Meeting My Mother’s Past During the Pandemic

By Liza Marshall

Editor’s Note: For Mother’s Day 2021, we are happy to celebrate by posting this touching blog.

After spending the first several months of the pandemic baking, cleaning, organizing, and catching up on long-postponed chores, I found myself at loose ends. I needed a new project and found it in the boxes and trunks overflowing with family papers and photos, containers I had stashed away in my attic, my basement, a closet or two.

Over the last nine years, my parents have transitioned from their home of 40 years to independent living in a continuing care community, to assisted living, and finally to two adjacent nursing home rooms. Their mementos moved to my house for storage and eventual sorting, and on about Day 45 of the pandemic, I screwed my courage to the sticking point, lugged multiple boxes of varying color, size, and structural integrity into my son’s former bedroom, and settled onto the floor. With those actions, I joined scores of other children of elderly parents, who have embarked on a kind of forced personal archeological expedition into a time when people still wrote letters and collected snapshots.

In many ways, the vast newfound stretches of time the pandemic may have offered me and my family was a devastating blow to my mother. Five months before the lockdown, my father died at 91, and my mother’s health and mental clarity deteriorated. She is 91, beset by numerous physical problems and dementia. The last year has evoked in her both rebellion and rage at the new restrictions and an emotional volatility exacerbated by the fact that she can’t remember why those restrictions exist at all. The pandemic and my father’s death left her desperately and almost completely alone. Not that theirs was a happy marriage. Far from it. Most of the years I saw them together were marked by tension and a pervasive sense of disappointment.

After lockdown, the facility in which my mother lives joined the rest of the world on Zoom, with the staff compassionately engineering calls for everyone who wanted them. My sister and I scheduled them as frequently as possible. My mother was pleased to see our faces and, if nothing else, to have a new audience for her railings against “their ridiculous rules.”

As the weeks wore on, as one box was sorted and another opened, I became enmeshed in the past. I was introduced to the mother I never actually knew. In 1944, her father was assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Honduras. The family decided my mother should spend the last two years of high school attending Glynn Academy in their hometown of Brunswick, Georgia. This decision led to a remarkably detailed record of my mother’s life at the end of World War II and the beginning of her flowering into womanhood. Who was this person who had a crush on the high school football star—never stated explicitly but obvious from the frequent mentions of his doings, both on and off the gridiron? Another surprise was a cheeky essay entitled “Teachers I Have Known,” which caused my rule-following mother to warn her parents to “prepare themselves for the shock,” because it may lead to her expulsion after she read it in class. My mother, with her longstanding contempt of her husband’s and daughters’ sports fandom, turned out to have attended every one of her high school’s football games, enthusiastically reporting the scores and the plays to her parents.

She had friends, which seemed to surprise even her. “I didn’t use [sic] to care if I ever saw people. I’d just as soon sit at home alone and read anyway. Now I’m really unhappy unless I’ve seen or been with some of the people at school.” She described her agony and embarrassment at having to invite boys to school dances, ranking the possibilities from football heroes down to second cousins.

My lockdown routine became mornings spent with my mother’s younger self, with afternoons in Zoom chats with her in her room. Over time, I began to see two people simultaneously: on the screen was an angry, depressed old woman, while on crinkly yellowed paper and in fading black and white photographs appeared a girl and young woman full of love and laughter and adventure.

Sometimes, a third woman emerged, the one I had known during my own childhood, a woman who disdained many things that were important to me in my teenage years — boys, sports, teen novels, rock music, and any kind of sentimentality—including expressions of affection between us. How could they all be the same person?

As summer began, I came across what was, for me, a great treasure. It caught my eye because unlike most of my mother’s letters, which she wrote on a typewriter, this one was handwritten on lined notebook paper. I unfolded it and read the familiar salutation, “Dear Mommie and Poppie,” but what followed was a revelation. My mother joyfully announced her “pinning” by my father.

Of all the objects of disdain in my mother’s life, my father seemed to occupy the top of that list. I remember a bit of mutual affection in my younger years, but by the time I was a teenager, my parents’ relationship felt anything but loving, evinced in my mother’s frequent curt tone in addressing my father, the sour face, the separate bedrooms. Yet in her letter to her parents, my mother said that despite the fact that she had known my father for only six months, he was The One.

I knew that they must have loved each other once, and I know that the exhilaration of the first flush of love disappears as years progress. But to feel my mother’s happiness coursing through the paragraphs uncovered a person I had known all my life but had never really known. To know that my parents had loved each other like this transformed the more depressing narrative I had accepted as fact.

But where did that girl go? Why did all the love and promise and capacity for joy disappear? The person in these letters was not the mother I knew, nor was theirs the relationship with my father I had observed. I mourned for both of them: Not only did the shared joy of their early love peter out, but any love for each other seemed to dissipate over the years. How much happier they both might have been had they been able to hold onto some of that original affection and sympathy for each other.

“I might add that I have never been so completely happy in my life,” my mother wrote as she finished announcing she had been pinned, “which I consider to have been an unusually happy one.” My mother happy? Because of my father? This was nearly incomprehensible to me, and yet, there it was. After reading those words, I looked at my mother on the computer screen, a hive of frustration and anger in her current state. I thought about my parent’s resolute but apparently loveless marriage. What might all our lives have been had she been able sustain just a few of those warm feelings over the decades? And, I wondered, what would she say if I reminded her of them?

After spending the first several months of the pandemic baking, cleaning, organizing, and catching up on long-postponed chores, I found myself at loose ends. I needed a new project and found it in the boxes and trunks overflowing with family papers and photos, containers I had stashed away in my attic, my basement, a closet or two.

