Tuesday, January 25, 2011

The Day My Mother Died


My mother died six years ago, January 27, 2006. She died in a hospice in Sun City, Arizona. It was a beautiful place, out in the desert, cactus and sage and rocks and reddish sand all around. She would have liked it. Before she got too sick, she used to like sitting outside and enjoying the little bit of desert that she had in her own back yard.

She had come a long way to die.

She was born in a forest outside a small village west of Lvov, Poland in 1920. She loved that forest and probably would have stayed there her whole life except for the Germans. They came to her house and killed her mother and her sister and her sister's baby. My mother fled into the woods, but the soldiers caught her and put her on a train that took her to a slave labor camp in Germany. Once I asked my mother to tell me what happened on that train. She said that even though I was a grown man and a professor, she saw things she couldn't tell me about.

For a long time, she also wouldn't tell me much about the slave labor camps in Germany. She would wave her hand at me and just say, "If they give you bread, you eat it. If they beat you, you run away." When she did start telling me about the things that happened in the camp, some times I had to ask her not to tell me.

At the end of the war, my mother met my father, another Pole who had been in the slave labor camps. When my mom saw my dad, he was a scarecrow in rags. He weighed about 70 pounds and had only one eye. He had lost the other when a guard clubbed him for begging for food.

She was 23, he was 25. She had been a slave for 2 years, he had been one for 4.

They married and waited in the refugee camps in Germany until someone in America would agree to sponsor them so that they could come here. They waited for 6 years. During that time, they had two kids, my sister Danusha and me.

In June of 1951, we came to America. For a while my mom and dad worked on a farm to pay off their passage here. Then, we moved to Chicago, and my mom worked in a factory.

The way I remember it my Mom was always working, working in one factory or another and working around the houses she and my Dad bought. She would plaster walls, paint, sand floors, and varnish them too. There was no work that she wouldn't do.

When my parents retired, they finally moved out to Sun City, Arizona, a long way from the village in Poland my mom grew up in. After he died out there in 1997, she lived there alone, taking care of her house and the garden, making friends and thinking about her grandchildren.

I've written a lot of poems about her over the years, and since the day she died,I've been trying to write a poem about her dying. Let me tell you, it's not coming. I've got pages of notes and half starts for the poem, but for some reason none of the words and lines say what I want them to say about my mom and how I feel about her and how her death touched me. Maybe I'll be able to write the poem someday, but I can't do it right now.

So I want to end this with two of my favorite poems about my mom from my book Lightning and Ashes. The first one is called "What the War Taught Her," and the second is called "My Mother's Optimism."


What the War Taught Her


My mother learned that sex is bad,
Men are worthless, it is always cold
And there is never enough to eat.

She learned that if you are stupid
With your hands you will not survive
The winter even if you survive the fall.

She learned that only the young survive
The camps. The old are left in piles
Like worthless paper, and babies
Are scarce like chickens and bread.

She learned that the world is a broken place
Where no birds sing, and even angels
Cannot bear the sorrows God gives them.

She learned that you don't pray
Your enemies will not torment you.
You only pray that they will not kill you.



My Mother's Optimism


When she was seventy-eight years old
And the angel of death called to her
and told her the vaginal bleeding
that had been starting and stopping
like a crazy menopausal period
was ovarian cancer, she said to him,
“Listen Doctor, I don’t have to tell you
your job. If it’s cancer it’s cancer.
If you got to cut it out, you got to.”

After surgery, in the convalescent home
Among the old men crying for their mothers,
And the silent roommates waiting for death
she called me over to see her wound,
stapled and stitched, fourteen raw inches
from below her breasts to below her navel.
And when I said, “Mom, I don’t want to see it,”
She said, “Johnny, don't be such a baby.”

Six months later, at the end of her chemo,
my mother knows why the old men cry.
A few wiry strands of hair on head,
Her hands so weak she couldn’t hold a cup,
Her legs swollen and blotched with blue lesions,
She says, “I’ll get better. After his chemo,
Pauline’s second husband had ten more years.
He was playing golf and breaking down doors
When he died of a heart attack at ninety.”

Then my mom’s eyes lock on mine, and she says,
“You know, optimism is a crazy man’s mother.”

And she laughs.



______________________________

The first photo is my mom, my sister, and me in Riverview Amusement Park in Chicago, around 1957.

The second photo is of my mom and my daughter Lillian, around 1982.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

John, you will write that poem yet I have no doubt. In that spirit, I dedicate my poem about "the day my mother died" - December 27, 1986 - to your mother. I apologize for the lineage and stanzas which are lacking in this format. Christina Pacosz


Discovering Judas


Trapped by dawn

and the empty bed

where she so recently

rested, my brother’s

voice a dark repetition:

Mama’s dead, Mama’s dead.


My father lies in bed,

alone in the room

that is his now,

and I rise

at my brother’s cry,

a sleepwalker.


The hearse is black,

of course. The first

I’ve ever summoned,
carrying careful men

who ask questions,

but never the right one.


Did you love her?

Her body rests

on a gurney and denials

pile up, a rock slide

at timberline, where

the wind is always


howling.

I kiss her forehead

and listen to the oxygen

roaring in her lungs. My lips

are dry and cold

like her flesh,

like the mountain

where the trees stop

and rock begins.

Dry and cold as Judas’ lips

when he brushed them against

Jesus’ cheek?


The hearse spins its tires,

in the red mud and rain.

I cannot imagine

it trapped in the dirt

with her inside,

broken and done.

John Guzlowski said...

Christina, thank you for the poem.

sonia said...

Beautiful photos. The poems show your mother's great spirit. My father's family are from a village about 40 miles from Lvov. His brother and parents were sent to Siberia and he was taken to Germany for forced labour a few years earlier. Thank you for sharing stories that don't get talked about much. Five years isn't that long when a parent's died - the poem will come.

oriana said...

Thanks for a wonderful post, John. I esp like the second poem. You don't need the last line -- pardon this knee-jerk workshop habit, but you really don't! Though it's minor, considering how strong the poem is, fabulous in content.

E♦B said...

John,
Your remembrance is a testament. We lost F's mom two years ago this 12 Feb., and my father in Aug. 2004 - and not a day goes by we don't think of them. F's dad (I never met him) died over 30 years ago, but I see his face in photos in the house and hear him mentioned often - so he too is always with us. You inspire us to remember - thank you dearly.

Urkat said...

Moments holding a granddaughter almost justify for a moment enduring the torment--it was worth it if only for that moment.

I can see why she wouldn't talk about the camps or the train. There are some subjects where your voice chokes the minute you start to pronounce the words and the tears blind your eyes. Whether it was too horrible to talk about or too horrible to remember doesn't matter.

Tim said...

Well...what can a person say to this? I wonder if I will ever have any real insight into the abominable side of humankind that your parents did. I hope not. But it seems like, when I think about them starting a family after all that, that maybe there could be something enriching in it. I feel sure it must be almost totally destructive though. I suppose that is what makes their story all the more miraculous.

John Guzlowski said...

Tim, I think my mother felt that having a family did help. I know she had some troubles showing warmth and being patient, but she got better as the years went by and part of what happened was that she was able to open up to her grandkids. Yesterday, I got an email from my daughter Lillian about my mom and how much she enjoyed talking to my mom in her last days.

Michael Meyerhofer said...

Powerful stuff, my friend.

Unknown said...

Timeless filial remembrances, maternal-resonating pure poetry within the beautifully melancholic amber of spiritual memory.