AN EMERGENCY TRIP TO TEXAS

Sometime in early October of 1980 I drove Ruby and Jim over the Muscatine, Iowa on a Friday Night to attend a youth rally.  They were planning to come back with the Cedar Rapids group the next day, so I drove back home.   When I got there, Ann said, “I need you to sit down on the couch I’ve got something to tell you.”  Her tone of voice suggested that it would not be good news.

She told me that my mother had been admitted to the West Texas Medical Center in Abilene.  The doctor said the cancer had spread throughout her body, but he did not expect her to survive, and he did not think she had much time left.  He also said, “She’s totally rational, but I don’t think it will last.”  He told Ann that I needed to get to Abilene as soon as possible.

On Saturday afternoon, I boarded a Texas bound plane again.  Again, I arrived late in the evening.  Daddy asked me, “Do you want to go to church in Clyde or Abilene tomorrow?”   I said, “I didn’t come here to attend church.  I’m here to see Mama.  A good brother loaned me a car, and for the next three weeks, I drove back and forth between Clyde and Abilene, but toward the end I spent the nights in hospital.  Daddy slept in the chair in her room, and I bunked on the benches if the hospital lobby.

During those three weeks, Mama left rational thinking only one time, and I’m pretty sure that was in response to morphine.  During the day time hours Daddy frequently had to take care of business responsibilities, so Mama and I had a lot of time when just the two of us would talk.  I started by asking her about her Fort Worth years before she met Daddy, and we worked through a lot of conversation that a mother and a son would normally have during the process of growing up.   It turned out to be a fantastic three weeks.   Mental illness had robbed us of those kinds of conversation, but now it came tumbling out in the last three weeks of her life.