain pens, special drawing pencils, mysterious drawing tools, and ink bottles.

It once had been a truly fine piece of furniture. My grandparents must have spent considerable on it. More than seven decades later, it was old and battered. My sisters, brother, and I never appreciated it as quality furniture. By the time we were old enough to understand quality in furniture, it was old and battered. This unwanted wedding gift was throughout my life a symbol of Mom’s resentments, principles, and longings. It sits next to me a reminder of Mom’s yearning in spite of her circumstances to have a normal and proper American middle class life, but not at the sacrifice of her integrity and ideals.

Mom always resented it. Gifts of quality furniture had never been a part of her life and she suspected that the giving of it was a manipulative device by my grandmother. My grandmother, a good woman, was also a devout Catholic with a touch of zeal. Mom saw the walnut secretary as a Catholic conversion tactic and came to hate it.

At some level Mom seemed to resent not having any relatives of her own. Her only surviving immediate relative, her father, had gone to live in the newly formed nation of Hungary before she had gotten married. She never saw him again. Thus there never was balance or normality in my parents’ marriage. Mom’s in-laws were not unusual for their time. But she did not find them warm and easy to get along with and sometimes seemed to wish that the opposite had been the case.

You can read a bit of biography of my paternal grandparents in playwright Arthur Miller’s 1987 autobiography Timebends. As best I can recall of my grandparents now, he described them accurately but from his own perspective. For instance in the book Miller implies that my grandfather was a closet Nazi. He wasn’t. He was an Irish nationalist.

Arthur Miller’s opinions of him were formed in the late 1930s and early 1940s, before the Holocaust. As a result, he was unfamiliar with the effective earlier Irish Holocaust caused by a combination of the potato blight and fanatic contemporary British government free-market economics. Out of the comparatively small Irish population, one to two million Irish people literally starved to death.

The generation of my grandfather’s parents and grandparents had managed to live through it, and the generation of my grandfather had heard the storied directly from them. My grandfather grew up with some animosities toward the British government, but was not pro-Nazi. If Miller, a thoroughly decent and thoughtful man, had grasped the Irish Holocaust he might have composed those paragraphs more understandingly.

Dad’s sister Mary (then known as Mary Grace) married Arthur Miller years before he had written anything significant and a long before he became one of the world’s most famous literary figures. In what little I remember of him from my early childhood, he was just Uncle Art, a tall lanky relative who sometimes came to visit.

Fame unfortunately does not only affect the person famed, it flows off, wanted or unwanted, onto others. And Arthur Miller not only became a larger-than-life literary icon he also came with some considerable political baggage. He was a communist with a small c and certainly a leftist in a literary tradition of left-leaning authors. As such, he drew the ire and flack of powerful conservative forces, and some of this also flowed off onto others with whom he associated or had once associated.

Like most people who have found themselves unintentionally in the charged aura of someone else’s fame, Mom was poorly prepared for it. She was pleased and proud of the connection and never hesitated to tell her friends and associates of it. She saw some of his plays in live stage performances, and she saw several more of them in movie theaters or on television.

But I suspect that she did not deeply understand, nor did she seem to understand the thrust of his life and art well. She was just one of the multitude of small unknown someones who had known the famed person quite well before he became famous, and for a while after he did, and flattered her own ego with the tenuous connection.

And that was not the only person who later became a relatively famous writer in the family she had married into. My father’s friend and cousin Frank Siedel launched a radio series titled The Ohio Story that later, in the early days of black-and-white television, briefly became a television series. He became known as Mr. Ohio, and retained connections to broadcast storytelling the rest of his life through a small media production company he founded. In my childhood Frank Siedel was known as Uncle Bud, and was around much of the time.

So Mom lived in the shadows of two famous writers, one of them as famous as one might ever get in writing. And she was ever reminding herself of it with oft-repeated anecdotal stories that became somewhat standardized and perhaps exaggerated from their sporadic telling over six decades.

None of this closeness to fame and the small fortunes associated with it ever brought her any wealth or security. When her long and bitter divorce occurred, she was left on the outside of her married-into connections with fame. As a result, she became merely a person who had known two famous people before they had become famous and relatively prosperous. She obtained no benefits from it but had to endure the derivatives.

Besides the unwanted walnut secretary, Mom brought what other furniture from her previous large two-story house that she could fit into her little one-floor cottage. One was an old Farnsworth radio-and-phonograph console. In 2007 the radio still worked. And the phonograph would still play old 33 and 78 rpm wax and vinyl records if it were cleaned and lubricated.

Readers may not immediately recognize the name Farnsworth. Philo T. Farnsworth invented modern television in a garage in San Francisco in 1923. He obtained a patent for his invention and set about perfecting it. The Great Depression and World War Two slowed his work. When the war ended RCA Corporation jumped in and began making television sets.

