our mother: a eulogy
Our
mother, Lorna Mary Casper Messerli, was born near the beginning of another
century, in 1925, the daughter of farmer Tobe Casper and his wife Anna Fahrni.
For most of her life—except for a brief period of time when my father, John,
was serving in the Air Force in World War II, when she taught in a one-room
schoolhouse—our Mother worked, like so many others of her generation, as a
housewife, raising her children and, particularly in my mother’s case,
endlessly cleaning her house. She was a decent cook and a truly wonderful
baker, particularly when it came to pies and cakes, serving up regularly my
father and brother’s favorites, apple and cherry, my sister Pat’s favorite,
raisin, and, occasionally, my own favorites, chocolate and rhubarb.
When we were all very young, living in
Newhall, my parents, and particularly my mother, loved the wild rhubarb that grew
in our yard, both of them devastated when the later owners chopped it all down
because they thought it was some of kind of weed. Our mother knew plants, and
pointed them out to us with their incredible names such as “preacher-in-the-pulpit,”
(also known as “Jack-in-the-pulpit”), “lily of the valley,” which she planted,
“morning creepers,” and many others.
She loved our father and the three of us,
and we grew up, looking back, rather happily, despite the normal family
differences that all of us share. In short, one might easily declare that our
mother lived a quite ordinary life.
That is not to say that our life, first
in the small town of Newhall, later here in Marion, and later still in numerous
other towns in the Mid-West, was totally Edenic—although, at times it might
have seemed so—or even completely placid.
Despite a completely devoted spouse and
three reasonably “good” kids, my mother seemed, underneath her commitment to
family and house, somewhat dissatisfied, which she quite often expressed to her
entire family. When one of us became sick—my brother Dave suffered severe
eczema as a child, with a number of food restrictions (milk, wheat, certain
fruits, etc.) and I was prone to bronchitis and terrible, hacking coughs, the
former of which occasionally put me into fevers from which I might end up on
the bathroom floor—it was our father who came to the rescue. Certainly, our
mother helped to nurse us to health; but it was as if she determined that any
illness we suffered was a normal thing. She’d take care of it in the morning.
Besides, she seemed to know we’d eventually grow out of these childhood infirmities,
as we did.
And then, although she guided us
beautifully through the moral values she shared with our father, she was not
always patient with our minor household deviations, scolding us almost nightly
for not properly hanging up our clothes or cleaning up the bathroom sink
or….well anything that might have altered her endless attempts for the absolute
order she sought. She was a proud spokesman for an orderly life.
I always explained this behavior to
myself by realizing that our mother, after the death of her own mother soon
after bearing uncle Duane (the death was caused by cancer, not child-birth),
had already helped in raising another family, particularly the new boy brother,
upon whom she always doted. I remember him briefly living with us in a trailer
house even after I was born.
With her sister Carol, Lorna had to take
over many of the household duties on the farm. Certainly, my grandfather Tobe
temporarily brought in other relatives to help; and some of our mother’s eldest
siblings were shipped out to the houses of other aunts to lessen the burden. My
uncle Don, for example, lived for a brief period of time with my great-aunt
Katie.
Yet, the true caring and cleaning of that
farmhouse fell to our mother and her younger sister. That was the way of it
back then, in the middle of the Great Depression. Young girls became de facto mothers.
I think that by the time she had birthed
her own three children, she was perhaps a little tired, maybe even depressed
about the fact that almost her entire life had been devoted to being a
“mother,” her childhood basically stolen away.
She didn’t resent us or love us any less,
she was simply a bit disappointed by the shape of things, so it seemed. And it
didn’t help that, spending most of her days locked away in the house, or
shopping for food, or designing the look of each of the rooms, that she had
lost some of her social skills. Early on, and continuedly throughout her life,
she was very involved in the PEO, church activities (she served as both an
elder and a deacon); but later on, I recall a moment, when after years of
speaking before church groups, she suddenly panicked and could no longer
continue her talk.
My father, first as a coach, later as a
Principal of Schools, and finally as a Superintendent of Schools and a regional
Educational Administrator, was remarkably social and was required to spend many
of his nights attending school-sponsored events. Besides, he loved sports in a
way that our mother never really had. She spent many of those evenings alone,
since Dave and Pat shared many of his interests, and joined him in his nightly
forays.
Not being a sports-lover myself, I spent
some of those evenings with her; but I can’t say I was a truly caring son. As
the eldest, I had moved on to my own personal interests, literature, theater,
writing: things she didn’t quite comprehend. We did watch numerous movies
together, dramatic soap-operas such as Bette Davis’ Dark Victory and Now, Voyager.
She loved these romantic dramas, and probably, in sharing them, encouraged me,
now as an older man, in my incessant writing about film.
Our father preferred TV Westerns, and
almost blushed to see any screen actors kiss. When I was young, before the
birth of either of my siblings, he and our mother would often take in a
drive-in movie.
As a two or three-year-old, I was taken
to see Oklahoma! and Carousel, for example, creating in me a
love of Broadway and film musicals. But, for the most part, our father could do
without movies.
