time after time

(October 1963. I am on the far right in picture. Our ill-fated vehicle is in the background.)

I am on the last bit of a visit to family far from home. One of the tasks I hope to help complete while here is to scan letters from my parents, primarily from my mother, Sylvia, to her mother. This will take some time, because Sylvia was a prolific letter writer, this young girl who married at 17 and was separated from her mother for the first time.

My sister has put the letters into some preliminary order for us. They are the letters from the 'time before' and the 'time after'. Although we don't label them precisely as such, we are certainly thinking it. They are labeled by location at first - Louisianna, West Virginia, Dallas, Ainsworth...towns where the newlyweds resided, my father taught and preached, where they concieved and welcomed 3 children.

Then the letters are sorted by another sort of label.

These are the letters from the time after: Post Accident. Hospital. Rehab. Then simply, "mommy's last letters." ( The very last letter is in my own 14 year old handwriting, dictated by her, whose hands could no longer hold a pen, brush my hair, no longer brilliantly play the piano or rebuild an engine - the connecting pieces tied with matching thread and laid on an old sheet in the driveway. )

Some of the letters are to us, Sylvia's little girls, in care of her mother, urging us not to "be afraid because it is taking mommy so long to come home." How my grandmother survived reading that letter I cannot, and do not wish to, imagine. My father's letters to us from the time after are full of his cheerful cartoons, drawings of his little girls in scenes of what he imagines is our regular life - going to school, helping grandma, playing. Some even contain helpful illustrations of some new tiny little movement my mother can make with her shoulders - or excitement about some sensation, which I now know will turn out to be the begining of a new painful and lasting condition.

It is the time after in which I still, and always, live. After the startling and abrupt arrival of an uninvited and unwanted reality. A reality that reverberates through the three generations. A knowing that I can never unknow.

On October 12, 1963, on the way to church, our car blew a tire and flew off the road, tumbling end over end. When the tumbling and horrible noise and darkness finally stopped, Sylvia was no longer in the vehicle. She lay crumpled several yards away, her neck broken and her body stilled and frozen. She was 25.

I want to honor her life, find her story too. I know she was more than just the brave and beautiful quadrapalegic that people admired or pitied. She was my mother, my patient, my friend, my burden, my longing, my teacher. She was a daughter, sister, wife, mother, musician. She had a keen wit, razor sharp intellect, the charm of Scarlett O'Hara and a deep understanding of people. She is the reason I keep going when I can't figure out how or why. She is the one who still teaches me to listen deeply to the music around me, for I am listening not only for myself, but now also for her. She who never went to the opera or the symphony, but would have so loved it. I can almost hear her saying to me, "Listen! Listen! Listen!"

So I will. I will listen to her in her letters, although it is through tears. Reading them is like watching a movie in which you know disaster lurks and the jolly little family's joy becomes so poignant and bittersweet, you want to turn away. But I will stay and look. Finding more of her will perhaps be finding more of me. And she will, as in the time before, be my teacher once again.