I turned the house upside down yesterday looking for this photo. When I found the negative I was so relieved that tears came into my eyes. This is a rare photo. In it, my mom is smiling.
One of the things the automobile accident took away from Mom was her ability to laugh. Though she was gravely injured, she was left with just enough understanding to know that she wasn't the same person as she had been. That made her cross, most of the time. With her emotional self control nearly gone, her anger often came out in violent ways.
I can count on one hand my memories of Mom's laughter.
The first was pre-accident: she had lost her car keys, and was running around the house singing, "Where's my key-key, where's my little key-key…" I must have been around five or six years old. I giggled and my sister (five years older) was scandalized: "key-key" was the family euphemism for "vagina."
The next memory is from many years later, when I was in high school. I recall Mom, my boyfriend David and I standing at the bottom of the stairs, laughing hysterically; Mom was laughing so hard she had to lean against the wall for support. I have no idea what we were laughing about, but it was probably something David had said. He was one of the few people who could make Mom smile.
The third and last time I heard my mom laugh was a few months before she died, when she was in her eighties. I had escorted Mom's sister Joyce to visit Mom at her home in Ohio. Though it required some advance planning, Aunt Joyce and I took Mom to a doughnut shop. As the three of us munched doughnuts, Aunt Joyce and I joked about the practice of replacing "Cs" with "Ks" in names of businesses: "Krispy Kreme," "Kut & Kurl," "Koffee Korner." Mom maintained the silence she had descended into several days ealier. Aunt Joyce changed the subject and talked about her church's choir. "Is that choir with a c or a k?" I asked. Mom suddenly brightened up and laughed, and for a moment my own sadness dropped away.
This photo was taken 21 years ago. It's of Mom, my daughter, and me. What I like best about it, besides Mom's smile, is that she has her arms around Meredith and me. Grandchildren made Mom happy. Though she didn't always smile, she always made a fuss over her grandchildren, and they remember her as a loving Nana. Somehow, my sad memories of Mom — her violent rages, normally directed at me — are eclipsed by this photograph and those three memories of her laughter. When I see it my sad memories of Mom drop away, just as they did in the doughnut shop that day.
When I located the negative for this photo, I took it to the photo shop and had several prints made.
