Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Mother dipped into the well of optimism

By Carl Heintze

Abraham Lincoln is reputed to have said: "All that I am I owe to my humble mother." I'm not sure that's completely true, but, aside from life, I owe my mother a lot .

The youngest of seven children, she grew up in an intensely Victorian and Methodist household in which drinking, smoking and card playing were cardinal sins, where family was all and where there was a strict, severe, unrelenting code by which one lived and died.

She seems to have escaped all the ill effects of this and enjoyed the best of its teachings.

For a year, she attended the old College of the Pacific, now the site of Bellarmine College Preparatory, when it was unusual for women to do so. Also uncharacteristically for the time, she picked up and rushed off to Washington, D.C., during World War I to work as the private secretary to the adjutant general of the Army.

She married when she was 30--long after most women got married in those days--to a rolling-stone civil engineer who wandered much of his life. She spent the first years of her marriage in a variety of odd homes, including a tent cabin near Placerville in a construction camp. It didn't seem to faze her.

After six years and three children, one of whom died only a few months after birth, she was suddenly widowed.

So far as I know, she never had another date or relationship with a man. Instead, she did all a single mother could do then--she moved in with her parents in their five-bedroom house. Within three years she was caring for her bedridden mother and father.

Neither Grandmother nor Grandfather were easy patients. My grandmother cried, she complained, she tried to run her house even though incapable of doing so. My grandfather maintained a stoic silence and eventually, because of a stroke, stopped talking completely.

My mother bore all this, and raising two children on her own, not only without complaint but with optimism. She invariably saw the bright side of things, seldom complained and became increasingly tolerant of others.

When her parents died, she went back to work as a legal stenographer and secretary. In time she became what amounted to a legal aide, although they didn't call them that then. She also developed over the years into a kind of family secretary, aware and current on every sister, brother, niece, nephew and cousin, no matter how distant, in a very large family.

Regularly she honored the dead, taking flowers to their graves in the town cemetery, often more faithfully than the children of her brothers and sisters. Most of her life was spent in the town in which she was born.

In time, she became the oldest member of her church, a church she attended faithfully as long as she could. Eventually, suffering from painful osteoporosis, she sold her house and moved successively to an apartment, a retirement home and then a series of convalescent hospitals and board-and-care homes.

Invariably she was the one who cheered the other patients, who organized even the proprietors, who put on a happy face when we came to visit her. I never discovered how she was constantly able to dip into this well of optimism, but it never ended. Perhaps it was because she didn't want to be the burden her own mother had been. She never was.

She lived to be 90 and in all that long life, she always knew certainly and surely where she was and what was going on around her.

The last time I saw her, when she was only a week or so from death, I asked her if she knew that Nelson Rockefeller had just died under what can best be described as unusual circumstances--in the arms of a young woman.

"Yes," she said. "He won't need his money where he's going."

Nor did she. By time she died, she had divested herself of everything except the clothes she wore and her enthusiasm for life and family.

"Tell everyone I love them," she said.

And she did.

Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.