I press play on the DVD remote, sit back in my favorite corner of the couch, and watch silent images from home movies. My dad sports a crew cut and clenches a pipe between his teeth as he assembles a small wooden trike on the back porch of our suburban Cincinnati house. Behind his back, three-year-old me steals a doll from my little sister Jean, who waddles after me, cloth diaper drooping. In the next scene, toddler-aged Jean sits cross-legged on the ground in our backyard eating Apple Jacks out of the box. Next to her waits Charlie, an adorable black-and-brown beagle-schnauzer puppy with floppy ears. Jean rewards Charlie’s patience with the occasional piece of cereal, which he laps out of her sticky hand. My mom appears, barefoot in Bermuda shorts and a sleeveless blouse. She scoops Charlie into a hug, but he jumps to the ground and zooms around her as she laughs and grabs for his fast-moving body. “Oh Mom,” I whisper.

My mom died from lung cancer almost 12 years ago at age 73. Only recently have I been able to think about who she was in all her glorious and contradictory humanity. Like all children, I am a mix of both parents. My out-of-control sweet tooth: my mom, although her favorite was black licorice, which I think is disgusting. My love of reading and musical skills: my dad; my mom was a slow reader who couldn’t carry a tune. My compulsive neatness, perfectionism, organizational skills, ability to find lost things: all my mom. Whenever I misplace my keys, I think of her as I turn the house upside down.

If my mom had been born a couple of decades later, she might have become Someone Important—a school principal or superintendent, a lawyer or judge, a politician or army general. Not POTUS, but maybe POTUS’ Chief of Staff; it’s easy to picture her keeping the West Wing and the country running smoothly. She was born in 1938 and raised to become a wife and mother, so her paying jobs—school librarian, paralegal—were low-status and subsidiary to family life. The division of labor was traditional: father went to work to make money, mother took care of the household.

And what a household! The human contingent consisted of my mom, my dad, me, and my two younger sisters. The humans were usually outnumbered by the animals. Five dogs, five cats, several turtles, one bird, numerous rodents, and countless goldfish came and went. It’s a paradox how my mom integrated her passion for order with the chaos created by all us creatures. A lot of bodily fluids along with other kinds of mess emanate from young mammals. She must have really loved children and animals to tolerate it. I’ve had one child and one dog, and that is enough.

My mom managed this zoo by civilizing us all. My sisters and I were potty-trained before we turned two. Unlike the dogs, we didn’t get a whack on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper if we didn’t make it to the potty in time.

The key commandments of my parents’ shared moral code were “do unto others” and “thou shalt not steal, cheat, or tell a lie.” My mom turned this abstract code into life lessons to teach us responsibility and good behavior:
–Keep your room neat
–Help around the house
–Do well at school
–Take care of those less fortunate and defend those who can’t defend themselves.

It may sound grim, but life with my mom was fun. She even celebrated our half birthdays! And she made each of us feel special. When I was fourteen, she took me to my first R-rated movie, A Star is Born, because her beloved Barbra was starring in it. I remember feeling so happy, sitting next to her in the dark sharing Raisinets and popcorn, not least because we had left my little sisters at home.

My mom did have her flaws. Never overweight, she often followed the cottage-cheese-and-grapefruit diet, and she passed this obsession with weight on to her daughters. She was a pack-a-day smoker for several decades and periodically drank too much. But she never stopped trying to be a better person and a good-enough mother.

She did evict the occasional pet from the family paradise for failing to meet her high standards. When our family’s first dog developed the unfortunate habit of stealing groceries from neighbors’ porches, she sent him to live on a farm. She rehomed another dog for his inability to be house trained. I don’t remember feeling threatened by these animals’ banishment, although I do remember discussing my mom’s perfectionism with my therapist after I left home.

THERAPIST: “So tell me about your mother.”
ME: “Sometimes I felt like I could never live up to her high expectations. Straight A’s, honor student, in the all-city orchestra…it wasn’t enough! She was in the popular crowd in high school—a cheerleader who dated the quarterback—and I wasn’t popular. So I felt like I let her down.”
THERAPIST: “How do you feel about that now?”
ME: “Ugh, do we have to talk about it?”

Growing up, I took our family structures and practices for granted. For example, I never thought about why we had so many pets. But now I think my mom wanted us to love, nurture, and enjoy animals as much as she did. This lesson succeeded with my sisters if not with me; Jean and Anne have each had many dogs, usually two or three at a time.

Maybe my mom also hoped these pets would teach us how to cope with loss. We did love our pets and we did help my mom take care of them—some of the time. We also mourned their inevitable deaths, which taught us from a young age how to say goodbye. This would have taken much longer to learn via the humans in our lives, since all our grandparents lived into their nineties.

