Mom

The YouTube video of my mom’s service. For an extraordinary video-within-a video, put together by my brother-in-law, 47:05.

My eulogy.

Mom

Mom took a memoir writing class from 2009 until 2011, and excerpts from her stories are in this eulogy. What better way to convey her life than through her own words?

I was born in Silverton Colorado on July 17, 1937.

I am the third child of Edna May Corlett Michael and Enos Samuel Michael (Shorty), and the baby sister of Frederick William Michael (Freddy) age 5, and Clarence Richard Michael (Dickie) 15 months old.

Mom’s dad, Shorty, was 5 feet, 2 inches tall, but he was the tallest person in his family. He had a seventh-grade education and began his career as a hard-rock miner when he was 15. He married Edna in 1932 and they divorced in 1939, when Mom was two.

Daddy was granted custody of us kids. I asked if Edna had fought for custody. When he told me no, I cried. I wanted to be wanted by her. I have often wondered what my life would have been like with both a mother and father, even if they were divorced.

It was the tail end of the Great Depression, and Shorty had three children to support. He couldn’t bring them with him to the mining camps, so he had to find people he could pay to take them in. Sometimes the children were split up. When Mom was four, the father she had rarely seen came for her and Freddy, to take them to a new lady in a new town, Winnemucca, in northeastern Nevada.

Daddy told us that . . . we were going to live with a lady called Mrs. Mayo.

I’m always reminded of May Mayo whenever I hear the phrase ‘cruel and unusual punishment.’

Mom wasn’t exaggerating. The slightest transgression got a whack from Mrs. Mayo’s razor strap. Backtalk, as she called it, got a slap across the mouth. There were endless chores.

Unless Daddy was visiting, we were served small portions that never filled us up and were never allowed to ask for seconds. Usually, we had to sit on the floor behind the stove and wait until the grownups were finished before we could eat. . . . I stole food every chance I got.

When she was seven-years old, tragedy struck that would literally stay with Mom her entire life. Brother Freddy had run away and Brother Dickie had joined Mom at Mrs. Mayos’. Dickie had a friend, Robert Woods, who had made a bow and arrow from a willow branch. Mom wouldn’t let Woods and Dickie in the house, trying to stop them with a broom.

When I wouldn’t budge, he pulled the string back and let the arrow fly. I felt a piercing pain in my left eye and it was wet when I put my hand up.

Mrs. Mayo didn’t take Mom to a doctor until the next day. Doctor Sweezy was a quack who worked out of his house. He put ointment in the eye and a patch over it.

I don’t know how many days went by while [Mrs. Mayo] continued to put the ointment in my eye . . . . She finally did get word to my dad at the mine where he worked and he came to the house.

Shorty took Mom to Reno to see a specialist.

The doctor explained that it would take surgery and even then he couldn’t be sure if the eye could be saved. He told Dad to check me into the the hospital that day, and he would schedule surgery for the next morning.

[After the surgery] I had to wear the bandage until the eye healed. I thought when Dr. Clark removed the bandage, I would be able to see. Dad sadly explained to me that my eye was so damaged from the arrow and the infection, he had taken the eye out, stitched it up and put it back in. In other words, I still had my eye, but would never be able to see out of it.

When we returned to Winnemucca, my life didn’t change much. Even though I couldn’t see out of my eye I thought it looked the same as before the accident. However, when I returned to school after summer vacation, some of the kids would taunt me on the playground yelling, “Cross-Eyed, Bull Eyed.” I was crushed; kids can be so cruel, and I was one of the cruel ones before my surgery. At seven-years old and in second grade I learned a life-time lesson—how much it hurts to be different. From that time on, I have never knowingly made fun of people with handicaps [and] disabilities, and still can’t tolerate people who do.

Two years after her first surgery, Mom had to return to Reno for another operation.

After Daddy and I got settled on the Greyhound bus on our way to Reno, Daddy started asking me questions . . . He began with “How is ole lady Mayo treating you kids?”

The question took me completely by surprise and I wasn’t sure how to answer. Finally I said, “She doesn’t treat us very good.”

