I had another dream in which my Mom, now gone many years, and I were talking. This is the second dream now that I’ve experienced her presence so powerfully that I am moved to tears to think of it. Mother’s Day and spring flowers are now infused with her memory because her diagnosis of Lymphoma and her death were bracketed in one year between Mother’s Days.
In each dream she looked lovely. In the first dream she looked a little bewildered like Shoeless Joe in the movie Field of Dreams. In the second dream she had returned to her role as my chief nurturer and listener. We had a good talk and then she left me to carry on with my task at hand.
She fought a valiant year-long battle, taking chemo concurrently with King Hussein of Jordan. She had the best of medical care, taking twelve rounds of chemo in as many months with a hospitalization for each one, finally succumbing to a lurking lung infection.
She was an independent, intellectual soul who needed very little as long as it included a good book. She was reduced in her latter months to dependency on me, the one of her four children who lived close by. I am ever grateful I was the one to support her in her toughest battle because we formed a special bond. I shopped for her food, brought her books, and looked in on her so often the other elders in her apartment complex knew me well. Before her illness she had struggled with being overweight but that final May she had wasted away so much I could just support her weakened frame as we walked to the car on that final trip to the ER.
The hospital staff was impressed with her hopeful attitude, but in the end when hope for a cure faded so did her eyes, and her humor and wit ceased to bubble to the surface as her physical shell simply wore out from the damaging treatment which kept the tumor in check. No food, book or flowers could bring a twinkle to her eye. One thing did — words of affection.
She had been, in her youth, beautiful and vivacious with a strong resemblance to a ‘40s movie star. As a child I believed my mom had been on the silver screen whenever I saw Ann Sheridan in a movie and would exclaim, “Mom, you’re on the TV again!” She was smart, too, a self-educated stay-at-home mom who convinced us that she considered her role as mother her main act and her life’s crowning achievement, a “Greatest Generation” hallmark. It has proven to be a tough act to follow but an inspiring one.
She was the only grandparent my children had ever known, having lost the others to the silent stalker, cancer, that had taken so many elders from both my husband’s and my family. My own children are Millennials and still too young to worry about their genetic heritage but will hopefully benefit from nutritional and medical progress.
My middle son is now an Army surgeon. When he was an undergraduate at Grove City College he had professors who had worked on the Human Genome Project, training new recruits to enter the battlefield of disease. He studied medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland, where young officers train in the field of medicine to serve their country.
I wondered if he would play a part in finding a cure for the disease that took his Nana, who invested many hours in rocking him to sleep when this mom needed a break. She taught him to form smooth balls, pies, and creations of Playdoh. She pitched baseballs to him in the backyard and faithfully sent him cards with money to show how much she loved him as he grew older.
Surely he will treat other people’s Nanas with the love and compassion he received in his formative years. It is with those smooth stones of security, passed on from generation to generation, that a young warrior can stand tall and take on the Goliath of the day. She bequeathed talent, passion for learning, perseverance, courage, and creativity which she received from her parents and described in a poem about a trellis she watched her father build. The rose trellis was a metaphor for our family structures, like interwoven latticework, what supports our DNA, without which we would be clones or automatons.
Here’s how the poem goes:
The Trellis
Slender white strips of wood were seen
To form a sturdy wooden frame,
That held up the tender shoots of green
‘Til their promised scarlet beauty came.
The strength of the vines, time tested
The rosy blooms in all their charms
And in the end the tired trellis rested
In the vine’s supporting arms.
Doris I. Noonan (1922-1999)
My children’s generation will take the tools passed on and come against “The big C” and other foes. The blooms on the trellis will blossom nurtured by the roots. My “field of dreams” is not inhabited by baseball heroes but by my mom and other family members who’ve played the game of life valiantly and are now cheering us on.
Chris Noonan Funnell is a local columnist. Her blog is at www.goodnewsboston.blogspot.com. An earlier version of this column was first p
Doris I. Noonan 
