The Story of Her Life

My mother, Thelma Louise Kathman Hawthorne, died on Sunday, Jan. 20 of congestive heart failure. She was 90 years old. 

This is an amended version of the eulogy I gave at her funeral, around 2:30 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 23 at the Lakeview Funeral Home in Longview, Texas.

 

On behalf of my brothers and the other members of the family, I want to thank you for being here today to join us in the celebration of the life of Thelma Louise Kathman Hawthorne. She is the last of her generation — both sides of the family — to go.

But enough of that. Let’s begin with an amusing anecdote.

Jerry and Kay visited Mom Sunday. That was the day she died. Anyway, they came into her room, and Mom looked up and said to Kay, who had had the flu for the past week or more: “You look worse than I do.”

That was vintage Mom. Tactful to a fault, and a person who didn’t know her better might have taken offense. Of course, Kay didn’t. She laughed. She knew Mom was joking.

Who knew that with just hours left to live, Mom would tell a joke.

•••

If you’re here, you probably knew Mom too, so I’m not going to tell you much you don’t already know, but I feel some of this must be said again. We must be reminded that my mother gave far more than she got.

She was the fourth of four. An accident, she told me, and she was largely ignored by her parents. She grew up during the worst of the Depression and the Dust Bowl, a shy, studious, beautiful girl who somehow managed to be virtually invisible among her 20 or 30 classmates at Muenster High.

She wasn’t a joiner. She was never a social butterfly. She liked to read.

After high school, she attended Nurses Cadet School in Fort Worth and would have been inducted into the U.S. Army had we not dropped the atomic bombs on the Japs, whom Mom never really forgave or trusted. She was also suspicious of Yankees.

She met my father through a mutual friend, and they married on Dec. 12, 1948 and, over the course of the next nine years, produced four sons who seemed to search valiantly for ways to complicate and impoverish her life. 

We threw baseballs through patio windows. 

We knocked holes in walls. 

We once cracked a coffee table in half while horsing around in the living room.

When I was a high school senior, I drove my Ford 150 through the plate glass window of Paul’s Grill at or around 2 a.m. after, three hours earlier, assuring her that I was home and on my way to bed.

 

[Read “The Gospel According to Paul’s Grill.” It's on my blog: Endless Rain Into a Paper Cup. Google it.]

 

How she maintained her sanity through all of this and more should be the subject of a dozen psychology dissertations.
•••

To the naked eye, my mother appeared hard, mean. Our girlfriends were often terrified of her.

Cheryl told me, “At first, I thought she hated me.”

We all did at one time or the other, Cheryl. Welcome to the family.

She could eviscerate a person with “The Look.”
Sabrina Jett was about as strong and willful a person as I've met, but she cowered when Mom shot her “The Look.”

I have an old friend who wrote me this morning, “She was one of the most daunting people I’ve ever met: that instant feeling of “Well, what the hell did I do to YOU?” followed by a spell of wondering if she could see through my facade straight to my rotten core. At first, I tried to put a large piece of furniture between us.”

How many of you have gotten “The Look.” How she’d squint and cut her eyes and purse her lips, and you knew she was thinking, “If I have to tell you one more time…”

We heard that a lot. We heard these a lot too: “It ain’t been done since I did it last,” as in “That sink hasn't been cleaned since I cleaned it last.”

And when something went haywire, and it often did, she would say, “Well, that’s the story of my life.”

••• 

The irony is that my mother was not hard. She was not mean. She was, by nature, a gentle person. She had a sweet soul. 

Life made her seem hard. 

Life made her appear mean. 

But she was neither.

As we know, nature can be cruel. It was occasionally cruel to Mom. It forced her to be strong and willful. She had no choice but to fight or surrender, and she was not a quitter.

Without her strength, without her determination, who knows how we’d have turned out? We were not “Father Knows Best” or “Leave it to Beaver,” but we weren’t “Beavis and Butthead” either. She would not have it. 

Of course, no good deed goes unpunished, and she endured all kinds of incidents, accidents and indignities along the way, but she persevered. She survived, and she made sure we did as well. 

