The last duty of a loyal daughter is to empty the house of all that made it unique to one woman; to pare her mother's possessions, saving the keepsakes to be passed down to children and grandchildren.
On a bleak March morning chilled by a misty rain over Pawtuxet Village, Joanne Angeloro faced a closet jammed with her mother's blouses and dressy slacks. "It's weird," she said, softly. "I can picture her in these things." She pinched a cotton sweater at the shoulders and held it up. "I gave her this one." Carefully folded, the sweater went into a pile on the bed.
Joanne's daughter Kristine delicately packed the clothing into a bag. Some would go to family, most would be given away. Not to Salvation Army, because Joanne didn't want anyone to have to buy them. Not even for a dollar.
Joanne had counted on her practical side to get her through the work of cleaning out her mother's house. Her practicality comes from three decades of nursing, witnessing suffering and many deaths, and of accepting both as part of nature.
The house was mostly as her mother had left it -- the spice cabinet had that familiar combination of odors that reminded Joanne of her mother's cooking. The Irish Belleek porcelain was displayed on the mantelpiece, the framed snapshot of Joanne's brother Timmy, who died at 9 months in 1961, was on the piano, where her mother could always see it, though she would hardly ever talk about it. Only the houseplants were missing; Joanne had already rescued them. Her mother would not have wanted her plants abandoned -- she had too much pride in her green thumb.
Outside the window, Joanne could see the blacktop driveway down which she had followed her mother five weeks before, on their way to the emergency room. In the driveway that day, Joanne had been struck by a premonition: Mom will never be back here. Her mother died in the hospital six days later, on Feb. 16. The death of Sabine Cunningham, at 78, left Joanne without parents. At 51, she is the matriarch of her branch of the ever-widening family tree.
"Oh my god, jewelry," she said, pulling her hand from the pocket of a dark blazer. She inspected a handful of tiny ziplock bags, and said in a whisper of awe: "Oh my god! This is what we were looking for -- her engagement ring."
"Oh . . . my . . . god," Kristine echoed.
"I knew she had more good jewelry in the house but we couldn't find it. This is a hidden treasure." Not a treasure of money -- the engagement ring had no diamond -- but a treasure of memories.
For decades, Joanne had dreaded her parents' deaths. Her father, Joseph, died in 2003. Her mother beat breast cancer in 1970; survived ovarian cancer in 1991; lived through bladder cancer around 1993. Two years ago, Sabine Cunningham began to feel run down. It seemed at first like sadness from losing her husband, but the feeling got worse. She started having discomfort in her legs. Doctors diagnosed myelodysplasia, a bone marrow disorder. It progressed to leukemia.
Joanne was with her mother in late 2005 when the doctor put his hands on Sabine and told her -- tenderly, but to her face: We're all going to die of something and this is what you're going to die from.
Joanne can accept death when it comes for the right reasons. "When there is sickness and no quality of life left, I don't have a hard time with it." She misses her parents and some days are difficult, but she has accepted what is natural. "I'm almost embarrassed to say it, but I'm OK."
Her mother accepted her own death, and chose not to delay it. The day Joanne took Sabine to the hospital, x-rays showed pneumonia. Sabine Cunningham had been a nurse; she knew what the diagnosis meant. She knew that in the best case, her life, the short amount she might have left, would revolve around drugs and platelet transfusions. She knew she would never again feel well enough to be alive. "It was," Joanne said, "a miserable diagnosis."
Sabine told her daughter: I don't want to do this anymore . . . I want to die.
The family was supportive when Sabine refused antibiotics -- it was not as if she were going to get better. She had spoken to a priest. Joanne had told her mother: Go be with dad, he's waiting for you up there.
Finding her mother's treasured ring hidden in a coat pocket was a scare. "That was a lesson," Joanne told her daughter. "We need to shake stuff."
They pulled tissues from the pockets of a pair of slacks. "When we were growing up there was five of us kids and there wasn't much money," Joanne said, thinking out loud about her mom. "She had one nice outfit she'd call her uniform. When she went out she'd say, 'I'll just put my uniform on.' "
In the pocket of a red blazer they found more tissues and the program for the St. Luke Christmas concert, Dec. 18, 2005. There were more tissues in a pair of tan corduroys. The tissues piled onto the bed. "Ah, I can just picture her in all these clothes," Joanne said.
She could not part with two of her mother's bathrobes. "We'll bring them down to the beach house," she told Kristine. They found two scratched-up emery boards in a shirt pocket. The pile of tissues grew.
"Oh yeah, this is the blouse she wore on Christmas," Kristine said.
"That's her Christmas blouse," Joanne confirmed.
"Remember her and granddad dancing all around your house?"
Yes, Joanne remembered. It was her father's last Christmas. Her parents had danced to a Burt Bacharach album. Joseph Cunningham had been ill that year, but he could still move. What a graceful dancer. He won father-daughter dance contests with all three of his girls. Joanne still has her trophy.
Funny thing, memory; it attaches itself to the most ordinary things. Sabine Cunningham had kept her late husband's shaving mug in the medicine cabinet, where it had always been. The family had grown up eating from a set of simple yellow cereal bowls, and Sabine's house still had one of them. Joanne figured everybody in the family wanted that bowl as a keepsake. And there was her mother's humble aluminum measuring cup, dented from decades of service. "It's got my mother's name all over it," Joanne said. "My sister said the same thing -- that same measuring cup, she probably got it the day she got married."
Joanne became emotional at seeing her mother's makeup and hair dryer. Those were personal things, unique to one woman. But they are just things, like any of her possessions, valuable only for the memories. Sabine Cunningham left behind people, too. She had called her five children "my monuments." Joanne was touched by how many relatives looked up to her mother as the family sage. Sabine was wise and practical. She dispensed sensible advice based on morality and experience. This is the first duty of the matriarch.
Your turn: How have you handled the death of a parent?
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