I lit a candle for Mom last night

November 24, 2024November 25, 2024 Sam Williams, Publisher, lassennews.com

I lit a candle for my mother at the Honey Lake Hospice’s annual Light Up A Life Memorial Tree Lighting Ceremony at the United Methodist Church’s Fellowship Hall last night, Saturday, Nov. 23.

For many years I have purchased a dove for a departed family member to be placed on the Hospice’s memorial tree — both as way to honor the memory of a cherished loved one and to support the hospice’s important and vital mission.

Honey Lake Hospice’s Andria Cuypers welcomes the community to the Light Up A Life Memorial Tree Lighting Ceremony Saturday, Nov. 23.

Yesterday, Nov. 23, would have been my mother’s 90^thbirthday, but she passed at age 53 many, many years ago. I still miss her after all these years, and I endured the saddest and most painful moment of my life at her burial when that first shovelful of dirt began filling her final resting place.

My mother, Betty Jean Barber, a self-taught genius who knew everything about marine biology, explores the life in the tide pools at Salt Point during a rare double-minus tide in the early 1970s.

I quietly wept a few tears of joy for her as Kathy Barker read the names, and the United Methodist Church’s Handbell Choir, under the masterful direction of Dennis Roberts, “tolled the bells” because this was not the time to remember her death. Instead, it was the time to remember, celebrate and “light up” the life she lived.

Born in 1934 during The Great Depression, she and her large family found shelter for a time in an abandoned car under a bridge outside Fort Worth. As a modern American, I can’t even imagine living that way. They had a few chickens and an old milk cow. They were country folk. They hunkered down, made the best of it, and somehow they survived.

Honey Lake Hospice’s Claudia Dunlavy reminds those attending the tree lighting ceremony that this is a time to light up a life and remember those cherished moments we shared with our departed loved ones.

The family was poor, so my mother, who looked mature beyond her years, left school during the eighth grade and took a job as a waitress to help support the family. Later in life, she took a few junior college classes, but that was the extent of her formal education.

She met my father after World War II. She married young (as many girls do in the South), and I was born in 1950. My brother was born 18 months later. Sadly, my father contracted cancer and died when I was only 9.

My mom — the covergirl — Audubon Magazine November-December 1968. My stepfather took the photograph.

A widow at 26 with two young children, she met my stepfather, who also had two young children. My brother and I needed a father and my stepfather’s kids needed a mother. Our families joined together.

We moved to Fresno from San Diego, and a few years later my sister was born. We children were always referred to as “his, hers and ours.” My siblings and I all agree for a decade or so we all shared a wonderful, idyllic, dare I say almost magical life. Tragedy struck — one of my brothers drowned during a family outing at Millerton Lake — and it all ended in an instant.

My mother and my stepfather stayed together for several more years, but their relationship cracked and fractured more and more with each passing day as we kids watched helplessly.

When we lived in Chicago in the mid 1950s, my mother worked as a waitress at Henrici’s — a Chicago dinner house landmark.

All this hurt my mother very deeply because she believed in family and the commitment she had made to all of us. My stepfather — well — not so much. Even after they separated and divorced, even after all his affairs, she still believed he would come back to her one day soon. We kids knew that would never happen, and despite us telling her so, she firmly held that belief. I don’t think she ever recovered from that loss, and I believe that unrequited love largely contributed to her untimely death. I think she finally just lost her will to live.

The night she died, something awoke me at 4:17 a.m. I found myself sitting straight up in bed and wondering why. I looked outside my window and everything was quiet out on the street. I went back to sleep.

It was standing room only at the Honey Lake Hospice’s Light Up A Life Tree Lighting Ceremony, Saturday, Nov. 23.

About 8 a.m. I got a call that my mother had died, and a blood relative had to come and identify her body. So, I drove to her home in Sanger, and I asked coroner if he knew what had happened. He said she died between 3:45 and 4:45 a.m. I muttered 4:17 to myself. All her trials were over.

As I remembered her life and took a moment to say thank you for all the sacrifices she made and the undying and unconditional love she gave me, I couldn’t help remembering that old Otis Pierce (a Fresno folk music legend) song — “I hear the soft wind sleeping/in every bush and tree/I know my mother’s waiting/in her heavenly home for me.”