Some History

My mother was born Marion Malone Hunter on May 19, 1926 in Charlotte, NC (LOL – now people will know how old you were, Mother! J).  My mother’s family was always big on family names, so she was named for her mother.  That unfortunate tradition was carried forward when I was born.  By then my mother was Marion Hunter Moore.  In discussing names with my father for their first child, she wanted to name the baby after my father had I been a boy.  William John Moore, Jr.  They had chosen Margaret for a girl.  Daddy wasn’t fond of juniors.  He knew Mother didn’t much care for her first name, so he thought he could avert that by saying he would agree to William John Moore, Jr. if she agreed to name a girl Marion Hunter Moore.  Shockingly, and disappointingly for me, she agreed.  She did change the spelling to Marian, hoping to spare me the curse of being thought of as male.  Unfortunately for me, the most common spelling of my name by those who either don’t think or don’t ask is Marion.  L

Anyway, Mother was born into an upper middle class family.  She was the oldest of three girls – her younger sisters were Amelia Ann, shortened to Mee Ann, and Sara.  They lived in the well-to-do neighborhood of Myers Park in Charlotte, a neighborhood full of large homes with big yards and quiet tree-lined streets.

She went off to college at WC – Women’s College.  Actually the Women’s College of the University of North Carolina.  I guess in those days women didn’t go to UNC.  She got her teaching degree and then moved back home and taught school.  She told me once that first graders were the best group to teach because they always loved the teacher.  I rolled my eyes at that because all that said to me was that she needed to be liked and put up on a pedestal.  Years later, I realized that it was not that at all, but it was the fact that younger children are happy to be in school and usually less problematic or prone to be troublemakers.

In pictures I saw of my mother in her high school and college yearbooks, she looked like a girl who wasn’t very fashion conscious and didn’t much care.  Her clothes looked kind of dreary and unimaginative and her hair was always kind of mussed looking, like she perpetually needed to brush it.  And my guess is no makeup either.  So kind of dweeby.  She seemed to hang out with a large mixed crowd of friends, from what little she shared about her life.  The only thing I really remember her telling us about that time in her life was a trip with her friends.  They went out deep sea fishing and she caught a sailfish which was later mounted and displayed at the Charlotte Nature Museum.  I remember seeing it there and always being amazed that my mother had caught that.

My mother lived at home with her parents after college.  One of her many pronouncements for life was that women should live at home and not buy furniture until they got married.  Seriously?  What if I never got married??  But she was happy with that life – living in the center of her universe, Charlotte, and teaching first grade.  But she somehow got the bug for adventure.  Which led her to the year she spent in Europe while teaching school.

How fortunate for us that she decided to write a diary about her adventure.  She was not one to share a lot of her personal life.  I really don’t know why that was.  She didn’t tell us a lot about the non-travel parts of her year in Europe either, except that she had met Daddy there, so the diary was a window into what made Marion Malone Hunter more of a real person to me.  It was entertaining, it was sometimes a little embarrassing, it was surprising, and it was endearing.  One of my brothers said that she had been a little embarrassed about the diary, that she thought it made her seem silly.  And it did sometimes, but maybe she would have been glad to know that, to me, it made her seem like someone I would have liked to know.

How It Started

The call came around 12:30 AM, 4 days before Christmas 2003.  The ringing of the phone always seems more shrill somehow when it comes in the deep of night, when you’re sound asleep.  I woke up abruptly, my heart pounding.  I rolled over and grabbed the ringing phone, glancing at the caller ID.  It was my brother John.  It occurred to me that that probably wasn’t a good thing.

“Hello?”

“Hey Marian.”  A very brief pause.  “Mother’s gone.”

I could hardly breathe.  I was so overwhelmed that at first there were no tears.

Later I thought about that.  I remember when Paul told me Daddy had died.  At first there is the crushing pain, the overwhelming need to scream “NO”, the keening.  I would start to cry but at first it’s like a dry cry.  It almost feels like for a moment that you’re forcing it.  And then, finally, the tears come.  It’s always the same.  I guess it’s the shock, the surprise, the time it takes for what you see or hear to really reach your heart, which is what makes the tears come.