Farnsworth fought for his patent rights and eventually won against the electronics giant. However, by the time that he won his patent infringement case, the patent itself had almost run out. He had only a few years to produce and license television sets under its protection. And when it did, others leapt in and began the television boom of the early 1950s. Farnsworth, inventor of television, was reduced to making fine radio and phonograph consoles. Dad had followed the long struggle in the newspapers and had become an admirer of Farnsworth. In addition, the Farnsworth radio-phonographs had received wide acclaim for excellence. So Dad, a fervent classical music fan even given the poor sound quality of wax and vinyl phonograph records, bought one.

The solid walnut Farnsworth console sat in exactly the same place in the living room of Mom’s old cottage where the movers placed it in late 1953. It held some significant memories for me. When it had been at the old house before being moved to the old cottage, I had a vivid dream that for some reason I have remembered ever since. As best I can remember it was prior to the family purchasing its first black-and-white Muntz TV set in the first years of the 1950s. I dreamt that I was watching a Lone Ranger radio show, but in the form of a color television program, on the Farnsworth radio console. I was a kid very into cowboy stories and cowboy movies then.

The dream would come true. For fifty-three years I would watch television programs on one or the other of a series of television sets that sat squarely on top of that Farnsworth radio and phonograph console. For about forty of those years it was a color television set. The first color television ran on vacuum tubes and was repaired in-place by television repairmen several times. Years later when television repair people had become too scarce and thus too expensive, Mom reluctantly bought new color television sets.

She was even more reluctant to throw the old ones away. For one thing, they all still worked, minimally. She had grown up in poverty and did not like to throw away anything that seemed still good. For another, all of those television sets had become virtual companions in those years after her children had grown up and left her so terribly alone in her small and drafty old cottage. She told me as much once. I took at least two of her old and broken, but still minimally working, television sets to church bazaars to avoid discarding her old friends in the weekly trash pickups.

The first television sets had furniture-like wood cases. And since the old cottage had no fireplace, the top of the television set became a makeshift mantel for framed photos, knickknacks, and the old electric clock. But finally there were none with wooden cases. The new TV sets were all enclosed in round-sided molded plastic.

Mom still needed a mantel, but we had spent the available money on the television set. I made a cabinet out of scrap wood, stained it with a half-used can of mahogany stain, and used a ten-year-old can of car wax to overcome its scrap-wood homemade coarseness.

I put the new round plastic TV set into it and all of the traditional items back on top of it. Mom went through at least three additional stamped-out plastic color-TV sets that went into it. The third one was still there and working in the impromptu cabinet on top of the Farnsworth radio console when she died and even for the year after she died.

The Farnsworth console had become functionally useless except to support the various television sets. Though the FM radio still worked, it was never used. It stood on short walnut legs like fine furniture did in the late 1940s and early 1950s. And in that structural design was another fond memory.

One summer day a small animal had gotten into the house. To Mom it looked, for all the world, like a rat. She screamed, A rat! Frightened, the animal ran. I looked at it as it scurried by. Its fur was white-gray colored rather than gray or brown like a traditional rat’s. But it was about the size of a rat.

I immediately concluded that it was a baby opossum. But there remained the problem of how to get a baby opossum that was in the house out of the house. While I was pondering the problem and its possible solutions, the baby opossum ran under the Farnsworth console. I ran to the encyclopedia that Mom had put so many hopes and dreams into and spent so much badly needed money on. And it turned out to be useful. I found that opossums ate, among other things, grapes.

And fortunately there were some grapes in the refrigerator. I got a handful, went back to the Farnsworth console, and peered under it. The little opossum was looking at me. I rolled a grape in. The baby opossum fielded it like a shortstop and began eating it. Then I rolled another in the direction of the front door. It moved there and ate that one. I opened the front door, placed a series of grapes leading out into the front yard, and watched as the baby opossum followed the trail and exited to the front yard and then disappeared.

The opossum was not the only animal to get in. This is a cottage with a crawl space under it and no real foundation. Small animals can find way in. Being close to Lake Erie where large European rats sometimes jump ship and immigrate to the New World, we have had to get rid of rats. And just prior to every single winter here some wee timorous field mouse got in. These always left on their own, too nervous to share living quarters with huge biped mammals. And one day some years ago a snake got in and had to be escorted out in a bag by a local very nervous policeman. It turned out to be a non-poisonous pet rat snake belonging to the boy next door.

In addition to the tall walnut secretary and the Farnsworth radio console, there were other items that Mom brought from the old house to this cottage fifty-three years before she died. There was the steel-tube fold-out kitchen table. The benches were designed to fold out from under it, and it becomes a picnic-like table. We four children all sat around it for breakfasts when we were small. It was more than sixty years old when Mom died. She treasured it. It was full of a mother’s memories of her small children growing up.

