My mother received her diagnosis of uterine cancer in the fall of 1984 and died on 21 August 1985, the timing of which she learned from a visit to her one evening by an angel in a dream.  She told me of this dream while she could still garden and walk in her yard.  She said she had accepted the inevitability of her death, and could live with having only another year on earth.  She told me, too, that she wanted her last year to be peaceful, surrounded by family, with as much time spent in her garden as she could, while she could.

Late that winter, I think; or maybe early the next year; she had her hysterectomy together with a biopsy of her intestines.  She called me from Barnes Hospital in St. Louis one morning, frantic, crying.  “Oh Mary, Mary, you’ve got to come,” she pleaded.  “There is urine draining from the surgery site and no one will do anything about it.”  I hastily secured continuances in a couple of hearings that I had to handle as a private practitioner and made the trip to St. Louis in considerably less time than it should have taken.

There, I groused and threw my negligible weight around and got the oncological surgeon to acknowledge the problem.  Some of my siblings combined their energy with mine to accomplish this; I don’t recall the exact details.  After the second operation, though, radiation had to be delayed to allow time for her to heal.

In the tense days which followed, I found myself pacing the hall outside her room, grabbing one nurse after another, pulling them into the room to show them unchanged linen, unemptied waste baskets, and discarded piles of examining gloves and bandages.  I accused them of incompetence and, worse, unconcern.

After a half day of watching me try to bully the staff into delivering better care, my mother pulled my hand and settled me in the chair beside her bed.  She rubbed my fingers between her two cold hands and patted my cheek.  I expected her to thank me for my diligence.  Instead, she said, in the gentlest of tones, “Even cancer is no excuse for rudeness.”

On 21 August 2014, my mother will have been dead for 29 years.  On 05 September 2014, I will officially be older than my mother ever got to be.  I miss her; I miss her; I love her so much, still.  But I keep a part of  her with me that never dies.   I hope someday that I will hear someone observe that I remind them of my mother.  When that happens, I will know that I indeed have honored her memory.

Lucille Johanna Lyons Corley and yours truly, at the Bissell House, c. 1971.