“What do you mean, not very good?”

Mom cried all the way to Reno, telling Shorty about Mrs. Mayo’s cruel mistreatment. Mrs. Mayo had threatened Mom and Dickie if they ever told Shorty the truth. Shorty was furious.

Daddy kept saying, “I wish I had never left you there.”

“Why did you leave us there Daddy? How did you know Mrs. Mayo? Didn’t anyone ever tell you how mean [she] was?”

“When I’m in town I don’t talk to people other than the ones I meet in bars. Guys in bars just don’t talk about things like that. A few people knew her when she was drinking and spending a lot of time in the bars, but no one ever said anything against her to me.”

When Mom and Shorty went to Mom’s appointment with Dr. Clark, he recommended removing the eye and replacing it with a glass eye.

. . . I didn’t know anything about glass eyes and I thought I would wake up from the operation with a glass eye instead of the real one.

Dr. Clark explained that I couldn’t be fitted for a glass eye until the eye socket healed. We would stay in Reno until time to take the stitches out, but the socket wouldn’t be healed enough for several months. After the socket was completely healed, I would be fitted with a glass eye, and would have to have a new eye every few months until I quit growing.

After the socket surgery, Mom got her first good news. Shorty told her: You don’t have to go back to Winnemucca and live with ole Lady Mayo again. I’m taking you to live with your Aunt Evelyn and Uncle Mack in Grass Valley, California.

For the next eight years, life was better, but it was still tough. There were a bewildering series of moves—northern California, Nevada, Colorado. Mom attended ten grade schools and six different high schools. In Colorado, there were two unpleasant encounters with her mother, Edna, an alcoholic who treated her horribly.

The words drinking, drunk, and bars appear frequently in Mom’s accounts of those years. She loved Shorty, but he drank a lot, and once spent a week in jail after a binge. Mom described where she lived as dingy, filthy shacks or trailers.

But it wasn’t all bad. Mom and Dickie were old enough to take care of themselves, so they could now live with their dad.

He couldn’t understand why I griped about cigarettes ashes flicked all over and he wanted me to quit bossing him and Dickie about keeping their clothes picked up and the house clean. They both thought I was too strict.

Years later, her kids felt the same way!

When she was seventeen, the family returned to Winnemucca. It was the first time they had been back since the Mrs. Mayo days. Mom would be starting her senior year in high school, and she was anxious.

I finally mustered enough courage to walk to school—Humboldt County High School. After I registered and got settled in my first class, I was surprised at the friendliness of several kids, especially some girls. Several of them invited me to have lunch with them at a restaurant in town, and they were eager to find out what had happened after I left Winnemucca eight years ago. They remembered the story of my eye and told me how sorry they had been, which was so far from anything I had imagined, I was elated. I was being accepted by the most popular girls in school. My self-esteem improved drastically, and life-long friendships were forged with six of the girls.

In 1999, Mom got a call from one of those friends, inviting her to a reunion trip in Sonoma and Napa.

What a great time we had. The b & b was beautiful and they gave us the whole top floor. We shared rooms and they were all luxurious.

They were to repeat the reunions the next ten years at different places. They came to New Mexico once and spent two days in Albuquerque and two in Santa Fe, where they went to the opera.

Mom blossomed that senior year. The following year she went to the University of Nevada in Reno. She was tall, slender, and beautiful.

I’ll never forget the day I got married. Daddy had told me I couldn’t. He couldn’t stop me. I was 19. I got engaged at the University of Nevada in the spring of 1965, a freshman. Ray was a senior. When I got engaged at Spring break, Daddy said no. I thought by August he would change his mind.

On August 17, 1956 Ray came and got me for our wedding in Reno. I went to Tungsten where Daddy worked and pleaded with him. He was in bed in the trailer reading a book which he threw at me and yelled, ‘You are no longer a daughter to me.’ I cried all the way to Reno.

I wrote my dad asking him to please accept us. The horrible letter he wrote back was heartbreaking. “If I had known you were going off to college husband hunting I would have never spent all the money to send you to school. All you are fit for now is to get pregnant and have babies and any Oaky moron can do that. The most important person besides Ray in my life disowned me for 4 years.

