This story is actually true. Well, there is one lie, but maybe I’ll come back to that later. You might wish the story wasn’t true. We don’t like hard things. We want rainbows and heroes and unicorns. Ok, sometimes we want car chases and buildings blown up, but only if the good guys survive. In this story, the bad guy wins.
I hate those stories, and I hate this one. But, it's the story I’m telling today.
I went to a small liberal arts college in Anderson, Indiana. This was when it was a college, not a university, like it is now. This was back when everyone was amazed that one of the guys on my dorm floor had a computer on his desk. His name was Simon, but it doesn’t matter to this story. He was from some Asian country, but that doesn’t matter either. And why would you want a computer?
My experience with computers at that point was the Radio Shack TRS 80. Imagine an old timey black and white TV with a keyboard. It’s memory was actually on a tape cassette. My mother brought it home from the school where she taught. She was a mathematician who was relegated to teaching junior high math at the archrival school across the county. Do you remember Ryan White? She was his teacher before he was diagnosed with AIDS. And after. Ryan was a hemophiliac who contracted AIDS during a blood transfusion and was prone to nosebleeds. Mom was prone to helping clean him up his blood and tears at the water fountain.
After his diagnosis, and after America realized that people with AIDS were to be hated and feared, Ryan wasn’t allowed back at school. Mom would videotape her classes and drop by his house everyday to pick and drop off the daily tape along with his homework. It wasn’t a big deal at first, but then the protestors started showing up. They didn’t just want Ryan out of school, they wanted him out of the neighborhood. Out of town. They had signs with messages from God, and there were signs about Ryan being a fag on his way to hell. But mom drove through them every day. She ignored the jeers and the yelling because he was her student. She was his teacher.
So, that TRS 80. Mom taught me some basic coding, and after a couple of hours, I was able to get the computer to calculate that 2+2=4. So why would anyone want one on their desk? That was back when computers were only as smart as we made them. Now I feel like they roll their eyes at me when I Google how to spell “calendar” for the 214th time because for some reason I can never remember. They probably all talk about us behind our backs while we sleep. But this made Simon popular and everyone wanted to be his friend. I didn’t. But none of that matters.
Before mom taught me that basic coding, and while she was working on her mathematics degree, she was working part time at the university hospital. She did post mortem x-rays for the coroner. Was that a job that was advertised? Who would respond to that? I don’t know. But one day, she and her coworkers watched out the back door as a tornado ripped through the city. They watched it destroy a factory just a few hundred yards away. The hospital, now without power, soon filled with victims. Mom was grabbed by a nurse and whisked into a storage room. The storage room was now for all of the people that were dead on arrival or died shortly after arriving. A lot of people for mom to x-ray later on, I guess.
But also in this room was a baby, alive, inside her mother, who was not. A doctor arrived to cut the mother open, and mom was asked to hold the candle over the mom’s stomach to help illuminate the doctor’s way in and the baby’s way out. Five years later that same doctor brought me into the world. I was afforded the luxury of a room with lights and living people.
It took an hour before they took that mother to the makeshift morgue, a refrigerated truck donated by Wilson’s dairy. In that hour before they took her, mom sat with her, stroked her hair, and sang her lullabies. I guess when you are young and you hear stories like that about your parents, you don’t know what to think.
I still don’t.
I guess I always knew my mom was pretty tough. When I was young, before kindergarten, I had a sandbox about the size of a football field. Best I can remember it was a good mile’s journey from the back of the house. The sandbox was my kingdom. Upon those dunes, cowboys and Indians fought against WW2 army men. There were dinosaurs and jets, and one extra large Tonka truck. One day, while overseeing the advancement of my troops in a battle against the bad guys, I felt a presence behind me. When I turned my head and looked, there was a cow staring back at me. Not being one to let this kind of brazen incursion go unpunished, I raced to the garage and grabbed a croquet mallet. The one with yellow stripes, but that hardly matters. I returned and raised the weapon over my head. I realized then the cow was not alone, that the herd that had broken through the neighbor’s fence was advancing, flanking my troops from behind. A surprise attack. I raised that yellow striped croquet mallet over my head, but something inside of me was smart enough to cause me to drop it and run for my life.
What happened next, isn’t clear. All I can remember is that I was in the house, under the sofa, lifting up the sofa skirt, staring out the back double door. My mother had the croquet mallet with the yellow stripes, and she was driving the herd back through the fence. The invading rogue bovine army didn’t stand a chance. They didn’t seem to question her authority. Maybe it was the mallet. Maybe it was just my mom.
I told you that my mom was a mathematician, not just a math teacher. Every summer the governor sent a limo for her and took her away to Indianapolis for a week. “Math stuff”, was about the most she ever said when asked what she did down there. Years later, when she was retired, she continued to do that math stuff. She also taught my son how to play chess. She taught him in the 4th grade, and when he was in the 6th grade, he finished 45th in the expert division of the High School national championship
tournament in Dallas. I asked him about the tournament when he got back. He just wanted to talk about how great the pancakes were at the hotel.
