THE MOSHER CLAN, Richburg, N.Y., 1997
(left to right) Ray Mosher, David Mosher, Minerva (Mosher) Dean, Ronnie Mosher, Terry Mosher
This is the second part of the stuff I just wrote on the mystery of Pete, a childhood friend who disappeared and never again made contact with his family. Tonight I’m writing about my mother ‑ Jessie Elaine (Van Dyke) Mosher – who was a twin. She died on May 21, 1953 when I was just 18 days short of being 13.
My mother’s death changed my life and sent me a year later into a tailspin that began my dark years in which I virtually raised myself, and as Groucho Marx might say, and did a poor job at it.
I did survive. But it did alter many good things I had going for myself and I really did not give a full 100 percent in anything for years after that. I was alone and, I thought, forgotten as a trudged half-heartedly through my teen years and into my mid 20s. I don’t know how I survived, but I did.
Fifteen years ago I got interested in what my mother was really like. I don’t have a lot of memories of her, probably because I was too busy back then enjoying a childhood that could not be beat. It was wonderful, right up to the day my mother died. Then it started to go backwards.
I remember my oldest brother Ray (he turned 83 on Wednesday) telling me a short while ago that he was just getting off a ship in Okinawa (he flew on B-2 bombers over the Korean Peninsula during the Korean conflict in the 1950s) when he was taken aside and told his mother had died. There was no way for him to get back to the states in time for the funeral and he told me it was the toughest period of his life because he was all alone on this island with nobody to talk to about the unexpected death of his mom. I never heard him talk about that before, and I could tell my usually stoic brother was clearly still broken and emotional spent all these years later.
Back in March of 1998, upon my urging, my next oldest brother, Ronnie, who is probably the most competitive person on this planet, wrote a letter to me in an attempt to explain our mother and his feelings, which do not come easy for him either (I guess being stubborn and stoic and unbending emotionally is a Mosher trait).
This is what Ronnie wrote:
“To Terry with love. For a long time I have been trying to think back to a period 56 or 57 years ago. (It’s) a period of time that I probably could first have had some sort of image of the most important person in my life at the time.
Whatever I write, whatever I try to describe, as I try to remember mom, should not be taken as a negative or positive statement. Not whether I liked a situation that happened or didn’t like a situation.
What I remember, I remember as it was, at least in my mind’s eye, and I remember with a lot of emotion. Maybe that’s why I don’t like to remember.
I know that mom’s kids came before anything else. When we would get up on a cold morning in the winter, we would stand on chairs in the kitchen, around the table, in our underwear. And mom would be in the other room ironing our pants.
What other mother would do that?
I must have been a little devil. Mom would put some kind of a harness that was attached to a long rope on me, and tie it to the big tree on the bank of the canal by the house (our mom used a clothes line to tie me to the clothes line wire to keep me from wandering away while she hung family laundry out to dry).
I hated that. I would go around and around the tree until I couldn’t move and she would come out and unravel me from the tree. She didn’t untie me, just unraveled me. If she let me run loose at whatever age I was, I would probably have been killed by a car.
She knew what she was doing.
When we pretended to be sick so we could sleep in a little longer, she at least pretended to think we were sick and let us stay in bed, most of the time. Of course, when we got up we had to walk to school (a mile away).
Talk about being catered to. When mom cooked, most of the time, she would have a couple main dishes to make sure that we all had something we liked to eat. But I also remember that we didn’t leave the table until we had cleaned our plate of food. Many nights the peas or beans ended up under the edge of our plates.
I hated liver. We had that about once a week. Something about it was supposed to be good for us for some reason. I couldn’t choke it down. And I remember that I sat at the table a real long time when I couldn’t eat my liver. I still can’t. We don’t even buy it. I’m not sure they even sell it.
When I wanted the car for a date and dad had to work, he would have me take him to work, 3 to 11 shift, and then pick him up afterward. I just had to be there by 11 at night. We (Barbara, his future wife; they have been married for 60 years) usually went to a movie, but we had to pick him up. I’d drop him off at home and finish the date.
Of course, mom wouldn’t go to sleep until I got in. And she would say, “Ronald, is that you?” Dad said then she would go to sleep.
Minerva (my sister who passed away just a little over two years ago at the age of 82) and Ray said that when someone she didn’t know came to the door, she would have one of us kids answer it. More than a little shy.
She would not sign for us to play football, so dad did that. And I don’t recall that there was a big deal made out of him signing for us. I also can’t remember that she attended many of our football games.
She attended the Bolivar (New York) game when Torry and the boys played for Bolivar. I got hurt trying to tackle Wayne Torry. Dad said later that when I got up, mom went home. She couldn’t stand to see one of us get hurt. That might have been the only time she watched me play anything (Ronnie played football, basketball, baseball and ran in track and field, and was good at all of them).
At the time I didn’t think in terms of mom or how she felt or why she felt a certain way. I was pretty self-centered in those times, and as long as I got to do the things I wanted to do, I didn’t think about how she felt or didn’t feel. I’m sure I caused her some serious heartache for my lack of attention to her.
Mom was tireless in what she did for us. Looking back at it as a middle-aged adult, I realized that most everything she did was out of love for her family.
I took a lot for granted. I felt life was good. I knew we had a good family. I don’t think it was a conscious thought, but inside I knew it. The big thing I took for granted was mom and dad. At the young age of 17 or 18 I never considered they wouldn’t always be there. When I went into the service I was not aware that mom had any kind of a heart condition – just never knew. You would almost think, as a member of the family, that something would have registered.
I was in Mississippi (in the Air Force boot camp) when they called and said she would not make it very many more days. I really didn’t know what to do or how to act. When they said she was dying, I di d not envision that she would be gone forever. Dying was something other people did, not us, not mom.
It’s sort of funny. All though school I never wondered what mom was doing. I went to school and she was there when I left, and she was there when I got home. It never occurred to me to wonder what she did all day. She was always there. I guess that’s what she did. One of the biggest and most important things about mom was that she was always there.
Looking back through the years, as my family grew up (Ronnie and Barb had nine children, seven which survive today), I would get choked up some times when I would think of mom and wonder what it would be like to have her in our lives with my kids, her grandchildren. I really missed that part of life.
Lord knows that our mother loved us kids. But did my mother know that I loved her?
I don’t know that I ever told her the words, ‘Mom, I love you.’
Did you?”
Ron
It’s easy for me to answer that. No, I didn’t. Like Ronnie, I took my life then for granted, that it would always be like Huck Finn, a great and wonderful time.
Then one day somebody knocked on Mr. Scott’s English class door. He came over to my desk and said I was excused for the day. I walked out and was greeted by my dad, Ronnie, Barb, my brother David, and was told mom was dead.
So ended my life as I knew it and soon enough – too soon – my dark ages would begin.
Ronnie became a high school PE teacher and football coach after his military service and when he retired he took a job driving a tour bus up and down the East Coast. Twice in the 10 years he was a bus driver our mom showed up on his bus, once to warn Ronnie to hit the brakes (saving his life) and the other time as a passenger, just sitting in the back of the bus.
Who knows why she reappeared. I do wish she would make an appearance in front of me. Then I could answer the question in the affirmative.
Mom, I love you.
Be well pal.
Be careful out there.
Have a great day.
You are loved.