Words about my mom

She was born into an Italian-American family in Brooklyn, the middle daughter.

Her grandparents lived with her family. Her grandmother made and cut pasta for the family. Her grandfather had kidney stones and drank distilled water.

As a girl, she walked to the Boro Park branch of the Brooklyn Public Library on Saturday mornings. She was, always, a non-stop reader, until she could no longer read. As an adult, she liked cozy mysteries.

When she was very young, her father once took her along to show her his difficult, industrial-area postal route. She remembered standing on a table — it must have been in a workplace — and people giving her money.

During World War II, she, her mother, and her grandmother all did “homework”: carding bobby pins.

When World War II ended, the blocks of her Brooklyn neighborhood closed down, and each block had a party. Her mother took her from block to block to see.

Her family lived by a daily menu, everything homemade:

Monday: chicken soup

Tuesday: escarole soup, chicken croquettes, ground by hand

Wednesday: meatloaf

Thursday: macaroni (i.e., pasta) and meatballs

Friday: fish

Saturday: pizza for lunch, steak and potatoes and vegetables for dinner

Sunday: chicken for lunch, cold cuts for dinner while listening to The Shadow

As she acknowledged late in life, she never liked to cook.

But she liked folding laundry.

She skipped the eighth grade. In her all-girls high school she was a Latin ace, an accounting and stenography whiz, the class vice president one year, the class president another.

In a different world, a guidance counselor would have pointed her to college. Instead, she went to work, taking two trains to midtown Manhattan.

She started in the secretarial pool at General Mills before becoming the secretary to the president (or was it a vice president?). When General Mills moved to Connecticut, she took a position as an executive secretary at American Cyanamid.

Was it like Mad Men? No, the men were all gentlemen.

She sometimes said she would have liked to have been a teacher. (She was.)

She and the man who would become her husband first met on the boardwalk at Coney Island.

When they were both working in Manhattan, they would meet for lunch at a Schrafft’s, she walking from Rockefeller Center, he from an office building on E. 40th Street. (Tile work came later.)

In the eyes of his Irish-American parents, this relationship was something close to (so-called) miscegenation. The hell with them.

She left office life for family life with her husband and, within four years, two sons.

She colored perfectly: with an even stroke, between the lines.

She typed my papers when I was college. I can’t imagine that I asked her to. I think that she must have offered.

She was a model of attention and concern. You couldn’t get away with the slightest cough or sniffle without an inquiry about your well-being.

She was a great consoler.

She was an astute judge of character.

She liked to tell us to bundle up. Bundle up!

“You did good!” That was a joke: she knew that well was correct, but that’s what she said. Maybe it was something her mother or father had said to her. Whenever I gave an exam, I would say to my students, “As my mom and I like to say, do good! And if you can’t do good, do well.”

She was the light of a cardiac rehab group, Cardiac Kids, men, all gentlemen, who adored her.

As she and my dad grew older, they became something of a mutual-aid society, each doing for the other in whatever ways necessary: teamwork.

They lived in the same apartment for forty-seven years, and she lived there alone for another five. There could never be any thought of leaving it.

After my dad died in 2015, her world became much darker — literally. She’d keep the lights off as much as possible.

She was a dedicated crossword solver. When the daily puzzle became too much for her, I made simple mini-crosswords on index cards and sent them in the mail.

She was a dedicated walker: up to 13th Avenue to shop in Brooklyn, around a park oval in New Jersey.

For many years, my brother managed many things for her, to a greater extent than I understood.

When it became unavoidably clear that she could not live safely on her own, she, who had always refused to consider moving, agreed to let us find her a place in Illinois. She went through every kind of late-stage residence: assisted living, then memory care, then skilled nursing and hospice.

For some time, she was able to dodge the questions that check for dementia. Doctor: “Do you know where are you?” Mom: “I’m right here with you.”

Illinois doctors and nurses and CNAs loved her New York accent.

Nurses and CNAs loved her compliments. “You look pretty jazzy.”

Jazz itself made her nervous, but she loved Billy Strayhorn’s “Lotus Blossom.”

In assisted living and memory care, she always made sure to carry her pocketbook when leaving her apartment. Her walker? Not so much.

In assisted living and memory care, she always accessorized with a little scarf. In skilled nursing and hospice, she occasionally did.

She made pasta from scratch with us at the age of eighty-eight. The first time for us, the first time for her. Remember: her grandmother had been in charge of the pasta.

She ate Thai food (minus the heat) for the first time at the same age. “Pretty good!”

She always enjoyed crab cakes.

She delighted in seeing her family and always recognized us, even when our names were gone. The fact that she had three great-granddaughters was always wonderful new news. Meeting the kiddos in person was more wonderful.

In memory care, a rumor started that she had dated Frank Sinatra. The rumor followed her to the nursing home. Did it begin with her, or with an employee? I reluctantly squelched it, in both places.

In the nursing home, her requests for vanilla ice cream (always vanilla) started a fad among the residents. The kitchen quickly ran out of ice cream.

She was always attentive to weather. And when she had the words, she was a hyperbolist of weather. The wind is enough to knock you down. It’s absolutely blazing. It’s so cold I thought I was going to freeze.

She never caught COVID.

She brightened up when talking on the phone, which seemed easier for her than talking in person. “It was lovely talking with you,” she said one time. That was something her husband always said on the phone. She smiled to hear her sister’s voice and my brother’s voice.

In the last few weeks she developed what’s called terminal lucidity: greater cognitive clarity that sometimes mysteriously appears when a person with dementia is nearing the end. Several weeks ago she greeted me with “This is terrible. I have to get out of here.” But I assured her that the people working there were helping her. They were.

She always liked to tell us to take care. My last words to her, on the morning of the day before she died, were “Take care.” And her last word to me was “Yes.”

[Louise Leddy (1932–2025).]

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Elaine has also written something: Louise.

[The version of “Lotus Blossom” I’ve linked to is music of mourning: Duke Ellington at the piano after the death of Billy Strayhorn.]