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Celebrating what would have been mom's 118th birthday

By Carl Heintze

It's something of a surprise to realize my mother, if she were still alive, would have been 118 in December 2006.

She was born in 1888, the youngest of six children. Her generation was the first in her family to have been born in California. Both her parents were immigrants. Her mother had crossed the ocean from Norway and the Isthmus of Panama to reach the shore of the Sundown Sea. Her father had come here as an orphan from New England when he was a teenager.

She lived almost all of her life in the Golden State and most of it in one place, Napa. When she arrived, it was in a house which had no electricity, no running hot water, no refrigeration, one bathroom and no central heating.

She was born at home, as were all her brothers and sisters, in a big, ugly white wooden, narrow, two-story house which, much altered, still exists, although in a different part of town.

She and her next oldest sister went to college for one year, something unusual for a young woman in those days. It was one of the few times she lived away from Napa.

She did, however, have two brief flings at life elsewhere. The first was during World War II when, for reasons she never explained clearly, she and her sister took the train across the country to work for the duration of the war in Washington, D.C.

There she was private secretary to the adjutant general of the U.S. Army, but she seldom mentioned it in later years. When the war was over, she and her sister came back to California and she had a brief period of work as a secretary on Alcatraz, then an Army prison, commuting each day from San Francisco.

Her second brief departure from Napa came when she married my father, a kind of rolling stone civil engineer who had worked on the Panama Canal, in Hawaii and in almost every state in the country at one time or another.

With him she lived in a tent in a construction camp in the Sierra Nevada, in Vacaville, in Truckee and in Sacramento, as he moved from job to job. With him in rapid succession, she bore three children, one of whom, my older brother, died a month after birth.

Five years later my father also died suddenly of pneumonia. She immediately fled back to the house where she had been born and spent a decade caring for her parents as they grew increasingly infirm and for my sister and me.

When her parents died, without a murmur she moved with us to a smaller house and went back to work, first as a bookkeeper and then as a legal stenographer. By the time she retired at 66 she had become a kind of self-taught paralegal, the best in town perhaps.

She lived the rest of her life alone, first in her own house, then in an apartment and finally in a series of board and care homes, where she never seemed bothered by what was going on about her and usually seemed more in charge of things than those who were supposed to care for her.

These are the bare facts of her life, but they do little to reveal her personality.

The last child in the family, as she was, must by birth order usually have to contend with older and often more authoritative siblings. She did that with a demeanor which was invariably civil and even. She was seldom angry, almost always ready to help, the picker-up and smoother-over of the family.

She did it as if it were to be expected. In time she became a kind of family secretary. She knew every family member's name, birth date and place, even remote relatives. She transmitted messages from one family member to another, called, wrote and kept in touch.

Yet she was not a gossip, and she never intruded. She was simply there when someone needed her or needed information. She cared for my grandmother--a difficult patient at best as she grew increasingly crippled by rheumatoid arthritis--through the long years of her bedridden life, and still had time for my sister and me.

This meant she had almost no social life of her own while her parents were still alive and that of a widow when they were gone. But if she minded, she never told us so. It was a time when widows often remained widows all their lives, and so she did, living out her life close to her next-oldest sister, but with no male friends.

When she died at 90, she died younger than any of her brothers and sisters, apparently content with her lot in life no matter how others might have seen it, and she remained an example to all those to whom adversity comes early and leaves late.

She knew how she was supposed to live, and she never wavered from that path.