"Mom Died About a Week Ago"

These were the words my sister said to me over the phone almost five years ago. She had prefaced them with, "I guess there's really no easy way to tell you this, but..."

My mother, born November 30, 1923, was one four children born to Joe Powalski and Lela Sanders. Two of her sisters, Agnes and Alice, predeceased her; her brother, Joe, was alive and well at the time of her succumbing to congestive heart failure.

"About a week ago." I was silent. Truth was, I really wasn't surprised--I had felt a disturbance of the force for "about a week" and had been trying to call my mother and sister to check in on them, only to reach an answering machine--but to hear it belatedly this way?

Mom didn't describe her childhood in pleasant terms. I don't know about her cousins, if she had any. I don't know where she went to grade school. In fact, my memory of her earliest days (I later figured out that she hoarded information, dealing it out parsimoniously.) came from the time when we were crossing the old Huey P. Long bridge into Baton Rouge. (If you ever made this trip back before the U.S. began to clean up its air and water, the stink from the noxious clouds pouring from the oil refining and aluminum smelting smokestacks comes quickly and easily from your memory, and you can still see the vaporous draping casting an umber pall over the plants and the surrounding communities. Hell, even then, I thought, "This can't be good for you.")



As we passed crossed the Mississippi, a river Styx into itself, into the miasma of toxins, Mom looked at the ALCOA plant and said, "I used to work there." I asked her about what she did; her answer was "Secretarial work."

"About a week ago I'm asking myself?" While I'm silent on the phone, my mind is yelling, "What the FUCK do you mean, about a week ago?" Such a contrast to the clinical terms and exact dates on a death certificate.

Mom was a very conflicted character. She could express love that came from an unfathomable source and she could flash into anger faster than potassium exposed to water. She spanked and slapped us. Once, she stood in a kitchen with a bread knife (I vividly recall the serrated edges) held toward me and said, "I just want to cut your stomach out with this." Yet, it was this same mother who first taught me how to unchain my imagination and then gave me freedom to express myself outside the first or second standard deviations for "normal behavior." She hosted fabulous sleep-overs for my friends, engaging us in all sorts of outrageous behavior, such as totally sudsing ourselves up and then combing our hair into the now in-style, hogsback peaks in the middle of the top of our heads. (My friends would, upon hearing that another had stayed over with me, ask them, "What did his mom do with you?")

And she was foresighted, perhaps even ahead of her time in many regards. She foresaw the need for healthy, nutritious meals, once cooking roast beef--complete with potatoes, carrots, and onions--for breakfast. She knew that we were responsible for our environment, encouraging us to consider our footprint on the earth. She could have started her own chain of nontraditional schools (consider, for example, Montessori), given her creative bent. (Lord, how she could cajole/lead kids into non-linear thinking and how she planned stimulating projects for them to do. Once, we had no money for Halloween, so we sat down and make our own decorations and costumes out of whatever we had on hand. Once particularly memorable creation was a white, oddly-shaped ghost fashioned from sheets, pillows, and twine that hung from the top of a door at just the right height that as you passed under its loose ends would brush over you in the way that a spectral visitor touches the back of your neck.

Mom had drilled a sense of gentlemanness toward women into me. I hold doors for women, help them off with their coat, and walk between my female companion and the curb. Thus, I only asked, "What did you do with her body? Was she buried?"

Mom worked hard to raise my sister and me. Money was always tight, although at that tender age I really couldn't have known how tight. I remember going with her to a job where, on her knees, she scrubbed floors and I, all of five years old, did the same with my own small spot, probably making more of a mess than being of assistance.

Over the years, Mom and I, scrubmates that we were, had drifted apart, especially after the death of her sister from whom she had inherited a small fortune of Piccadilly Cafeteria stock. After the stock entered a death spiral and was eventually worthless, Mom send me a fax asking me to pay her back for the money she spent raising me.

My sister's answer to my question about whether Mom was buried or not followed the vein of her informing me of her death: "She wanted to be cremated and I scattered her ashes in places that she was close to."

Mom must have had some kind of kink formed early in her way of relating to men. I know that her dealings with me underwent a dramatic transformation when I reached puberty. This change was clearly manifested when, I think I was about thirteen, Mom went to slap me and I caught her by the wrist and held her hand suspended midway between her and my face. Her eyes went savage and her lips tightened. In that one moment I had passed from being her little boy child she could control to becoming a member of her worst kind of enemy, a man.

But, as I said earlier, she was confliced. One time, it must have been my senior year in high school, Mom and I were sitting around and talking and--even at the time I was taken with the girlishness lilt to her voice--she told me about her first marriage...the marraige BEFORE the one with my father. I was dumbstruck at this revelation, but not upset...I wanted to hear more. She almost whimsically told me more: He was a big man (she later gave me his red silk robe that she had saved over the years, and it hung loosely on my shoulders) and she had married him right after high school. I think she may have even met him at the ALCOA plant; perhaps he was a salesman. But, even though he may have been her ticket out of an unhappy home with her father (her mother had died shortly before I was born), I detected in her voice, still after almost four decades after their still-born marriage and subsequent divorce, a soft side toward men (or at least, toward a certain kind of man) that had rarely been expressed by her before.

"Where? What places?" I asked. My sister's answer was vague and nondescript. I guess "here and there was about as good as "about a week ago."




I was a small child in kindergarden, maybe even a daycare, four years old at most. We were making hand prints in a plaster of paris type mixture. I did mine three or four times because I wasn't happy with the way it looked. Finally, I had the impression I was satisfied with and anxiously waited for the next day for it to dry so I could paint it. I choose red, and when the paint, too, had dried, proudly gave it to my mother. Years later, I made her a man-size cast, painted it red, and gave it to her to match the first made over thirty years ago. Soon afterwards, she gave them both back to me, saying that she didn't need to keep them anymore.

I had a paper route. On 10th Street, a busy thoroughfare. No other boys wanted it. Sometimes it was dark when I finished throwing folded up newspapers into driveways and onto porches. I always passed a gift shop on the way back, and there, spotlighted on the glass shelves, stood a lion, flowing mane and all, carved out of stone. I saved and saved and bought it for Mom. Years later, I glued its broken leg back together. Years after that, Mom gave it back to me, too.

The lion fell beside the wayside somewhere. I still have the little hand. And I think that, when it's all said and done, there's a little boy in me somewhere who sorrows over the loss of his mom.

Mike Sledge