Part 3 - Hazel's Life after Dad Died in 1985

Dad died in 1985. Mom was 71 years old, my age as I write this. She was alone for the first time in her life, and in shock for sometime afterward. Don and Ellie had recently lost their farm in Wisconsin, had moved to New Orleans, and arrived there only a few days before his passing. They dropped everything and headed to Kokomo. I took a day to arrange for a substitute before boarding a plane for home.

Mom lived another fourteen years without Dad. I think several of those years were pretty lonely especially the first and final few. She visited Don and Ellie in New Orleans, and came up to Alaska, but was kind of a lost sole in both places. She had lived in Kokomo since 1937, but life around town seemed alien to her after he passed.

The trouble with living a long life is that you out-live most everyone else. One of her friends sat in the front row at Dad’s funeral. I no longer remember her name, Bernice maybe, but she and Mom had been the best of buddies since the sixties, did a lot of things together. The woman had emphysema, and breathed with difficulty. I heard that she passed a short time later.

Mom was the last of her generation to go. She outlived her three brothers, and Dad’s four siblings - family members of whom I’d known from my beginning.

Three or four years passed. I visited for a week every year of so, cleaned gutters and did needed repairs around the house. We tried the Senior Center for lunch a couple times, but she didn’t seem to know any one there. We went to a Unitarian Church service. She liked it and continued to attend till summer recess, but never went back when they commenced in the fall. She lived in her bedroom with the television on 24/7. On visits I often crept into the room to turn off the blaring TV after she had gone to sleep. The TV was her constant companion in those days. The bedroom and kitchen became all she needed and were the only rooms she went into.

Then things changed for her in the next year. One night she called me, said she had been out with a couple old friends, a rare occasion. The three had a couple of drinks and Mom’s voice possessed a bit of an uncharacteristic slur. We talked on for a while, then the phone line went silent for a short spell, and then Mom blurted out, “What would you think if I got myself a boy friend?” In-a-way she was asking my permission, would it be alright with me? If I had said something like, “You don’t want to do that.”, she would have dropped the subject and I’d have never heard anything more about it. I said, “That sounds like a good idea to me”. I consider that to have been one of the wisest and most thoughtful statements I’ve made in my life.
GO TO: Part 4 - Hazel's Life After She Renewed an Old Friendship