At 12:20 AM this Sunday morning, the dreaded midnight call finally arrived. I had known it was only a matter of time, but it was a gut-punch nonetheless. When I picked up the phone, I knew it was Delia from Casa Nostra, and I knew what she was going to say. The news was final. “Your mother just died.” I was literally struck dumb. A good minute passed before I could really reply. I asked some questions about details, and then said I’d call her back the next day.
No, this wasn’t surprising, even if it was sad. My mother had been in decline for the past couple of years, slowly migrating from talking incessantly about her teenage years in Copenhagen, to barely talking, finally only answering questions (“How do you feel?,” “Are you comfortable?,” etc.), and then barely even that. When I saw her at Christmas, she couldn’t say my name, though she said she remembered who I was. At the end of March, I drove to Ajijic, and she was even less responsive. A few days ago, Casa Nostra messaged me to ask if they could treat her for a urinary infection. “Of course,” I said. This had been one of the banes of my mother’s last few years, not uncommon in elderly women.
Saturday night, she just stopped breathing.
She was about six weeks short of 94 years old, and had lived a good, long life.
My mother Bente was born in 1930 in Copenhagen, the youngest of four children, and the last of her surviving siblings. A sepia tinted photo of her babyhood shows her rocking back and forth in a giant steel bowl, with a smile on her little face. Just shy of her tenth birthday, Germany invaded Denmark, and my mother spent her formative years under the German occupation of WWII. Because the Germans also occupied the schools for the children of German soldiers, Danish children had to go to school in shifts: girls in the morning; boys in the afternoon. Thus she met my father, who suddenly found himself at her school after the Germans booted him from his. They shared a desk and left furtive notes for each other, eventually marrying in 1952.
Life in post-war Denmark with my father was an adventure. My dad owned a rattletrap Harley Davidson, held together with baling wire and fueled by turpentine due to the wartime restrictions on gasoline. This motorcycle was an adventure in unanticipated ways. Because it was never designed to run on turpentine, it could be a little cantankerous when you wanted to start it. Sometimes it went and sometimes not. When it would go, my father and mother roared around Denmark, camping, fishing, sightseeing, and doing other things that I, their son, will never learn, all the while smoking cigarettes at highway speeds, leaving a tobacco-and-turpentine smoke-trail in their noisy wake.
In a bid for further adventure, in 1958 she and my father emigrated to California, where the only people they knew were my mother’s aunt, “Moster Maggie,” and her husband, Karl, who had emigrated to San Francisco in the 1920s. Karl and Moster Maggie sponsored my folks, and how they got the sponsorship was a story of its own. Moster Maggie and Karl had visited Denmark some time in the earlier 50s, and Karl was impressed with my ever-handy father, who had managed to fix Karl’s expensive, and now broken-down camera. Karl said that if he and my mother ever wanted to emigrate, that he’d be happy to help. After arriving in California, both quickly found work in the American boom years. I was born a few years later.
Starting out, my mother had a couple of short-term jobs including a couple years as a letter carrier. Her secret weapon in faithfully delivering the US mails? Making friends with people’s dogs. She was always an animal lover, and we had many cats and dogs, and even a horse and some chickens over the years. Later she got a job with The Stanford Press, where she started as a keypunch operator, and later a computer operator. At least those were her official (and in the ’60s, kind-of-impressive) job titles. In reality it was a bookkeeping/accounting position, something my mother was very good at. She worked there until she retired in 1992.
My mother loved her new country and was fascinated with its history and culture. She brought home endless scholarly books on American History, Native Americans, and an often-used copy of “Your Rugged Constitution,” a perk of her job at the Stanford press. She had Native American jewelry, turquoise, and we had an original Navajo table runner for our dining table while I was growing up. She adored westerns, a very popular category of film and TV when I was a child, and we seldom missed episodes of Gunsmoke, Big Valley, and the like. When my grandmother visited from Denmark, it might as well have been a Western Movie festival. They were both enraptured.
Mom also loved American music, especially folk or blues. Ray Charles, Johnny Cash, Otis Redding, and many others provided the soundtrack to my youth. I particularly remember that she bought a 45 of “Ode to Billy Joe,” the sad tale of Mississipi Delta suicide. And she nearly made me run away from home with Don McLean’s “American Pie,” she played it so many times. I’m listening to Johnny Cash and Ray Charles as I write this, tears running down my cheeks.