We once drove the fairly long distance from
Newhall to Marion, where we would later live, to see White Christmas (another still-beloved musical), and, of course, we
saw Davy Crockett, The Ten Commandments, and Ben-Hur, like everyone else in those
days, as a family unit.
One morning, our Mother, who’d been out
the night before in one rare movie-going evening with my father, recounted to
me, frame by frame, every moment of the Rock Hudson and Doris Day comedy, Pillow Talk, skipping over, quite
obviously any of the secretly embedded references the writer and director had
planted in the plot about Hudson’s gay sexuality. I loved her for that; it was
almost as if she were a young girl again, giggling with joy, while so very
coherently telling me the story.
And there were other brief moments when
our Mother revealed that she had another deeper life within. I can’t say that
Dave or Pat might agree with this, but there were moments when my mother, our
Mother, particularly with relatives and sometimes with closer friends, was
actually brilliantly witty. A bright look would suddenly come into her eyes,
and out would pop a quite stunning observation or even a joke, so different, by
far, from her later, somewhat absurd conversations. In my old age, I no longer
am able, alas, to recall any of these Dorothy Parker moments, except one. When
Howard once asked her “should Douglas dye is hair,” she looked over at me and
quipped: “Wouldn’t hurt.”
Increasingly in her later life, lived
outside of the social community, my mother would presume that every daily
experience of her life was shared by others, so that she might interpolate an
event she had witnessed on a TV wildlife show, for example, into the middle of
normal conversations, believing that others might easily comprehend her sudden
comments such as: “You know, a giraffe can kill with his kick you if you get
close enough.” Just ask Pat’s husband, Scott!
And then, despite the seeming normality of
her life, she and our father didn’t precisely, when it came to their living
quarters, live an everyday life. My father used to like to believe that he and
our Mother, both half-Swiss, were of Italian-Swiss extraction (after all, he’d
served in Naples during the war). We’re not! Both the Messerlis and the Farnis
were German-Swiss of the Bern canton. But I might suspect that my parents had a
bit of the Roma-Swiss in them, given the almost gypsy-like life our family led.
Several times she told me stories of gypsies visiting the Casper farm.
You can understand our Mother’s demand
for order a bit better if you recognize that, just since I was born in 1947, we
must have lived in at least 13 houses—and as Dave and Pat can tell, there were
more to come. Yes, I remember a trailer, but there was also a Ventura (near
Clear Lake, Iowa) apartment. Then an apartment across from the park in Newhall,
before we moved into a rented house near the town’s dairy (towns had dairies in
those days), and finally into a newly-built house (with an oak-lined linen
closet) in what, if you stretch your imagination, was the new suburban area of
the town of about 500 citizens.
On to Marion, where we rented a house
for a short while before moving to a perfectly-defined suburban tract home at
1130 Northview Drive, with a kitchen lined, to my mother’s absolute delight,
with St. Charles metal cabinets (they come in beautiful pastels: I think ours
were avocado).
Then on we pushed to a new, split-level
house nearby built by the same designer Fashion-Par, a lovely edifice where we
lived for most of my high-school years, before I went off to Norway and my
parents moved to Waukesha, Wisconsin into an even-more commodious split-level,
whose basement, where I had determined to reside, was covered with wood-lined
walls. I left home that year for the University of Wisconsin; but that didn’t
stop my parents, Dave, and Pat from moving on, I believe first to a home in Cedar
Rapids, then on to my parents’ birthplace, Monticello, where my father was
asked to become Superintendent of Schools, and on again to Faribault,
Minnesota, and then, in a complete transformation of living quarters, a motel
outside of Minneapolis.
Before I get into the details of that
series of events, let me just add that my mother, devoted to her many smaller
and larger possessions which she always wrapped up personally into boxes, and
watched the furniture with a true hawk-eye being loaded onto trucks to be
shipped back to Marion, to another house on the west side of the city before
moving yet again to a new house on the east end of the town. Is it any wonder
that John, late in his life, moved into real estate?
Besides all of these moves, our mother
participated in at least two of Pat’s moves, one from near Los Angeles to
Austin, Texas and then from Austin back to Boone, Iowa. And I’ve forgotten the
moves my father and she made to two different houses in Marion, when they
finally returned “home.” Even
if she were the inveterate packer that she had to be, she must have been
exhausted by the end of her life, when she determined to move, yet again, into
an assisted nursing home.
And then, there was that brief period of
time when our Mother and Father determined to run a motel. Overpaying in the
first place and signing a contract with outrageous balloon payments, it was
doomed from the start. And my father, soon realizing the facts, went into deep
depression. Our Mother, on the other hand, ran the hotel like a natural
business woman, organizing legions of maids and others to daily clean and help
to manage the place. She, herself, helped make beds, clean sinks, and showers.
She managed the accounts (as she had almost all her life), and paid the bills
on time, to the best of their ability.
