Bringing Mother's Father Back to Life

          Now that I'm in touch with Christine Rheims of the Paris YMCA, I feel that I've resurrected Granddad Robison, someone Mom really loved.  I think the connection between her father and a city she loved would make Mom really happy.  She knew about her parents' travels in Paris and other cities in Europ in 1920, a year before they adopted her, but I'm not sure how much she knew about her father's work at the YMCA during World War I.

           I commented earlier that in the obituary I never explained the reason that I identified Mom’s parents as her adoptive parents.  It wasn’t to distinguish them from “real” parents.  Adoptive parents are very real.  Whoever loves and cares for a child is the real parent.  I said adoptive parents because later in her life we found four siblings my mother, brought up as an only child, didn’t know she had.  I couldn’t go into detail about how much she loved her (adoptive) father, whose grocery store in Los Angeles went out of business as supermarkets prevailed and who went door to door during the Depression trying to sell products as a Fuller Brush man but not succeeding because he was too honest and gentle to push his customers, also struggling in the Depression, into buying something they didn’t need.  Mom loved him and admired him precisely because of his kindness and his putting human connectedness ahead of success. 

           In the obituary I couldn’t describe the hours I spent with my mother after she had dementia and a fear of leaving home—except one Friday when she realized that she hadn’t responded to Nancy Pelosi’s request for a donation for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the urgency to save the country helped Mom overcome her agoraphobia.  But when Mom felt that she couldn’t leave the house, that gave me more time to be with her, this mother whose life was so active that we had to be sure she didn’t “have other plans” for Mother’s Day. Once Mom was house-bound, I could visit her more often.  At first we made a ritual on Friday afternoons of filling out a memory book called The Story of a Lifetime.  It was a personal history that included periods of our national history.