And there was a chest of drawers and a dresser that had been at the old house. These were relegated to my bedroom and my use for almost four decades before Mom died. And there were the drapes on the living room windows. The drapes were brought here from the old house. And, with perhaps biannual washings they continuously hung there on those windows in this old cottage for fifty-three years.

Most precious to Mom was her cedar chest, a coffin-sized and coffin-like chest that sat on the floor of her bedroom. It had also been a wedding present. It was always there in my lifetime.

It had, at very least, been in all of the other houses that Mom and we children lived in as far back as I can remember. Into this cedar chest went Mom’s most precious things, including the deeds to this house and all of her necessary and often unnecessary financial and document records. In addition there were the items for which it had been made, blankets, comforters, and some more precious clothing. It still sits there as I begin writing this, largely empty now, her revered personal items now either dispersed to whichever of her children wanted them or packed into plastic storage containers for inevitable moving. Mom clearly did not want to give up on those memories of a long-ago marriage, of a family once together in that old house and even other previous old houses.

It was only after the bitter, two-year-long divorce was finalized that Mom bought this old cottage. Alone, without any relatives, and banished to the periphery of former connections to her husband’s family she took the small equity she had in a large house in Lakewood and sunk it into a down payment on the only house she could afford. It was this old and even then run-down former vacation cottage that by sheer chance happened to be ideally located near the shore of Lake Erie.

When Mom bought this old cottage in 1953, it was only about three decades old. It was not in very good condition then. Mom knew it. But she told herself stories like we all tell ourselves stories and like a great part of our consciousness is personal libraries of collected and sometimes unspoken stories. Without stories we conscious beings are nothing. Like everyone, she dealt with reality and related to others through her accumulated stories. Perhaps people who are mentally deficient or defective are not able to construct essential stories for dealing with others and with reality. But even the most logical and sane of us has to bend or even discard factual material to maintain a both constructive outlook and positive relationships with others.

Mom, like all of us, showered her consciousness with favorite stories about her past, about her friends, about her trips, about her children, about her neighbors, and about everything that constitutes a person’s consciousness and sanity. Like all old people, she tended to retell favorite stories about her memories and experiences without apparently realizing it. And one of those stories that was extremely important to her was about how she had paid off the final several mortgage installments on her old house the day she retired. Full ownership of it was a thing of great pride to her.

Another favorite theme, with several story variations, was about how well built her old former vacation cottage that had become her home was.

And there was a modicum of truth that sustained this story. When the cottage had been built in the 1920s, it had been built by hand without power tools and with the care and standards of that time. Relatively good solid wood had been used. Electrical wiring using solid copper wire and ceramic insulators was done carefully. Iron bolts and nails were more than simply adequate.

But in fact, the modified cottage was in terrible condition when she acquired it. As a former summer vacation cottage reconfigured into a small year-round house, it had always been just a step above a shanty. Some of the problem stemmed from the fact that the modifications to allow year-round living had been done provisionally and with obvious haste. But the main problem was that it had been built as a summer vacation cottage. It lacked a foundation. It was made of material meant for summer vacation enjoyment.

Built in the early 1920s as a summer-only vacation cottage near the shore of Lake Erie, it had been hastily low-cost modified for year-round living around the time of World War Two when war-production factories raised demands for housing when house-construction labor had been absorbed into the battlefields. Neither the original cottage nor the modifications were ever quite adequate as a full-fledged house, especially in the cold Ohio winter. They only permitted residence and survival for someone in great need of cheap housing.

That was precisely why the cottage became her home. And it was her house. It was one of her few major accomplishments in life. Having grown up in rough mining-town poverty in southeast Ohio, she was not physically or psychologically uncomfortable in it.

More importantly, she was well aware that it was the only thing standing between her and homelessness. There were times when she had no money in the bank and borrowed against it to either bail her children or to make desperately needed repairs to it. Her pride and her security revolved around it. And it became, as years went by and she eventually lived in it for more than a half century, her cherished pride and joy.

Her children wisely never disabused her of her self-deceptions about her beloved house. We understood that the stories she told herself about it were central to her sanity and well being and went along and even encouraged them. To have ever called her cherished little cottage a rundown shack would have hurt her deeply.

Knowing how deeply she loved and cherished her old cottage, I completely painted it at least four times. Several times I spent whole summers extensively repairing it. And in her last years I did what was necessary, without creating too much stress and commotion in her extreme old age and illness, to keep it structurally satisfactory and not an eyesore.

A year after her death, her beloved house was on its last legs. I had done most of the repair of the work on it and knew the realities of its condition. I had no reason to share her self-deceptions about it. When Mom died, my brother and sisters felt that it might be dangerous for me to continue living in it. But I continued living in it for the year after Mom died partly because Mom had so deeply