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My sister posted some entries from my mom’s 1972 diary… I had been told that my mom was pregnant with me for 10 months… I guess they thought she was pregnant when she wasn’t yet, so it just made it all that much longer. Of course, except for the month of April last year, I’ve been pregnant since last January… Anyway, Maria typed this up:

1/31: …by the size thinks I won’t be due until the end of June or (groan) even early July.
2/14: Mom called them “grammom and grampop”*
4/3: he finally heard baby’s heartbeat & on that basis alone declared me to be 5 mos gone with baby due end of July early August. He’s got to be kidding.
7/16: 6 lbs 7 1/2 ounces

*But on 2/17/65 she called them Grandmom & Grandpop (This is a debate we’ve had… I spell it “Grammom” and “Grampop” and Maria doesn’t.

From a 1965 diary entry, Mom quoted the first two lines of this poem:
I Slept, and Dreamed that Life was Beauty
I slept, and dreamed that life was Beauty;
I woke, and found that life was Duty.
Was thy dream then a shadowy lie?
Toil on, sad heart, courageously,
And thou shalt find thy dream to be
A noonday light and truth to thee.
–Ellen Sturgis Hooper

On a related note, the midwife I saw the other night (who had not looked at my chart) asked me if I asked my mother how her labors went. :-/

As I’m scanning away at work, I’m going through emails looking for recipes folks have emailed me. I found this email that has nothing to do with recipes. It is in response to an email my brother sent me last year, asking me to talk about my mom and her love of music. I think he was working on a book about his life and music, I’m not sure what’s become of that. He asked certain questions, like “What was her favorite place?” so some of my comments are direct answers to his questions. I thought I’d post it since I can find it easier here.

I don’t think she had a favorite place. Our house was small. She probably felt most comfortable in the kitchen (which was also our eating/dining room), talking on the phone to Grammom, something she did every single day. The living room may have been comfortable for her, and the bedroom, but not while Dad was there. I don’t think she had a favorite place at her parent’s house. Obviously, one of those rooms was hers growing up, but I never saw her get nostalgic for that house.

Mom hated driving. There were long periods of time when she had double vision, and would drive around with one eye closed, singing the Foreigner song. Even though she hated driving, my biggest memories of
her (besides the bedridden dying memories at the end), are of her driving. She hated driving, but she liked roadtrips. We would go out for Sunday drives, rambling around Berks County. She would get frustrated when other motorists tailgated or drove aggressively, and she would always exclaim, “What ever happened to Sunday Drivers?!”

Sometimes we drove much farther… I remember ending up in Wilmington, Delaware one night, and possibly that very same night we drove to New York, crossed the Tappan Zee bridge and came home. Because my memories are from the car, I do have a soundtrack in my head to go along with it. Some are my own– listening to New Order or XTC on my little boom box. Some are from the radio.

You say that she liked the lighter side of the British Invasion, but after I was born, and she discovered AOR and classic rock, she certainly did like the Kinks and the Who. I think it was Mom who taped Tommy off the radio…

One time, I was away from home for a few hours– maybe I slept over at Melissa’s, or maybe I was just there for the day. I called Mom, and she was listening to some music. I asked what it was, and she wouldn’t tell me– she played the @#$% guessing game. I had no clue what it was. I told her it sounded like COUNTRY (which at that time was the biggest insult I could hurl). It turned out that it was Hayfever from The Kinks’ Misfits LP.

There was a SNL phony ad for an album of songs from commercials, featuring “that nike song” (revolution) and they also made up some songs… “We gotta get outta this place… and take a trip to the Poconos”… that was a Mom favorite. I can see her singing it in the car at the Muhlenberg Shopping Plaza. She sang it a lot. Just that one line.

Dad loved music as well. Dad knows all the oldies. Turn on the oldies station, and he’ll start singing along… Return to Sender, Two Faces have I, Volare. But Dad’s love of music swung more towards Goofy Greats… I’m looking over my dead dog rover… He also loved ABBA, and when we saw Mamma Mia the other week, I realized he knew all the songs.
Dad passed that goofy great love to Maria. We all have it, but Maria has it the most with her Filking friends. I am sure she’s the one who taught me little bunny foofoo.

Yes, we had a lot of XMAS albums. I still have them. They were probably 1/4 of the collection. When you were growing up, maybe it was closer to half of the collection. I grew up in the Queen era.
Mom was obsessive. She was also a hopeless romantic. She developed terrible crushes on people– from Freddie Mercury, to her Psychology teacher, to Bono, to that kid who played on the Temple A’s.

Don’t forget that she indulged a 6 year olds music obsession– she took me to see Rod Stewart’s Blondes Have More Fun tour.

The washer dryer didn’t break as much later on. We got a new one in 1982 or 83. She still liked to yell at the dishes. She also liked to listen to whatever crap I had on the TV– a lot of Brady Bunch. The kitchen table was the desk for all of us. We didn’t have any room in our rooms. I think I remember Maria doing her College Applications there. I wrote my Chekhov paper there, and mom helped me win all those science fairs there.