In 1966 she renounced her Danish citizenship and became an American citizen, which she proudly announced to me when she got her citizenship papers.
My mother wasn’t a mere consumer of the arts, but a producer too. She learned to play the guitar, and would play American folk music and sing along. She got good enough that she even spent a year or two giving lessons to various neighbors. She tried to teach me too, but honestly, at the time my hand was too small to wrap around the guitar neck, and my fingers were practically cut by the hard steel strings.
Music wasn’t her only creative talent. She made so many things with her hands. When I was a little kid, she used to take pottery classes at night, and our house was filled with her vases, ash trays, dishes, and many other things she made those years. She made so many ash trays, she had to give them away. For a while I thought the American Cancer Society was going to show up with an injunction, but it fortunately never happened.
As I grew older, she learned to paint canvases, and made quite a few very nice paintings. And no Danish lady of her era didn’t embroider. When we flew to Denmark in 1973 to see her very ill father in the hospital, we also stocked up on a lifetime supply of embroidery patterns, linen, floss, and the like. Seriously: there are still-unfinished projects in my attic in Boston. Mom’s embroidery was so perfect, so excellent that once one of her coworkers somewhat enviously exclaimed to me, “The back of your mother’s work looks just as pretty as the front.” She also sewed, and made many of her own clothes, and when I was a boy, made me shirts too.
Knitting? Did I mention knitting? She made all kinds of sweaters, but not the easy ones. Nope. Irish cable knit sweaters, elaborate skirts, and other complicated things. She was also a great baker, famous for her Danish butter cookies, and lemon merengue pie which she would make for Thanksgiving and Christmas. While other kids’ mothers were making one-egg cake mixes, homemade rum cake was a staple dessert of my childhood.
After she and my father divorced in the early sixties, she ran the house and did everything. She even changed the oil on our VW bug on her own, and managed various repairs to the house itself. She never shied away from challenges, and she never complained.
Around 1974 the workers at Stanford University went on strike. During this effort, she met Breck who worked in another department at Stanford, and who was to later become my stepfather and her second partner. A few years later, Breck came to live with us, and a few years after that they bought a fixer-upper house in East Palo Alto, much closer to work than where we lived on King’s Mountain in rural San Mateo County. Together they took a disaster of a house and made it a beautiful home where we all spent many happy years. Fortunately for mom, Breck was just as handy as my father, and he lifted the burden of car maintenance, house repairs, and took a hand in raising the rambunctious, young Kim.
After retiring, she and Breck moved to Redding, CA, where they bought a brand-new house, and then spent the next 20 years building an extra garage, upgrading the kitchen, installing a garden, garden paths, a gazebo, and generally making it a home, where she and Breck, and sometimes I spent many happy years.
As longtime readers know, on Christmas Eve of 2016, Breck died after a brief illness, and she was left on her own. Shortly thereafter we discovered she had breast cancer. We spent the next two years successfully battling that, and getting ready to move to Mexico. In January 2019, she started her next adventure when she moved to Casa Nostra in Ajijic, where she made many friends with the other residents.
Life in Casa Nostra was good for the first few years, but 2022 marked a turning point. In January she fractured a vertebra, which left her in great pain and confined to a wheelchair. The pain eventually left, but she remained wheelchair bound for the rest of her life. In February of that same year, she suffered a small stroke, which left her weak on her left side. Thus began a persistent decline in her health. Various stomach problems surfaced. An inoperable ulcer was diagnosed. Infections of various kinds began cropping up, perhaps most persistently and uncomfortably, urinary tract infections. These infections began to require stronger and stronger medicine, which also irritated her stomach. She began to eat less and less, and eventually had to be fed by one of the caregivers. The last two years were difficult.
I saw her at Christmas, but she was very withdrawn, and barely spoke. I just spent time holding her hand. In March, I went back to see her again, but there was even less conversation. Again, I held her hand, but there wasn’t much to say. So when the call finally came, it was a mixture of sadness and relief. The last two years were no way to live, unable to do any of the things she once loved.
Thank you mom. You were a wonderful mother, a wonderful person, and I will always love you. I’m crying as I write this and I truly hope you are in a better place.
El Gringo Suelto 