I wasn't ready for it Off the Record Barbara Stinson Lee

Although my mother was 89 years old, I wasn’t ready for her death. The telephone call from the care facility in which she had lived for the past 4 years, telling me she had passed away in her sleep, had me in tears immediately. It took me an hour to be able to pull myself together, call other family members, and start making plans to fly home to Phoenix.

Mother and I were close off and on while I was growing up. She and Dad had six children, and it seems like one or another of us were either in trouble, upset about something or needing our parents’ undivided attention. We grew closer as we both aged.

Dad was an air traffic controller for the Federal Aviation Administration, and was often one transfer ahead of the rest of us. It was Mom’s job to keep us all together, packed up, and ready to go.

Mom was strong. And as we began preparing her obituary and telling her story for the sake of the priest who would celebrate her funeral Mass, the same phrase kept coming up as we talked to one another. “Mom kept reinventing herself.”

When one of her own children was diagnosed with dyslexia, Mom took classes to help her to read. And when grandchildren began arriving with various learning disabilities, Mom, at the age of 56, earned her teaching certificate and surrounded herself with children who, but for her patience, might never have read a book.

When Dad died in 1988, Mom reinvented herself again, becoming a library volunteer. Again she gave hours working at the Kino Institute Library for the Diocese of Phoenix, making sure everyone had the books they were supposed to have when they were supposed to have them.

As Mom aged, reading was the one thing she could still do until the day she died. Her eyes did not fail her, nor her sense of humor. She loved books of all kinds, and she couldn’t bear thinking that someone, anyone, didn’t have the skills to read.

I tried to get home to see mother twice a year. We would read together, do crossword puzzles, read the newspaper on the porch. We ate from fast food restaurants because mother loved curly fries and jamocha shakes. We prayed together.

Mother died peacefully.

We weren’t ready for it.

Only she was.