One day, one of his friends called and asked for him. I told him that Eli, my son, was in the bath. “Well tell him I moved queen to rook 5.” So I went back to the bathroom and knocked on the door and said “Gordon moved his queen to rook 5.” There was a bit of a silence behind the door, and just as I was about to repeat the move, I heard him say “tell him knight to queen’s bishop 3.” Gordon heard it too, groaned and hung up.
I asked my mom why she didn’t teach me chess. She said she did. It just didn’t stick. Oh well.
One of my math professors asked me one day if I was related to Elizabeth Oyler. I guess she was at these secret governor’s math meetings, also. I said yes. Their facial expression all at once acknowledged their excitement to make that connection, while simultaneously recognizing that I didn’t inherit my mother’s math genes.
Eli ended up at Anderson, now Anderson University years later. Eli the chess player, also Eli the soccer player. You could see how his training in chess manifested itself on the soccer field. He wasn’t where the crowd was, he was where the ball was going to be next. He was thinking several moves ahead. It was at one of these soccer matches that our story finally comes to rest.
My parents came to almost every one of my children’s soccer matches. They traipsed the state, doing the same for my nieces in Goshen and Terre Haute. Somehow, they made them all. But we had graduated now, out of the folding chairs at the YMCA matches to the cold metal bleachers of the university field.
On this particular day, the opposing team was late. And my parents were always early. So, after sitting in the bleachers for quite some time, my mom headed for the restroom and then to the van to get a jacket. It had cooled down while waiting for the other team. Maybe if the team were on time, she wouldn’t have needed that jacket. Maybe if the team were on time, I wouldn’t be telling you this story.
As she went up the stairs, and got close to where we were all seated, she tripped. She didn’t miss by much, but her right toe just didn’t quite make it over the edge of the last step. She went down hard, and her head brushed the side of one of the metal bleacher seats, slicing across her brow line.
If you were a fan of professional wrestling, which I am not, you would know that back in the olden days, this is exactly where the wrestlers would cut each other, or themselves, for quite dramatic effect. Their faces would be covered in blood almost instantly, but they would close up quite quickly.
My mother’s face, too, was covered in blood almost immediately. But her wound didn’t close up quickly at all. It was too deep. And she was on a blood thinner. If you are squeamish at all, it’s time to turn away.
Holly, the mother of one of Eli’s teammates, jumped into action. “I’m a nurse,” she said. “I will take care of you.”
My mother remained where she fell, wedged between the stairs and the seats, not moving, just bleeding. “Don’t touch me,” mom said.
Napkins and towels and anything absorbent quickly came from the surrounding crowd. Holly tried again, but she got the same response.
“Don’t touch me.”
Now, I knew that my mom was tough. But none of us understood her resistance. She had ingrained in me that unless a bone was sticking out of your skin somewhere, you toughed it out and kept going. But this was a 70-year-old woman. And a bone was sticking out. It was her collarbone. And something just below the shoulder as well, but we couldn’t see it at the time. So, this seemed to be a good time to let go and let someone help.
In the coming weeks her entire left arm, shoulder and collarbone were replaced with metal parts, ironically made in Goshen at the company where my brother-in-law is the CFO. Before her surgery, she asked if she got a family discount or if maybe they could get parts from a clearance bin.
There was a crowd now, silent, but with one mother quietly praying nearby. Everyone was focused on the fountain of blood and my mother’s fierce resistance.
Holly tried again. “Please Betty. Please let me help you.”
“Don’t touch me,” mom said.
“Betty, please.”
“Don’t touch me. Don’t touch my blood.”
“But we have to make it stop.”
“Don’t touch my blood,” my mother said, now in tears.
“I have AIDS.”
It was as if the referee was waiting for that dramatic line to be uttered to start the match. Because as soon as she said it, he blew his whistle. That was good for a laugh a few months later.
It was also as if the EMT on hand waited for that moment to break through the crowd to help. I’m sure it wasn’t what he was expecting to find. Holly whispered to him, and in addition to the gloves he was wearing, he dug into his kit to pull out a mask and a protective yellow medical gown.
My mother lived for a couple of decades with this deadly virus. My dad knew. Her doctor did, but no one else outside of the medical facility.
Despite her recovering from the subsequent surgeries, that bleacher confession seemed to take the light out of her. It was like air slowly leaking from a bike tire over the winter in your garage. I told you that the bad guy won. Except, it wasn’t really a bad guy, just a bad virus. Six months after falling, six months of light slowly leaking, she quietly slipped away.
She should be here, now, enjoying the wave of endless great grandbabies that are happening in Goshen and Terre Haute, and now for Eli and his brother here in Anderson.
This woman, who braved tornados, held a candle over a dead woman to help life come out, who sang to that dead woman, who drove back an army of cows, who ignored the chants of protestors so one student wouldn’t be excluded or forgotten, was actually felled simply by helping that young man, wiping away his blood and tears, before the diagnosis, when maybe a small cut on her hand was enough to let the intruder in. Who knows.
There’s no moral here, no lesson to be learned.
Like I said. You might not like how this story ends. Neither do I. I miss my mom.
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