What do you think, Mom? Am I telling this story right? I wish you were here to ask, but then I wouldn’t need to be writing this.

Dead Dogs

Soon after Charlie was immortalized in film, he ran out of the backyard into the street—a busy intersection—and was killed by a car. Soon after, we got another dog to take his place, a miniature schnauzer named Vicki.

Unlike Charlie, Vicki wasn’t cute. She had short salt-and-pepper fur, beady black eyes, and a bit of a beard. She was placid enough to put up with the noisy antics of three little girls and she let us cuddle with her, but she was really my mom’s dog. She would follow my mom around or wait for her by the front door whenever she left the house. My mom reciprocated that devotion; I can hardly remember one without the other.

After losing one dog to vehicular zoocide, you’d think my parents might have fenced in our backyard. In those days free-range pets (and kids) were the norm, which makes Vicki’s death at that same dangerous corner seem inevitable. This happened in the summer of 1973 when I was ten and Jean was eight and we went to sleepaway camp together for a month. Soon after camp started, Jean and I were approached at lunch by the head counselor. Her real name was Cindy, but everyone called her BowWow because of her dog-ear pigtails. She walked us over to the camp office and handed us the phone. My dad, the family purveyor of bad news, was on the line. “Girls,” he said without much prologue, “I have something sad to tell you. Vicki was hit by a car yesterday. She didn’t make it.” Instead of sending us back to our cabins for rest period, BowWow sat on the office porch steps with an arm around each of us as we cried.

My mom saved all our camp letters and in a letter dated June 28, 1973, I write, “Dear Mom & Dad, I got your letter, but I’m not sad anymore. Jeanie is a little bit. By the way, I just ran out of bubble gum. Could you please send me 50 more pieces? I would appreciate it. Love, Kate.” While I seem resilient, this letter also reads as my attempt to make my parents feel better by pretending I have bounced back quickly.

I don’t remember my mom ever telling us how she felt about losing Vicki. I do know it was a long time before my family got another dog, so moving on might not have been as easy as she tried to make it look.

Tikki

In addition to the family cats and dogs, my sisters and I each had our own pets. Mine was Tikki, a yellow-and-green parakeet. Tikki was a fun pet for a lonely, bookish fifth grader whose neighborhood friends had deserted her in middle school. And unlike our furrier pets, he didn’t bother my allergies.

Tikki and I had a special bond. Every day after school, I would rush to my room and croon, “Who’s a pretty bird?” and Tikki would “talk” back by chirping and trilling while he swung on his perch. I gave him fresh water and birdseed every day and cleaned his cage when it smelled. I used my babysitting money to buy him chew sticks and toys.

Sometimes I would liberate Tikki from his cage with an elaborate routine. First I would shut my door to keep him from escaping. Next I would put on a record and Tikki would sing along; he preferred the theme song from H.R. Pufnstuf. I would open his cage and put my finger next to his perch. He would hop on and I would ferry him out, then hold him close to my face so he could “kiss” my cheek with his beak. After stroking his soft feathers, I would toss my hand in the air, saying, “Fly free Tikki!” He would launch himself and circle above my head for several minutes before coming in for a landing on my bed. Tikki seemed to enjoy his freedom but also to understand when it was time to go back in his cage.

One day as Tikki circled around the room, he crashed into the wall with a thud and fell to the floor.

“Mommy!” I screamed. I knew if anyone could fix things, it was my mom.

She came running down the stairs and burst into my room. “Katie, what’s wrong?”

I pointed to the limp heap of green and yellow feathers that was now Tikki. My mom grabbed a towel from the bathroom, bundled Tikki gently into it, and drove us to the vet. In the passenger seat, I cradled the bundle in my lap and whispered, “Don’t die Tikki, please don’t die.”

The vet diagnosed a broken wing and said there was nothing he could do, but maybe the bird would heal on his own. A few days later, I found Tikki cold and stiff on the floor of his cage. After school that day, we held a funeral where I eulogized Tikki with a poem: “Tikki, a wonderous creature of the light, who now pursues his final flight.” We buried him in my mom’s garden under a forsythia bush.

Soon after the funeral, my mom asked, “Katie, would you like another bird for your birthday?”

“No, Mommy,” I said. I knew no bird could ever replace Tikki. Instead, I got a white mouse with red eyes and a long pink tail. I named him Mousie.

