Mama Bigfoot 1937-2018

I have stepped from away blogging for the past few days to travel to Virginia to pay my last respects to my mother, who passed away from a heart attack this past Monday.  Later that afternoon, I got a call from one of my brothers.  Because this is unusual for us this time of year, I could pretty much sense that he had some bad news.  According to my siblings, Mom had checked herself into a hospital about a week earlier.

We had two viewings this past Thursday and the funeral yesterday, for which I was a pallbearer, as I had been for my father in 2013.  For the viewings, we found about 10 photos from Mom's life, including one from her and Dad's wedding and one of them about to go on a date.  The viewings and funeral were attended by friends and co-workers of my siblings, some out-of-town relatives, and some of the same neighbors who had shown up for Dad.  One relative was a cousin I had not seen since the late 1980's, at her home in Pennsylvania.

Mom was born during the Great Depression and the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, and lived to see a president younger than her first two children, and even to see him step down.  Her father was coal miner and her mother was housewife.  She was the middle of three sisters, who also had an older brother.  About two years after she graduated high school, she married an older alumnus from the same school, who had gone to work in western New York State.  Other than during a one-year hiatus in Connecticut, they raised six children in New York.  In 1975, due to Dad changing jobs, we all moved to Virginia, where most of my siblings still live.

For brief time after we moved, Mom did some volunteer work at an elementary school which my younger siblings attended.  During her later years, she would knit afghans, scarves, hats, and other things that through her church were given to the needy.  She was also adept at crocheting and needlepoint.  Mom certainly knew how to cook, whether the food was American, Italian, or east European.  In fact, one time I ate some potato pancakes that were exactly like Mom used to make - in Zakopane, Poland.  This is remarkable because she wasn't even Polish.  She was mostly Slovak, with some traces of Hungarian.  I figure that in the town my parents come from, those recipes must have been tossed around among the various ethnic communities.

Mom was preceded in death by her parents, her husband, her brother, and her older sister, and is survived by her six children, her six grandchildren, and her younger sister.  Although her death was sudden, we comforted to know she lived a long life of 80 years.  As I noted after my father's passing, not all of us have both parents around as we get into our 50's.  Losing a parent is not something people generally look forward to, but under normal circumstances, we go through this loss twice.

My mother and her siblings had one such loss very early.  She was only 7 when their father passed away.  I don't know the cause of his death, but in those days, coal mining was not without health risks (and I'm sure it's not totally risk-free today).  I've long known that the men who mined coal were (and presumably still are) made of stern stuff, and so were the women who cooked with coal-fired stoves, my grandmother included.  But even so, all of us leave this earthly existence sooner or later.

I see that things have continued to go on during my brief hiatus.  I'll be digging through that and posting some it here very soon.