Wynifred J. Emerson

My mother requested no funeral, no memorial service, no whistles or bells. She was cremated early this week, and her ashes were mailed, along with my brother's, to the family plot in Shamokin, PA. It was purchased by her grandfather in 1940 for $98.00. George at Mountainview Funeral Home said $98 won't buy anything at all any more.

She was a stay-at-home mom for my entire childhood in Odenton, Maryland. For most of it we lived in the split-level house she had designed in 1956. She was, I think, remarkably tolerant of me and my particular brand of fun. Some might argue that she was too tolerant. I was an outdoor kid, ranging far and wide around the neighborhood. As long as I was home for lunch and supper, she didn't worry about me - or at least I was not aware of it if she did. When I came home, I often brought turtles and /or snakes to live with us. One summer we had 14 box turtles on our screened back porch, all with names and distinct personalities. She fed them scraps of meats, vegetables and fruits. She didn't feed the snakes.

When I stayed in the yard, I still could not be a calming presence. I started a forest fire in the woods behind the house once. A forest ranger gave me a stern talking to after that. I climbed trees as far as I could possibly go and then some. I had a rope swing on the old pine tree, and I would wind the rope around and around it as far as I could, then launch myself, spinning madly while I also spun around the tree until I was unwound and then wound up again, then spun madly the other direction. She saw my head flying perilously close to that tree at breakneck speeds many many times. She told me to be careful.

She was a den mother in my Cub Scout pack, and an interested mother in my Boy Scout troop for which my dad was Assistant Scout Master and designated Akela. She planned family trips to Civil War battlefields, museums, zoos, fishing and all manner of other interesting activities. She read to me - The Wizard of Oz books, The Borrowers books, the Alice In Wonderland books to name a few - instilling in me a love of reading. We made Christmas ornaments, assembled Easter baskets, dyed eggs with onion skin dye, beet juice, or regular commercial egg dying kits. She was the best mom I knew.

We always had four-legged family members, cared for primarily by Wynifred. Princess and Sindbad, a German shepherd and a Siamese cat, were the primary critters I remember from my youth. Both of them died after I graduated high school. We also had a two-legged family member until I was eleven. The Easter after I was born, they gave my six year old brother a tiny baby duckling, He named it Mr. Peepers after his favorite TV show. The name held until Mr. Peepers laid her first clutch of eggs - just in time for Easter! Then she became just Peepers. My mother made sure Peepers, living in a pen at the edge of the woods I almost burned down, was fed, watered and taken regularly to the pond near our house for some swimming and tadpole hunting. That became my job after my pre-adolescent brother lost interest.

In 1968, when I was fifteen, we moved to Vero Beach, Florida, where she had spent her teenage years until she met and married a handsome airplane mechanic stationed at Vero Beach Naval Air Station. Her mother still lived there, and Wynifred hired a local contractor to turn the concrete block ruin in the back yard - it was intended to be a garage before it was abandoned by my grandfather - into a house much more modern than the sixty-year-old frame house they had lived in since the thirties. My mother was a whiz at designing living spaces. If she had been born forty years later, she could have been an architect. For a short time, we lived in the old house while my grandmother shared the new house with Gil Emerson Commercial Art, for which my mother was secretary and bookkeeper. I was a part time graphic artist, photographer and darkroom technician. We scraped by on her genius for buying fifty dollars' worth of groceries for ten dollars and a fist full of coupons.

After I left home in 1971 she worked at the Indian River County Library, doing books and answering the phone for several years. My dad was plying the art show circuit on weekends around Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas. Then in 1978, I decided I liked fishing the Indian River and the inlets better than ice skating, and moved back to Vero Beach to stay for nine years. My dad and I decided to really dive into the commercial art biz. We got a process camera, built a darkroom for it, landed the Los Angeles Dodgers account, and were off to the races, with my mother again at the helm with the books and the business end of things. When my dad decided to hand the business over to me in '87, I and my new wife decided to move to Central Florida. He sold the business soon after, and bought an RV.