Who did the Englebert Humperdinck records belong to??? And she had all those Elvis 45s– the country songs. I am fairly sure she went to see Tom jones with Carla P, but that was before I was born?? Carla
also made us go see Marty Robbins in Lancaster or somewhere. Right before he died. Mom went to see Ricky Nelson with Beaver too. Oh, When did Party Doll come out? I think when mom was in high school, she
had a little bit of a bad girl streak that she mentioned to me– she liked some bad boy, and I think that song was involved. She also told me about some guy… do you remember the story about the guy going nuts
and swinging a machete around? I don’t remember what that was about, but he was her friend at some point, and he thought she had nerdy friends, but he came over to her house, or a friends house, and one of moms friends– maybe Morris B, probably not Ellis, played “Who put the bop in the bopshbopshbop” on piano, and he thought he was cool… I don’t know what the hell you can do with that story….

Mom is the one who turned me on to Howard Stern. I was still listening to the Morning Zoo, and she was listening to Howard on her way home from work in the car. He was always interviewing 60s music icons..
Moody Blues, the Kinks, etc.

When we got MTV, John Waite had that big hit. Mom would look at him, and say, “Oh, he’s from the Babies”– WTF? who were the babies?? She had some weird musical knowledge from somewhere– must have been the Circus mags. I feel like she also was very familiar with early Elvis Costello… How could that
be?? from you?? Was Oliver’s Army a hit?

I remember she thought the Housemartins “People who grinned themselves to death” was REALLY good. She liked U2 of course. I think she enjoyed INXS when I liked them so much… She did not enjoy the fact that I played “Shivers” by the Boys Next door (Nick cave) over and over… “I’ve been contemplating suicide… but it really doesn’t suit my style.”

When she was dying in the hospital bed in the apartment, the U2 song “One” was a huge MTV hit. She mumbled about how the whining was driving her nuts… she didn’t realize it was U2 or Bono.

Nobody ever thought she had anything benign. They couldn’t do her bronchoscopy in 1984, and then, in the fall of 1986, right after Dad moved out, they sent her for a biopsy. It was within weeks of him moving out. The biopsy was never “benign”– it didn’t look like cancer, but it was definitely something, so they called it sarcoidosis.
They never called it anything else, until the autopsy. Can you believe she lived for 8 years (or more) with untreated cancer? Holy shit! That cancer wasn’t meant to kill her if they had treated it right in the first place! (but that’s my story… you can have the music, I get the medical/environmental story).

I grew up in a suburban housing development known as Cherokee Ranch, just north of Reading, Pennsylvania. One block away from our home was Cabot Berylco, a company that produced beryllium, a metallic element used as a component in steel. Our proximity to the plant was always a concern. My mother clipped and saved articles from the Reading Eagle/Times, which reported not only on the constant environmental violations of the plant, but more poignantly on the people affected by berylliosis, a lung disease caused by beryllium. The articles told of a woman contracting the disease after visiting the cemetery next to the factory every week, and of a young mother who contracted the disease after working as a secretary for another beryllium factory near Reading.

When my mother started coughing incessantly, her doctors performed a biopsy. The results were negative for cancer, but also negative for berylliosis. She was diagnosed with sarcoidosis, a disease that cannot be concretely diagnosed. After suffering with other illnesses most of her life, including kidney disease and myasthenia gravis, she lived for eight years with this diagnosis of sarcoidosis. Before she died at age forty-nine, she made me promise to have an autopsy done, so we would finally know what had killed her.

Expecting to hear that beryllium had been the cause, I was confused when the cause of death was ruled to be malignant lymphoma of the lungs. Experts reviewed her medical records and found that although she had lymphoma all along, it was impossible to diagnosis in her first biopsy. I wondered if the beryllium could be the cause of the cancer. Information I’ve found about beryllium disease does not link it to malignant lymphoma. In 1999, after reading yet another article about berylliosis in the Reading papers, I contacted a doctor at Penn who is a beryllium expert. He wished to meet with me to discuss my mother’s case. I regret that I never set up a time to meet with him. I had just returned to college full-time and feared that talking about my mother’s illness might interfere with the completion of my degree.

Now that I have earned my degree in American Studies, I am ready to focus on documenting my personal experience with my mother’s death and its possible connection to the toxic pollution in Cherokee Ranch. I find myself reading autobiographies looking for others who have experienced situations close to my own. I would like to develop an article, possibly for publication. In order to do this I need to become more comfortable with my own writing. I would like to learn interviewing techniques so that I can comfortably contact the physician at Penn, as well as the residents of Cherokee Ranch—although we were neighbors, we are essentially strangers that share a common bond.

–
I wrote this for an environmental writing class I signed up for in 2001, but didn’t finish. I did however meet the Penn doctor for lunch one day. It was very awkward– when I contacted him in the first place, he suggested going out to lunch to talk– he was very interested. When we went out, we went to a place that was a little pricey for me (and I paid my share), and he acted like he didn’t know where Cherokee Ranch was, and essentially told me there was no connection between beryllium and cancer.