In 1957, my Dad signed on for a summer of above-ground nuclear bomb testing in southern Nevada.

We dreaded the thought of being apart, but his increase in salary would get us out of the financial bind we found ourselves in.

Dad went to southern Nevada and tested atomic bombs. The only time he got off was for his and Mom’s first wedding anniversary, August 17, 1957. He went back to Livermore and nine months later I was born. Three months after that, we moved to Los Alamos. Dad went to work at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, which everyone called “the lab.”

Mom loved Los Alamos. She had friendships that lasted a lifetime. Her kids were in one of the best school systems in the country, and neighborhoods were packed with playmates.

Bob was born and when he was 3 months old we moved to los Alamos. I always felt torn between happy about my marriage and sad about Daddy. When bob was 2 years old, I was pregnant with Judi. When I was about 7 months along, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I was holding bob and looking out the window, when I saw my dad coming down the steps to the quad on walnut street. My first thought was, ‘I can’t let my dad see me pregnant’, still thinking of his letter and the oaky moron bit. I did open the door and didn’t know what to say. I simply held out bob for him to hold and held my breath. I said ‘dad meet your grandson.’ Bob, who never knew a stranger, laughed [and] played with his hat. I know how hard it must have been for dad to decide to come and see us and probably worried about how I would take it and what to say. After meeting bob, none of that seemed to matter. He was embarrassed to see Ray when he got home from work, but it was the start for the friendship between them that lasted almost to his death in 1985.

Mom and Dad’s philosophy of child rearing was the opposite of helicopter parenting. Dad was progressing up the lab’s career ladder and taking night courses for his masters degree and then his PhD. Mom did most of the child rearing. The rules were simple: do what you want and do your best; stay out of trouble; you’re responsible for your mistakes; you’ll bear the consequences, and get out of the house and get some sunshine and fresh air.

Being a parent is the toughest job in the world. The biggest experts are people who’ve never had kids. Some of those experts are kids. The perfect parent has yet to be invented, but kids know they’ll be much better than their parents when their turn comes. Mom’s kids were no different.

Mom was remarkably unsympathetic to our whining. “Why do I have to do this? Why don’t I get to do that?”

“Because I’m the mother, and you’re the little kid.”

They didn’t call it Attention Deficit Disorder back then, they called it: “That kid has his head in the clouds.” My head was frequently in the clouds, and Mom was concerned about teenage Bob. “What’s going to happen when you start driving?” she would ask. I never had an answer.

Growing up the way she did, she had learned a thing or two about people. Dad had the Ph.D.; Mom had the street smarts. Pompous and phony didn’t have a chance with her. Either did lying, for which there were always consequences.

She also had an acute sensitivity to what was actually important to her kids.

Jim was a tinkerer. Mom set up a table in the corner of the family room for his many projects. One of Mom’s friends, a you-could-eat-off-her-floors type, was horrified at the clutter. Mom just told her, “Jim needs his space.” He spent hours at that table.

Judi inherited Mom’s love of music. We had a piano and she started playing when she was four or five. My parents didn’t have a lot of money, but Mom found enough for Judi’s piano lessons. Judi’s been playing all her life. She also plays the flute.

Mom knew, maybe before I did, that I had to get out of Los Alamos and New Mexico. I didn’t want to be a scientist. Our family had been to San Francisco and Los Angeles on family trips, and I loved them both. Mom knew I needed the stimulation, the challenge, and the energy. She understood me and wanted me to go my own way. I lived in California for 36 years.

Mom was an expert seamstress and made most of our clothes. She made Dad a leather jacket, my coat for the senior prom, and Judi’s wedding dress.

In 1970, I was so disappointed when my neighbor, Marge, moved to Richland Washington. We had sewed and material shopped together for years. She returned to Los Alamos on vacation one time and was really excited about a new sewing procedure, Stretch and Sew, a way of sewing with knit fabrics.

Mom learned the new procedure, and started teaching it to the ladies of Los Alamos in our home.