The Strays

When I was in high school, my youngest sister Anne started bringing home abandoned animals. Our next-door neighbors decided they no longer wanted their cats and Anne convinced my mom to adopt them. Thus the brother tabby cats Tom and Jerry joined our household. Anne was also responsible for our family’s next canine acquisition, a stray dog she named Bo. When Anne brought Bo home after he appeared at our cousins’ nearby farm, he had clearly suffered abuse: he had buckshot in both feet and was afraid of everything, including hairbrushes, bones, cats, leashes, loud noises, and people. Like Anne, my mom was a lifelong champion of the underdog; she worked for years for a human rights lawyer and helped him start a prisoners’ rights nonprofit. I think she was reluctant at first to commit to another dog due to the physical disruption and emotional risk. But she made it her personal mission to help Bo overcome his fears and give him the happy life he had previously been denied. I can see her on hands and knees on the kitchen floor, pretending to gnaw on a steak bone and crooning, “Yum yum yum, this bone is soooo good Bo, it’s delicious, come try it Bo,” while Bo growls and backs away. He never did learn to like bones but like all our dogs, he loved my mom best.

Bo’s name is worth mentioning. In ironic opposition to the homophonic “Beau,” he was quite homely: bullet-shaped with stubby legs, short black coarse fur that he shed all over the house, crooked teeth and terrible breath, and a nervous habit of licking his genitals (which may explain the breath). But Bo had a gentle spirit and was the most beloved of all our dogs. Bo saw himself as a mighty hunter who dreamed of catching a squirrel. The squirrels seemed to enjoy taunting him. They would hover near the base of a tree until he got close and then scamper up above his head, scolding while he barked and gazed longingly at his would-be prey. Unlike Bo, Tom and Jerry were excellent hunters who left frequent trophies—mouse tails, bird hearts and beaks—on our doormat. Thanks to the cats, Bo’s dream did come true in a way. One lucky day, one of the cats managed to catch and kill a squirrel. Bo, who happened to be nearby, claimed that squirrel as his own, carrying it into the house and dropping it proudly at my mom’s feet.

“Take it away!” my dad squealed as he tried to hide under the couch cushions.

“Oh Peter,” my mom said, and disposed of the carcass in the outside garbage can.

A few years later when my parents’ nest emptied of children, they sold their house and moved to a condo across town. Tom, the only surviving cat, went with them. They decided to send Bo to live with Jean in Virginia to give him a yard to run around in (even though by this time his running days were mostly over). Within a year, Bo was diagnosed with cancer, and Jean drove him back to Ohio so he could die in my mom’s loving care. Bo had one final adventure en route: during a night-time walk at a gas station in West Virginia, he fell into a briar patch. Jean climbed down in the dark to rescue him, and my mom spent the next few days picking briars out of Bo and Jean with a pair of tweezers.

Lucky Family

In September 2010, my sisters and I planned a surprise trip for my parents’ fiftieth anniversary. We told my parents to reserve that weekend and to pack their suitcases. We left behind our spouses, children, and pets. This would be the first trip with just the five of us in many years.

The three of us arrived at my parents’ condo that Friday afternoon wearing monster masks purchased by Jean at Target. My mom opened the door, shrieked, and bent over laughing.

“What have you done with my lovely daughters?” she said after she caught her breath.

“No questions Mom. Get in the car!” I said.

“Where are we going?” my mom asked.

“We are kidnapping you and Dad for the weekend. Get in the car, Mom!” Jean said.

They squeezed their suitcases into the already full trunk of Anne’s SUV and got in the back seat. Being Mom, she couldn’t help herself.

“Where are we going?” she tried one last time.

“No questions!” we shouted in unison. After a few hours on I-75 South, we were all delighted to arrive at Blackberry Farm in the Great Smoky Mountains.

That enchanted weekend we rode bikes down shady forest roads, did yoga in a gazebo overlooking the lake, shared funny stories from our childhood. We ate delicious farm-to-table meals in the beautiful renovated barn and ordered far too many bottles from the high-end wine list. Our last dinner culminated in a drunken almost-crash-into-a-tree laugh-until-you-wet-your-pants golf cart ride through the dark woods back to our cottages. As we headed back to our “real lives” the next morning, that weekend became our beacon. Surely nothing bad could ever happen to such a lucky family.

If this were a movie, such hubris would cue the ominous music that foreshadowed the plane crash, the deadly car accident, the child rushed to the hospital with a life-threatening illness. This was real life, not a movie, and of course thoughts don’t cause disasters. But within a few months, my mom was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer even though she had quit smoking thirty years before. She was dead in less than a year.

Mom, the last lesson you ever taught me is this: there are some losses you never get over.

 

Kate Levin (she/her/hers) is a writer and educator in New York City. She taught college English for many years and serves on nonprofit boards in education and the arts. She has published in academic and non-academic journals. She plays the violin, sings in choruses, and enjoys travel and theater.