Over the last nine years, my parents have transitioned from their home of 40 years to independent living in a continuing care community, to assisted living, and finally to two adjacent nursing home rooms. Their mementos moved to my house for storage and eventual sorting, and on about Day 45 of the pandemic, I screwed my courage to the sticking point, lugged multiple boxes of varying color, size, and structural integrity into my son’s former bedroom, and settled onto the floor. With those actions, I joined scores of other children of elderly parents, who have embarked on a kind of forced personal archeological expedition into a time when people still wrote letters and collected snapshots.

In many ways, the vast newfound stretches of time the pandemic may have offered me and my family was a devastating blow to my mother. Five months before the lockdown, my father died at 91, and my mother’s health and mental clarity deteriorated. She is 91, beset by numerous physical problems and dementia. The last year has evoked in her both rebellion and rage at the new restrictions and an emotional volatility exacerbated by the fact that she can’t remember why those restrictions exist at all. The pandemic and my father’s death left her desperately and almost completely alone. Not that theirs was a happy marriage. Far from it. Most of the years I saw them together were marked by tension and a pervasive sense of disappointment.

After lockdown, the facility in which my mother lives joined the rest of the world on Zoom, with the staff compassionately engineering calls for everyone who wanted them. My sister and I scheduled them as frequently as possible. My mother was pleased to see our faces and, if nothing else, to have a new audience for her railings against “their ridiculous rules.”

As the weeks wore on, as one box was sorted and another opened, I became enmeshed in the past. I was introduced to the mother I never actually knew. In 1944, her father was assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Honduras. The family decided my mother should spend the last two years of high school attending Glynn Academy in their hometown of Brunswick, Georgia. This decision led to a remarkably detailed record of my mother’s life at the end of World War II and the beginning of her flowering into womanhood. Who was this person who had a crush on the high school football star—never stated explicitly but obvious from the frequent mentions of his doings, both on and off the gridiron? Another surprise was a cheeky essay entitled “Teachers I Have Known,” which caused my rule-following mother to warn her parents to “prepare themselves for the shock,” because it may lead to her expulsion after she read it in class. My mother, with her longstanding contempt of her husband’s and daughters’ sports fandom, turned out to have attended every one of her high school’s football games, enthusiastically reporting the scores and the plays to her parents.

She had friends, which seemed to surprise even her. “I didn’t use [sic] to care if I ever saw people. I’d just as soon sit at home alone and read anyway. Now I’m really unhappy unless I’ve seen or been with some of the people at school.” She described her agony and embarrassment at having to invite boys to school dances, ranking the possibilities from football heroes down to second cousins.

My lockdown routine became mornings spent with my mother’s younger self, with afternoons in Zoom chats with her in her room. Over time, I began to see two people simultaneously: on the screen was an angry, depressed old woman, while on crinkly yellowed paper and in fading black and white photographs appeared a girl and young woman full of love and laughter and adventure. Sometimes, a third woman emerged, the one I had known during my own childhood, a woman who disdained many things that were important to me in my teenage years — boys, sports, teen novels, rock music, and any kind of sentimentality—including expressions of affection between us. How could they all be the same person?

As summer began, I came across what was, for me, a great treasure. It caught my eye because unlike most of my mother’s letters, which she wrote on a typewriter, this one was handwritten on lined notebook paper. I unfolded it and read the familiar salutation, “Dear Mommie and Poppie,” but what followed was a revelation. My mother joyfully announced her “pinning” by my father.

Of all the objects of disdain in my mother’s life, my father seemed to occupy the top of that list. I remember a bit of mutual affection in my younger years, but by the time I was a teenager, my parents’ relationship felt anything but loving, evinced in my mother’s frequent curt tone in addressing my father, the sour face, the separate bedrooms. Yet in her letter to her parents, my mother said that despite the fact that she had known my father for only six months, he was The One.

I knew that they must have loved each other once, and I know that the exhilaration of the first flush of love disappears as years progress. But to feel my mother’s happiness coursing through the paragraphs uncovered a person I had known all my life but had never really known. To know that my parents had loved each other like this transformed the more depressing narrative I had accepted as fact.

But where did that girl go? Why did all the love and promise and capacity for joy disappear? The person in these letters was not the mother I knew, nor was theirs the relationship with my father I had observed. I mourned for both of them: Not only did the shared joy of their early love peter out, but any love for each other seemed to dissipate over the years. How much happier they both might have been had they been able to hold onto some of that original affection and sympathy for each other.

“I might add that I have never been so completely happy in my life,” my mother wrote as she finished announcing she had been pinned, “which I consider to have been an unusually happy one.” My mother happy? Because of my father? This was nearly incomprehensible to me, and yet, there it was. After reading those words, I looked at my mother on the computer screen, a hive of frustration and anger in her current state. I thought about my parent’s resolute but apparently loveless marriage. What might all our lives have been had she been able sustain just a few of those warm feelings over the decades? And, I wondered, what would she say if I reminded her of them?

Liza Marshall is the co-author with her husband, Dr. John Marshall, of the memoir Off Our Chests: A Candid Tour Through the World of Cancer. Liza Marshall, a graduate of Duke University and the University of Virginia School of Law, practiced communications law until the mid-2000s. With two children and her husband building a demanding career as a nationally recognized oncologist, she retired from practice to manage her family and focus on volunteer work. Soon thereafter, she helped to found a cancer support organization, Hope Connections for Cancer Support in Bethesda, MD, and served on the board for nine years and as Board President from 2015 to 2017. She continues to serve in leadership roles with Hope Connections, her church, and in her community. As a sidelight, she became a Jeopardy champion in 1997. In 2006 when she was forty-three years old, she was diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer, the most deadly form of breast cancer.