The response overwhelmed me . . . . I started teaching two classes a week and then three daytime-classes and two night-classes . . . . Between 1970 and 1976, I had taught over a thousand ladies to stretch and sew . . .

She called her business Sew Biz.

Years later, I asked her what she was most proud of.

“You mean besides you kids?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know.”

“Is it your sewing business?”

She thought for a moment. “Yeah, I think it is.”

Ray and I were square dancing at 8pm when a neighbor lady rushed into the school and yelled at us to come home our house was on fire. I screamed our 14 year old son was home. She told me Jim walked to their house, rang the doorbell and said will you please call 911, my house is on fire.

Jim made it out; our dogs didn’t.

Everything was either burned or smoke damaged. The fireman said if we had been sleeping, the noxious fumes would have ki[ll]ed us before the fire.

Sew Biz was destroyed. I had already gone off to California, but I believe this was the beginning of a long slide into depression. Then, in 1984, Dad divorced her.

She was devastated. All the emotions that had tormented her growing up overwhelmed her with renewed intensity. She saw a series of psychiatrists and took a variety of anti-depressants. None of it seemed to do any good.

Mom got better, but progress was slow. She moved out of Los Alamos and eventually ended up in Rocky Flats, Colorado, working at a nuclear installation. While there, she met Charley Warner, who worked at the lab in Los Alamos.

Mom moved to Rio Rancho in 1994. Charley’s second wife, Leona, had passed away.

Charley and I had been dating for several months when he came to see me at my condo on Saint Patrick’s Day, 1995 and said, “Wanna go shopping?”

“Sure I love to shop.” As we were going out the door, I said, “Wait a minute, you haven’t told me what we are shopping for.”

He held my hand and said, “Rings.”

“As in wedding rings?” I stammered. “Charley, you haven’t asked me to marry you.”

“I’m asking you now. I was going to wait until September but on the way down from Los Alamos, I thought why wait? Will you marry me?”

“Yes, I mean no—I mean I don’t know. I have to have time to think.”

“You can think on the way to the jewelry store.”

I don’t remember much of the trip to the store . . . but I remember standing in front of the counter and a woman showing us loose diamonds to be set in an engagement ring. . . . We finally picked a stone and a setting for the engagement and wedding rings. We went to Chili’s Restaurant for margaritas while waiting for the stones to be set and rings to be sized.

When we went back to the store the rings were ready. Right there in the store Charley got down on his knee . . . and asked me to marry him while he put the engagement ring on my finger. I was crying and the saleslady was crying.

Charley and I were married in a beautiful ceremony in the outdoor gazebo at the Rio Rancho Inn on June 10, 1995.

Mom wrote: Charley saved my life. Figuratively in 1995, literally, a year later. She started having bouts of vertigo. She’d fall down and have trouble getting back up.

I had been going to the same doctor on the east side that I had been going to before we were married. He kept telling me there was nothing wrong and said, “As we get older it takes longer for the blood to reach the brain.” Charley had gone in with me one day, and when the doctor said that, I thought Charley was going to punch him out. He said, “Come on hon, we are going to see a real doctor.”

A real doctor, Dr. Hankinson, ordered tests and an MRI.

The tumor was called a Meningioma and was about the size of a large egg. When I mentioned the big C word, he said Meningiomas are usually not but they can be.

The tumor had to be taken out immediately.

The kids and their families were with me the night before. I remember telling Bob not to worry, that we had been through a lot rougher times—during the divorce—than this. I prayed a lot before going to sleep. Thank you God for sleeping pills.

I woke up in the intensive care unit. I was groggy and Judi and Cyndie were standing there giving me a thumbs up. “Mom it isn’t cancer.”

I had been going to a psychiatrist for a couple of months with severe depression that I couldn’t shake. I quit going after the surgery, but when I saw her for the last time and remarked that Dr. Hankinson had told me it takes years to grow a tumor of that size, she replied, “Ella Mae, I am so angry at myself for not thinking about a brain tumor. Your symptoms are classic and I should have ordered an MRI for you myself. Depression that doesn’t respond to antidepressants and therapy is often caused by brain disorders. That’s one of the reasons you had such a rough time dealing with your divorce from Ray.”