My parents then began to wander the mountains  in search of a suitable location for a summer home at which to escape heat and hurricanes. It was not until 1995 that they bought a lot in Smokey Mountain Estates in north Georgia. They hired a Vero Beachite contractor to build the shell of a three-story house with subflooring, stairs and enough interior framing to hold it together, and for the third time, my mother took on the task of designing. This was their dream cabin in the mountains. For ten or so years they hauled themselves and their cat(s) back and forth from Vero Beach to Blairsville every spring and fall until it got to be too much for them. They decided they liked cooler summers and the lack of hurricanes better than warmer winters, and they moved the rest of their stuff up to Georgia. A few years ago, my dad declared the cabin finished, with only a trickle of small projects to keep him busy.

Their health was pretty good through the 1990s and double naught years. About five years ago her cardiologist told her that she needed a pacemaker. She refused, period! No pacemaker nohow!

Three years ago my dad had a stroke. He was taken to Gainesville, GA, fifty miles over Blood Mountain, to a hospital better equipped to handle his situation. Then he was transferred to a rehab /nursing home in Gainesville, where he celebrated his 90th birthday. I was with my mom for a couple of weeks after the stroke, and realized that she was not physically, mentally or emotionally fit to live alone without help. We hired in-home help for her, but she refused to let them do anything other than to take her down to Gainesville several times until Dad was released to come back home. He was left weaker but still ambulatory, and with some difficulty speaking and swallowing, but in pretty good shape. He promised my mom that he would never put her in a nursing home, that he would take care of her until death did them part.

In late February, my dad told me that he had been keeping it from us that my mother had Alzheimer's. "I ask her to put things in the refrigerator. She says 'What is a refrigerator.'" He knew that if he tried to get her tested, there would be hell to pay. He asked me to go with her to her routine doctor's appointment on March first. I did. I told Dr. Sanders about her memory issues. He had his nurse come in and give her the standard test. She could not answer most of the questions. The first three: what year is it, what city do you live in, what state do you live in. He was convinced. He gave her a card with four weeks' worth of pills of increasing strength. "They are not a cure. They only slow the progress of the disease." After she had finished the card, they went back for a prescription to continue the medication. The day after the first new pill, she got really sick. An ambulance took her to the emergency room. They pumped her stomach, and she was okay for a few days. Then she got really sick again. Back to the ER, where they admitted her. They spent a week trying to figure out what was wrong with her. Finally, my dad told me that she had an intestinal blockage, and they were going to operate. I was concerned about her chances of surviving surgery, but he had already authorized it, so I zipped my baloney lips.

On the afternoon dog walk of April 12th, a nurse at Union General Hospital called me on my cell to tell me that the plan was to haul her to Chattanooga, through the roller coaster roads that she hated, implant a pacemaker so that she might survive this surgery, and find and remove whatever was blocking her lower intestine. I told her that this sounded crazy to me. She said that that was why she had called me. She thought I might be able to convince my dad to rethink it. I tried calling him. No luck. At about 8:00 that night, Union General called again to ask me for final authorization to haul her to Chattanooga. I guess they, too had not been able to reach my dad, and my mom was unresponsive. I said NO! and told them I wanted to talk to Dr. Sanders. Carmen finally got a hold of my dad. Dr. Sanders called my cell. Between the four of us, we decided to abort this insane plan and put her in hospice. My dad said that he was not aware of the pacemaker piece (his hearing is not so good) and he had thought that after this surgery she would come home for him to take care of her. Doc Sanders said no, if she survived the surgery she would go to a nursing home until she was well enough to come home, and he was skeptical of the chances of either of those outcomes.

Carmen and I went over to Blairsville on the 14th. We sat with my dad who sat with my mom every day until the end. He decided to let the neighbors go ahead with the 70th anniversary party on the 21st, and on the 22nd he told her all about it. He opened the numerous cards and read them to her. She was still unresponsive. We went home at 5:00 as usual. At 8:12 the hospital called and said she was soon to go. We got ready as fast as we could, arriving at 8:40 - about ten minutes too late.

Carmen had gone back to Nashville several days before. I stayed with my dad, helping him with the arrangements and the contacting of relatives with whom he hadn't communicated in years - decades even. I listened to his stories and told him some of mine before I went back home on Tuesday the 26th. He is living alone now for the first time in his almost 93 years. The neighbors keep trying to help him, but he says he needs to be alone with his grief for a while. I think he'll be okay.