I really shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was.  My mother had had health problems for over five years.  The last 6 months she had been diagnosed with vasculitis and complete renal failure, so she was on dialysis 3 days a week.  She had changed during those last 6 months.  I’m sure some of it was the dialysis, which she hated, and some of it was just her body finally wearing out.  But she was no longer present in her life, which was a distressing thing to witness.  Even for me.

My mother and I had a difficult relationship.  I don’t remember when it started exactly, but I don’t know that I felt like I ever truly satisfied her.  I didn’t want to be a teacher or a nurse, which she thought were the appropriate jobs for a woman.  I didn’t want to live at home until I was married, like she did.  I was inclusive, where she was not, and she couldn’t understand why that mattered to me.  I always said that my mother didn’t “get me” and she didn’t.  Ever.  But I did know that she loved me and I loved her back.  So losing her, even though I knew she was ready, was hard.

Getting through the next few days seemed surreal.  We had been through this when my father died, but that had been almost 15 years earlier.  We followed the same basic outline – receiving family and friends at the funeral home, followed by a church funeral in Atlanta, then driving to Charlotte for the burial.  The graveside service and then the burial.  To do all this surrounded by the lights and joy of Christmastime seemed wrong somehow. 

I had lost my enjoyment of Christmas after my father died.  The last Christmas he was alive, I had spent very little time with him.  All due to my ex.  Instead of Christmas dinner with my family and then seeing them on Christmas Day, we spent most of the holiday with the ex’s family and spent a total of about an hour and a half with my family.  Although I didn’t know then it would be Daddy’s last Christmas, he was sick and I knew that and I also knew that it didn’t feel right to treat them as though they were second class.  In any case, although I never allowed that to happen again, it still wasn’t the same.

And now this.  The burial was on Christmas Eve.  I knew I would never think of Christmas the same way again.  My brothers wanted to ensure that Christmas was the same for the little boys, my mother’s grandsons.  They were young enough to not fully understand that Grandma was gone and they still were focused on Santa and their presents.

Christmas Day was not as bad as I’d feared, but I think we were all still a little numb.  It was odd not to have Mother there.  I got sick that day, so not only was I sad, but I felt like shit.  It was a tough day.

I thought later about the fact that, once again, we really didn’t have a lot of the memories of my parents.  There weren’t lots of pictures of them, especially in the later years.  My mother, in particular, hated to have her picture taken and would get kind of wild about it.  We had not taken the time to record in any real fashion memories and stories.  We have always tried to talk about Daddy in story terms, to remember those things, but it seemed depressing to think that all the history, all the stories, all the memories would be gone before long.

And then the diary appeared.

I don’t know if we knew the diary existed.  We, of course, knew that Mother had spent a year in Germany teaching school, that she had traveled all over Europe that year, and that she had met Daddy while she was there.  We had seen the slides she took of her travels.  I always loved looking at them, but quite honestly, the only one I remember is the one where she was on the camel in Egypt.

When Mother moved out of her house into the retirement apartment, we divvied up furniture she wasn’t taking.  My brother George got this small chest of drawers that was in the foyer.  It had all the pictures that had been taken over the years in it, so he got those as well.  But what we didn’t realize was in there was the diary.  Maybe Mother forgot it was there.  I feel sure that had she remembered, she would have done something to hide it.  Because that diary was a window into her soul and her heart.  It gave a picture of her that she had worked diligently to wipe away.

My mother, I have come to realize, worked very hard to delete anything bad in her past, anything that she thought would embarrass her or show that she had been anything but perfect.  I don’t know if she wanted us, her children, to think she was perfect or if she just didn’t want us knowing about anything that would have made her more human, but she whitewashed her past.  If you had asked me, I would have told you that this was a rare human being (said with great sarcasm), who made all A’s in school, never misbehaved, never did anything wrong, and was prim and proper her entire life.  The perfect Southern lady.

Ha!