Mom was forced to steer a leaky life-boat crammed with surly, burly ungrateful bonehead boys into the teeth of one storm after another in search of the blue skies and calm waters she rarely saw until well past middle age.

If this made her seem stern, it wasn’t her choice or intention. It wasn’t her true nature.

 •••

This was mother’s true nature.

• She loved music. She introduced us to Glenn Miller and Nat King Cole and Rosemary Clooney and Johnny Mathis and Jim Reeves and the Mills Brothers and, most importantly, to me, anyway, Show Boat and “Ol’ Man River.”

In 1963, she bought me my first 45 record: Anita Bryant singing, “My Little Corner of the World.”

In February of 1964, she bought me my first Beatle record ­— the single Love Me Do on the A-side and P.S. I Love You on the B-side. Then, she took me to see A Hard Day’s Night at the Arlene Theatre, then she bought me the soundtrack.

She was working furiously, almost desperately, to put beans in a bowl and on the table, and yet, she found money to do that for me because she could tell that I loved music as much as she did. What a fierce act of generosity.

I think it might also have been a fierce act of passive-aggression. My dad hated the Beatles, start-to-finish.

• Mom loved books. At one point, she must have had 20 Zane Grey novels lined up on a shelf. We didn’t have much, but she made sure we had a set of the World Book Encyclopedia. 

Over the years, she and Kenny shared and devoured every one of the James Patterson and David Baldacci novels, and there must be at least 300 of them.

• Mom loved crossword puzzles. Most days, she could solve the New York Times puzzle in under an hour. By the way, she read the newspaper, every story, every day. She would spend more time with the Monday edition of the Longview Morning Journal than I do with the Sunday edition of The New York Times.

• Mom loved movies, especially Katherine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart and “The African Queen,” and Betty Davis in “All About Eve,” and Susan Hayward in “With A Song in My Heart,” and, of course, Clark Gable as Rhett Butler in “Gone With the Wind.” 

Every year, she’d take us to see “Gone With the Wind” on the big screen, and to this day, the church bells, the trill and the crescendo of the opening song almost brings me to my knees.

She loved musicals with happy endings and sprite songs you could whistle to, like "Singing in the Rain" and "The Sound of Music" She loved westerns starring John Wayne and Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart. She and I watched “From Here to Eternity” maybe three or four times. We watched "Casablanca" a half dozen at least. We watched "The Wizard of Oz" every time it came on, and while I'd get terrified by the Wicked Witch of the West and teary-eyed at the end, she'd sit in her lounger, stoic, probably wishing Toto would pop out of the screen and leap in her lap. Maybe she wished she had that little girl wearing the ruby slippers to hold and comfort.

• Mom loved to cook, and she could do more with less than anyone I’ve ever known. We grew up on tuna casseroles and spaghetti and salmon patties and fried chicken and chicken fried steak and meatloaf and somehow never tired of them.

Granted, a few of her dishes were more popular than others. We loved her “Hot Heroes.” but not everyone did. They’re like pizza on a slice of bread.

She loved sweets, and she especially loved baking Rio Lace cookies, which are more addictive than Mexican tar heroin. They’re nothing but butter, sugar, pecans and a sprinkle of oatmeal. When she knew I was coming home, she’d bake a batch of them, and I would eat almost every one. If I die of diabetes, it’ll be her fault.

Again, there a few failures. Remember those fruit cocktail cookies? They were horrible, but she made them every year for 15 years, and I doubt 15 of them were ever eaten. Even the dogs wouldn’t eat them.

“Just make Rio Lace cookies instead,” we’d cry, but the next Christmas, more fruit cocktail cookies, and they’d go uneaten until they hardened and crumbled to dust.

She also tried to force us to eat butter beans, beets, turnips and that God-awful La Choy Chop Suey that came in a box. She would stir in celery and onion and rake into a paste. Then we had a choice: eat it or sit there and go hungry.  

I think someone eventually determined it was good in the treatment of open wounds. 

But that aside, my mother was a great in the kitchen.

 

• Mom loved her grandchildren and her great grandchildren. They were a source of endless joy.

She also loved Doniece and David, and we are forever grateful for the kindness and love and the million or so things you did for her in the final years of her life.

 

• Mom loved to give. 