But she also recognized something was
wrong with our father. As she suddenly rose to the task, becoming a strong
businesswoman who, if nothing else, would have ridden their bad investment into
the sunset, my father was abandoning his identity, telling perfect strangers
how he was slowly losing his mind.
Of course, she called on Dave and Pat, and
then, from the far-away Washington, D.C., on me. Would I come and help Dad
clean the swimming pool? What experience might I have ever offered for that
impossible task?
I
arrived to see a man I’d never met before; he even lost his way from airport to
the motel.
He was more than depressed. Despite her
severe worries, however, she seemed almost triumphal. She had found the self
that her housewife duties had never allowed her to be. If she was exhausted,
she was, nonetheless, remarkably capable, totally in control, despite her deep
worries about her husband. Both of them were under such duress, desperate to
tell their tales, that I asked to meet them in separate rooms, trying to
determine how to help each of them, but knowing also that our mother’s
resurgence into life was surely doomed.
A few months after I left, our mother and
father left the motel, returning to Marion, the only thing they could have
sanely done, given the situation. A judge later found that, indeed, these
lovely innocents had been swindled, and settled in their favor.
Our mother returned to the role which, evidently,
she had been destined to play. She lovingly babysat family members. She relaxed
to her role as a grandma and, later, a great grand-mother. And, I think she
had, at least, glimpsed her potentiality. She became calmer in her daily role,
less critical, maybe a little bit less unhappy with her lot in life. She’d come
through, recognizing, I believe, her real talents.
Two images of her, one from very late and
one from my early childhood haunt me still today, and reveal her amazing gifts
as a mother and a lover.
When I had come to care for our father,
now irascible and fully aware he was dying, I saw a man angry with the world.
More importantly, he was in deep pain, in the very last days of his life. Our
mother, was exhausted from caring for him, and I needed to take over. She was
relieved, and could now try to imagine where her life might now take her. She
talked with friends who visited; for the first time in years she might get a
full night’s sleep.
I watched over him, making sure that he
got the regular pills (probably opioids) that would relieve his pain—and surely
hurry along his death. One night, he was restless, and who wouldn’t be, lying
day and night for weeks upon a bed?
Our mother came into bedroom (she had now
been sleeping nightly on a reclining chair in the living room) and immediately
perceived his discomfort. “You want to sit up for a moment?” she quickly
responded. Yes, he wanted to sit up, just for a moment, at the side of the bed.
And he smiled in the pleasure of it.
Then, falling back into the bed, he whinnied
again in pain. Our mother, in front of me, lay down on the other side of the
bed and suggested that they roll, and together they did. “Let’s roll, let’s
roll across the bed, okay?” And so they did, from left to right and right to
left like the author James Joyce’s loving couple in Ulysses, Leopold Bloom and his sensuous wife Molly. They rolled
back and forth across the bed until John fell back to sleep again.
When
I was a child of about four or five, I recall being in the yard with our
Mother, she hanging clothes upon the line. I was already a problematic child, I
suppose, insisting that I was bored. “There’s nothing to do,” I proclaimed.
My mother took a clothespin out of her
mouth and suggested, “Why don’t you start collecting shells?”
Even at five I was flabbergasted!
“Shells!” I thought to myself, and then opening my words up to mother, “Who can
collect shells in a state that has no large lakes, no sea?” You might as well
suggest that I begin a collection of African insects.
Gracefully, my mother bent down to the
ground, bringing up one of the most beautiful snail shells I’d ever (and in my
imagination have still have ever seen).
“Here,” she said. “This is the
beginning.”
A few days later, our nice elderly
neighbors in Newhall, received a huge shipment of sand, which, they proclaimed
they were using for their creating of soap. “Might I wish to come play in the
sand,” asked Mrs. Gertson, “before we begin to use it?”
Even as a child, I wondered how sand
could become an element in making soap; and, moreover, I was not the kind of child who liked playing
in sand. But, I was bored, and took their offer, bringing out a little shovel
which I don’t remember previously having, and digging into what they described
as river sand.
Suddenly I uncovered glorious seashells,
a “Paper Fig,” an “Alphabet Cone,” a “Nutmeg,” a “Branded Tulip” in the midst
of this otherwise very ordinary pile of river debris.
Taking my treasures into Mrs. Gertson’s
kitchen, I expressed my total wonderment. “No,” I declared, “this can’t be from
the river!”
“I can’t believe what I’m seeing,” insisted
the kindly neighbor lady, “pinch me!”
I don’t think I took up the offer, but
suddenly—or maybe only now—I realize my mother, our mother was behind this. My uncle Bob soon sent shells from the
West Coast (after the funeral, Bob told me that he has no memory of ever
sending me shells; probably another invention of my mother’s love), and I now
had an entire box of these treasures.
Maybe our mother, I now finally
recognize, was not such a very ordinary woman. Perhaps she was an incredible
figure living inside of the shell of what seemed like such a predictable life.
Los Angeles,
October 24, 2017
This was spoken, in a much reduced form, as a eulogy for my mother's funeral on Saturday on January 13, 2018
