My mother died five years ago today.

I’ve written so many “Dead Parent” posts at this point, between Mom and my father who died in January 2009, that the magic and poetry (perhaps novelty) of the healing process has burned out altogher.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t learn from Sherry LaFave.

I learn from her every single day of my life — even five years after her final breath.

With such a limited family background to lean on at this point, all of the specific details about my mother are kind of hazy. I don’t know where she was born, what she wanted to do for a living, how many people she dated before my father, and — perhaps more meaningfully — four-fifths of all the things she told me as a young person.

Truth be told, I assumed she would always be around for me to check in and ask about later.

Obviously, that’s not the case.

It hasn’t been for some time, and it was iffy for years before that. For each year she rooted for me in college from 75 miles away in our podunk farm town, we grew a little more distant. Even the bonding factor of losing my father a few months before my departure to college-land became old hat, and something that felt less worthy of celebration every year I spent as a student in Bloomington.

The sands in the hourglass tick by, and yet, the shape of the timepiece remains the same.

There’s just less to assign hope to as each minute passes by.

To speak candidly, my mother was a Saint among snails. As far as I know, she grew up in rural-ass nowheresville to a family with little money, and extoled the virtues of sharing and caring to anyone who wound up on the Chapman family porch that evening. Anyone who found their way into the abode was welcome for dinner; anyone who stayed for dessert was welcome to stay the night.

A few years later, Mom and the rest moved to downtown Indianapolis, and she kept the same altruistic attitude on Temple Street near Arsenal Technical High School — do unto others, love all — even until her graduation day, when a race riot saw a classmate rip Sherry’s earrings out through her earlobes minutes after getting her diploma.

You can’t pick the road you have to walk in this life. But laying down in defeat is absolutely not an option.

The story goes that my mother met my father at work late one night in 1989. Dad was the president of an east Indianapolis welding business — dropped in his own lap after his father died relatively young — and my mother was working as a for-hire maid cleaning the joint after-hours.

Somehow, whether it was at the copier or over a parking-lot cigarette, the two fatefully met. The rest is history: When I was a teenager, Dad told me he ultimately proposed to Mom shortly after meeting her for the first time. He knew, in his heart, that she was the one. In his initial confession to my young self, he said he called her and talked and hung up and redialed her and smiled and hung up and called again and talked some more and finally got around to the point.

Just two weeks after their paths crossed, Sherry LaFave (neé Chapman) had a ring on her finger.

Nearly exactly nine months after their wedding day, I was born.

While my older sister is a living testimony of their meeting, and my younger brother a living record of their later years, I am perhaps best-equipped to have experienced their time together as the living metaphor of their commitment and copulation.

Alas, despite all of our best wishes, the time goes quickly.

I was Jeffrey. Then Jeffy. Then “Jeffrey-Doo-Dah-Day.” I was the boy who laughed in public and cried in private. I was the boy who learned long division before he could tie his own shoes. I was the honor student who felt like a total impostor every step of the way. And I was the young man who found a dead father in the basement and made sure Mom was the person who knew first.

She saw me off to college, minus the figure she would need to lean on the most, and did so with the most grace one could ever hope for from a widowed family matriarch.

Move-in weeks come and diploma bestowments go, and gray finds its way into everyone’s hair.

The last I saw Mom’s hair was at her showing: she has been dead for 5 years, as of today.

Her passing came and went in a flurry — Mom texted me on a Friday night that she was having lung issues, and had checked into a hospital. She was certain, like every time before, that it would be a minor stay. By Saturday, she was on a ventilator. By Monday, she was choking. And by Wednesday, she was dead.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust — we all do what we must.

An uncanny phenomenon about relatives that have been dead for so long is that, despite your best efforts, you begin to lose the finer details about the cadences and diction in which they spoke. But they never leave you fully, especially when juxtaposed against the eternally memorable and symbolic actions in which the memories themselves were carved.

I remember my mother, Sherry LaFave, as a mother who was frequently doing her best with a limited battery. Despite battling sleep apnea, Lupus, a cigarette addiction, an eating disorder replaced by Coca-Cola classic, and a broken heart from the loss of her soulmate Mike, she was always front-and-center to accommodate me and any friends I had over in our home from a young age — just like she was raised on Temple Street.

I kept a lot of young-person truths hidden from my Mom, especially while I was away at Bloomington (“a practical Sodom and Gomorrah,” I was told by a random Bible-thumper in high school). She never knew about the cigarettes or the weed or the booze-flooded parties or anything like that. I did my best to keep it from breaking her heart, and truthfully, I can tell she did her best to keep her judgment from fracturing my spirit.

I get the sense she’d understand — after all, youth wasn’t easy for her either.

Mom always told me that it was toughest to be young: You have all of the responsibilities, and none of the experience. All of the rent due, and none of the finances in the bank. All of the acquaintances, and very few proven friends. All of the drive and little of the wisdom. A walking oxymoron, young people are.

I’m especially grateful that she saw it in me, her first son and the eponymous “Big Guy.”

I held her hand for the final time on July 26, 2018. I told her it was okay to let go and she squeezed my palm with her frail wrist one last time. I knew that neither of us wanted it to be so sudden, nor so horrifyingly sterile as to come in the intensive care unit.

But I saw her giving all of her weak 90-pound frame, and I knew I had to carry that energy, that electricity, so long as I lived, so her vivacious torch would never burn out.

And so, 1,826 days later, I unfortunately feel as I am writing about a person who is lost to time more and more with each day.

But I am confident that my eyes are seeing for her spirit, my bones are aching for her passion, and my heart is living for her soul with each and every action I take as a 33-year-old man.

She called me Scarecrow — a metaphor of our relationship embodied by her love for “The Wizard of Oz” — as I was with her, Dorothy, from the very beginning.

The yellow brick road will guide us to our fateful destination, and we continue despite (and dedicated to) those who marched with us along the way.

Mom, I love you. Thanks for everything.

I’ll always be your “Scarecrow.”

###

-moose