Every Christmas, she insisted on buying every child and grandchild — even my two step-children — a Christmas gift. My step-children were raised Jewish, which is neither here nor there, but I told her at a hundred times, “Mom, you don’t need to buy me or anyone else a Christmas gift. Save your money. Buy yourself something.” 

I might as well have told Jerry to vote for Hillary Clinton. She was determined to buy a Christmas gift for every kid, and she put considerable time and effort and thought into selecting that gift, and if you couldn’t figure out why she purchased this or that for you, then too bad. Your loss. Not her's.

For years, she would slip a 10-dollar bill in my birthday card. We had an unspoken agreement. I’d send her fifty, and she’d send me ten. I have one of her cards, along with two 5 dollar bills and one 10 dollar bill, framed and hanging on the wall of my office at home.

My daughter, Sarah, will inherit them, and then her daughter, Violet, will get them, and it be accompanied, I hope, by a copy of this eulogy, in which I shall now explain why they mean so much to me. 

It’s because Mom knew the value of 10 dollars. When I was seven or eight, I lost a 50-piece I’d somehow obtained, and when I gave up on ever finding it, I shrugged and said something along the lines of, “Oh, well, you can’t buy anything for 50 cents anyway.”

I knew immediately I had screwed up. Call it a "faux Ma." 
Mom shot me “The Look,” and then she curtly informed me that “50 cents could purchase a loaf of bread or a half-gallon of milk, and by the way, young man, one day, you might be damn glad to have a loaf of bread or a half-gallon of milk.”

Again, she was a child of the Depression, so she saved everything, just in case.

It irritated her to no end when I would rummage through her cabinets and desk drawers and closets and toss out bales of those return mail stickers that come with solicitation letters for orphans and wounded veterans. Once, I clawed through her VHS collection and found four copies of “My Fair Lady,” so I took two of them — not both of them; only two of them — to Goodwill because (1) she didn’t own a VHS player and (2) she had three versions of “My Fair Lady” on DVD. 

This drove her mad. After I returned to Austin, she complained to anyone who would listen how I had wantonly thrown away all of her movies and all of her records, and most of her pots and pie pans and spoons and cups and glasses and scissors and playing cards and casserole dishes and boxes of cereal and bags of sugar and flour and canisters or jars or bottles of mystery mush, which she had planned to use that very day.

If it was lost, she assumed I had thrown or given it away, without her consent or knowledge. I had cleaned her out.

For example, maybe five years ago, she owned at least 30 coffee mugs. So, I asked her, “Serving a lot of coffee these days?”

Well, that earned me a glare.

So, I added, “Why don’t we get rid of some these old ones — you know, the strays and chipped and stained ones — and just keep the nice ones, and that way, you’ll have more room up here for your 22 pie pans.”

Before she could catch me, I culled out about 15, and I was very proud of myself.

“Look Mom! You have space in your kitchen cabinet!”

That afternoon, she and I went to Drug Emporium to pick up one of her prescriptions, and I looked up, and she was about to buy another damn coffee cup because it was on sale. Only one dollar. It would make a fine Christmas gift.

 •••

Well, that was Mom. 

I hope one of the lesser perks of heaven is being reacquainted with all of the cookbooks, and coffee mugs and CDs and videotapes and address labels that I threw away or gave away against her will. It would mean, she truly is in paradise.

And I hope Nugget and Lil ‘Bit are sitting in her lap.

And I hope her parents are there too, and they are telling her something she probably never heard from them, ever: “We love you.”

And I hope her sisters, Bernice and Dorothy, and her older brother, Frank, are with her, and they’re sitting around the kitchen table in Dorothy and Paul’s old farmhouse, sipping coffee and talking and laughing. I hope Aunt Nora and Aunt Frances are there too.

Actually, I hope this is happening right now, at this very second.

Because she deserves to be happy and sweet and gentle for a long, long time.

She’s earned it. She gave far more than she got.

You want to know the story of her life? That is the story of your life.

So, rest in peace, Mom. Thank you for your strength and guidance. Thank you for the music and the movies and the Rio Lace cookies and the business card holder.

We love you, and we promise to stay in touch.