Mildred Ruth Henry

 When I remember Mom’s life there are certain traits and events that stand out as teachable moments or events, some of which are quite humorous.  There are many of these in Mom’s life but I will share a few poignant ones.    Mom began her adult life as an undergraduate at Keuka college, where she earned a Bachelor’s degree and made some lifelong friends.  We met one of these friends at a lake in upstate NY one year when I was in my early 30’s, where Mom and Elsie, her friend from Keuka, were showing some old pictures.  We don’t think of our parents as being young and crazy once, but I came across a picture of this woman who was smokin’ hot in a beret with skin tight jeans and boots and a bottle of booze in her hand ready to go out and party.  I remember being surprised at this picture and asking Elsie: “Wow, who is this hot looking babe?”  It was then I noticed Elsie laughing and Mom blushing red; the picture was Mom at about 20 years old.   Before any of us children were born my parents made friends with Norm and Jean Schwartz.  They would become, and still are, our family’s oldest friends, so much so that to this day we view each other as brothers and sister.  Jean was a nurse and helped Mom deliver me, her oldest son.  Between the two women, there would be first 4 boys, two each all close in age.  A number of years later Mom and Jean became pregnant around the same time and our youngest brother and their youngest sister were born within months of each other.  All of us grew up together and were very close.  Jean visited my Mom while she was dying and barely able to speak.  It was a great effort for her, with difficulty, to whisper even a word or two.  Jean reminisced with her of better times they both experienced when they were much younger and the extensive socializing and time the families and our parents spent with each other.  As Jean was leaving and Mom realized that she was seeing her best and oldest friend for the last time, with great effort Mom blurted out her final words to her closest friend “All my love to you Jean”.   My mother taught us to value our lives in every aspect of it, to prepare for your future with discipline, study hard, practice your music and sports, and do the best you can do.  While doing these things pay attention to people and treat them properly, and be sincere in getting to know them.  She also taught us to balance our lives, especially with our relationships with other people like family, friends, and neighbors.  When we were young children we had an Italian family living across the street. The woman was older than Mom and the other women, she was an immigrant from Italy, as was Mom’s grandfather, and didn’t really know a lot of people in this country.  Mom would regularly invite her and her niece, who lived next door and was around Mom’s age, over to socialize and cook, and not feel isolated.  I would watch them and learned to cook at an early age.  My brothers and I are all good cooks and often with no recipe required.  This skill comes in quite handy when you are a young adult on your own and tired of restaurants and fast food.  You remember what Mom taught, then go to the store, get the ingredients, and make something good.  One of Mom’s most enduring traits was her ability to empathize with other people, listen to them, and see through to their inner soul, appreciating them as unique individuals in their own right.  One very early example of this occurred in New York City, where my parents were living at the time and I was a baby.  A very famous comedian at the time had lost his baby in a terrible tragedy, the child drowned in his swimming pool and no one was there to see it.  The comedian was working a show at the time, and was so good at covering his shock and grief that he finished the show and the audience never knew until later that this tragedy had occurred during the show.  Shortly after, my parents were out with me and by chance bumped into this man in the street.  What happened next was typical of what could happen with Mom.  He looked at me and Mom readily identified with his grief.  She asked for no autograph or conversation.  She offered me for him to hold so he could assuage his intense grief for as long as he needed.  He took me in his arms for a pretty long time and grieved over his great loss.  With tears in his eyes he gave me back to Mom and thanked her very much for the opportunity to use me to say goodbye to his baby and grieve quietly and away from the spotlight.  Typical of Mom, she never spoke of this incident, I found out through Dad.  Which brings to mind another trait of Mom, keeping people’s confidence.  Many of these things are told about her by others who witnessed them.  At the end of her life Mom taught us how to continue to live, even through suffering, with as much dignity and perseverance as you could muster.  Eventually Mom would be bedridden, barely able to speak, and unable to feed herself or even move her arms or fingers enough to turn a page or push buttons on a phone or TV remote.  Even in this state, people came and spent time with Mom.  Not only family and friends but also people she had recently met.  Father Ed, the sisters at Sacred Heart, her nurse Cieta, and her former nurse Karen, all come to mind.  Cieta knew Mom from the assisted living place where she had lived prior to coming to the nursing home.  She helped arrange for Mom to live on the 3rd floor of the nursing home, where she was now the nurse and could look after Mom.  Probably most surprising is her former nurse, Karen, from the assisted living place.  Karen would visit every couple of weeks and spend quality time with Mom, even referring to her as Grandma, although there was no obligation on her part to do so, and Mom looked forward to those visits.  Several times Mom would wonder out loud “Why on earth does God keep me here?  I cannot possibly now be of any good to anyone.”  Nevertheless she did not curse or blame God, be short or angry with the nursing home staff, or engage in self-pity.  Her modesty was such that, knowing she was dying, she didn’t think a eulogy was necessary at her funeral.  Mom passed from this life on Christmas Eve 2017 to spend Christmas with Dad and our deceased relatives and friends.  Dad had waited 16 years for her to show up and now she has. She continued to live as she taught us. Live your life in a balanced fashion, don’t complain too much, be sure to appreciate others, treating them as you would like to be treated to the best of your ability to do so, appreciate the life you’ve been given as well as the life others have been given, and soldier on to the end. My brothers and I greatly loved our parents and have very fond memories, especially of our childhood.  We miss them both and hope that when we meet them again in the afterlife we will have lived as they taught us to the best of our ability to do so, that we don’t disappoint them, and like Mom, in spite of any suffering we may endure, we persevere, without undue complaint, to the end.