Today, November 30, is the anniversary of the death of my mother, Iris.
She was hospitalized in our hometown of Streator, Illinois for some time, so the phone call from my brother who lived near Chicago was not a great surprise.
Mom had been in a car accident, later had a stroke and had lain on the floor for some time in her apartment before neighbors became worried. I had visited her earlier that summer.
She needed three caregivers for round the clock care, and I was there for moral support, help her remember things after anesthesia wiped things out, and to help her walk with her broken hip. She hated the exercises and I hated causing her pain.
But it had to be done. We both knew that, because many years before, she had forced me, as a little boy in leg braces from polio to walk. In fact, I had written about that in a memoir after her death:
I suppose the first memory of her was when I was about 5. We were sitting on the bathroom floor, and I was crying. My older brother, Jim, had dressed and had run out into the warm Illinois sunshine.
My mother was trying to put my steel leg brace on, tying the orthopedic shoe, the leather calf strap, the knee pad, the thigh strap and buckling the steel belt around my waist. The room was hot and the heavy belt bit into my hips as she struggled to pull up my jeans over the shoe and the brace.
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“Why me, Mom? Why did I have to get polio?” She stopped and took my hands in hers. She was then about 30, beautiful with wavy chestnut hair to her shoulders, and hazel eyes. “But Kurt, Jesus only chooses the bravest boys. God picked you above all the boys in town.”
The three of us – she, my brother Jim, and I – had returned to Streator from Virginia to live with her mother when my father died suddenly after World War II.
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It was there, while working as a secretary at the newly completed Pentagon, that she met my father, a young soldier. It was there she met President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The awe of reaching down to shake his powerful hand never left her.
I bit into my lower lip in an attempt to live up to her words. “Am I brave?” I asked. “Of course you are. And God will always watch out for you.” She pressed her handkerchief to my face, and ran her hand through my blond hair...
She talked of the world that had waited for her to see, but she had fallen madly in love with a young soldier and sacrificed her dreams to become a wife and mother.
Once I asked her what her favorite thing would be to see and she said a palm tree. As a dreamy little boy, I proudly told her, "One day I will show you a palm tree."
My brother who phoned me is really my half-brother Pat. My older brother had died of melanoma shortly after graduating from Virginia Military Institute. Pat was the joyous product of Mom's marriage to my stepfather, her only boy who had not caused her pain.
It was only later, as an adult that I realized every pain a child suffers is double for the mother. As it turned out, I did show Mom that palm tree. After college graduation, I accepted a job offer as a reporter from Rupert Murdoch in Sydney, Australia and later invited Mom and my stepfather to see my new country.
One day, the three of us were having fish and chips on Dee Why beach, north of Sydney, and Mom and I both glanced up at a palm tree at the same time, and then locked eyes.
But I don't think the pain of my polio ever left her, because you see, November 30, 50 years earlier was the date I was diagnosed with polio.
Kurt Sipolski is a resident of Palm Desert, CA and the author of "Too Early for Flowers." He can be reached at CanMan619@aol.com.