It was then I realized that Charley really had saved my life and my sanity.

They bought a beautiful house in Rio Rancho and a cabin in northern New Mexico near the Brazos River. The kids and their families visited them. We fished in the river and fed deer in front of the cabin.

Charley died the Monday after Easter Sunday in 2007.

I moved from Los Angeles to Albuquerque with Roberta and Austin in 2012. Mom and I would have coffee or go to lunch almost every week. Of course, Mom loved seeing Austin every chance she got.

Mom had gone to Charley’s church until he died. She started going to this church. She found worship, friendship, and comfort, and she mentioned several times how much she liked Pastor Raquel. We thank Pastor Raquel for coming out of retirement to perform her service.

On Thanksgiving 2023, Mom broke her right hip. After surgery she went to the Suites at Rio Vista nursing home. She never regained her ability to walk and had difficulty getting in a wheelchair, so she was essentially bedridden.

Rio Vista did a fine job taking care of her, but one of the saddest aspects of Rio Vista or any nursing home is how few people visit the patients. I was told by one of the nurses that well over half never received visitors.

Mom was one of the fortunate ones. During her two-year stay, her entire family visited at various times. Jim and Cyndie would bring Mom’s dog Yoda, flowers, photographs, and life-sustaining chocolates.

Judi and David came up from Las Cruces. On several occasions they brought their kids, Mom’s grandchildren Alex, Katie, and Brian. Brian and Nevaeh brought their son, Mom’s great-grandson, Jaz. Austin would visit when he was back in Albuquerque from Phoenix. Mom could be having a bad day, but when she saw the grandchildren and great-grandson, she’d brighten up instantly.

David brought his ukulele and we had sing-a-longs. The patients and nurses at Rio Vista must have thought we were crazy, but if you go through life without someone thinking you’re crazy, you’re doing something wrong.

Mom lost a lot of weight. Roberta started bringing her Whataburger burgers and Taco Cabana tacos. I’d bring my homemade spaghetti.

I’d also bring coffee and chocolate chip muffin tops from Dutch Brothers, which is vastly superior to that other coffee chain. I got to know most of the employees there. When Mom passed away, they gave me their condolences and a $50 gift card. Dutch Brothers is donating the coffee for the reception after the service.

No matter who was visiting, the first order of business was usually the Phone Photo Pet Parade—Mom wanted to see everybody’s cats and dogs, and she loved them all.

Notwithstanding her condition, Mom’s sense of humor was irrepressible. One time I came in and told her I had forgotten to bring something she had requested. She shook her head and said, “What’s going to happen when you start driving?” I still didn’t have an answer.

Her jokes could be wicked. She told me that when she was a girl she was the best marble shooter and took all the boys’ marbles.

I said, “Really?”

She smiled. “Yeah, you have better aim with one eye.”

Mom stopped eating and drinking in early December and I thought her body might be shutting down. I called Judi. She asked if she and David should come to Albuquerque. There had been false alarms in the past, and I wasn’t sure if this wasn’t another one. I told Judi it was up to her. A few minutes after I hung up, I called her back and told her that even though I didn’t know if this was the big one or not, I’d feel better if her and David came up. She said they were already making plans.

Mom wasn’t in very good shape during the days before or the days after Judi and David came to Albuquerque, but the days they were there, she rallied and we had two good visits.

I visited Mom on a Friday. She was sleeping, but I nudged her awake. She looked at me. “Dickie?”

“No, Mom, it’s me, Bob.”

She smiled and said, “Bob.” Then she murmured incoherently for a few minutes and fell back asleep.

I had come into Mom’s room many times when she was asleep. She would have a tormented expression on her face, perhaps bad memories welling up from her subconscious. This time, she fell asleep with a smile.

She died three days later, on December twenty-second, and I don’t think she ever regained consciousness. The nurses remarked on how peaceful she looked.

Goodbye Mom, I love you. And thanks for letting me help you with your eulogy.