Spending the Afternoon with my Mother

Spending the Afternoon with my Mother

After my mother died in November of 2000 I was given a box full of letters, clippings, yearbooks and various memorabilia.  Shortly thereafter I moved to Columbus from Bowling Green and I had Kacey store it for me.  This summer she returned it to me.

I spent the afternoon perusing the many letters and newspaper clippings and pictures that had been collected across the years. The box was full of her life from birth to death including some notes of  sympathy after she died. 

One woman – her college roommate has described her as a “real trooper” and a  “great example that life was meant to be lived everyday with enthusiasm.” While as a mother, I often encountered her as worrying and anxious – this as the Marge or Margy I encountered in this letters.  I always knew that she was an athlete in high school and college playing three sports every year.  What I didn’t know is that she was a thespian too performing in plays and musicals and high school and college as well as community theatre with my Dad in retirement.  She wrote song parodies throughout her life and was a strong alto in every church choir as they moved around the country for my Dad’s job.

What drew me this afternoon was to read “the letters.”  This is the first time I read them all the way through.  This was a correspondence between her and only and older brother Harry when he was serving in  the second world war. They begin in September 1943 and end in November 1944.  She was in a student at Elmira College and he was away from home.

He first served in Fort Bennington and then Colorado  in and then Europe.  He addressed his letters to her “Dearest Margy”  and  often ended them with “love to all, Harry.”

They were always upbeat and chatty letters with him sometimes teasing her about her new beau – my Dad, Wayne Gersen – and talking about the food he was eating and the movies he had seen or heard of.  Once he referenced the World Series as he tried to keep up with what has happening back home.  He wrote in appreciation for the food my grandmother sent – Melba toast and jam and candy  - and was especially thankful for the local newspaper  - The Swarthmorian – that he was sent.  Sometimes he complained about heat  or boredom or just plan homesickness.  Margy wrote about the events in her life in college – parties, visits from friends, her plays, and the movies she had been too. 

It was when he went to Europe and that the reality of the war became real.  He writes

“I wish I could tell you what I am doing or where I am , but censorship is pretty strict over here.”  And later in that same letter remarks on reading the local paper and finding out that “Johnny Ogden” was killed in action.  This was written in October 1944.  He wrote his sister three times that month and three more times in November.  He was clearly writing many people he said because he wanted to “keep the correspondence flowing.”  Letters were a lifeline back home which he truly wished to be.

Among the letters I found was a very small yellowed newspaper clipping from the Swarthmorean.  This was the headline:

Lieutenant MacMillan Killed in Germany

“Wounded previously, Lieutenant Harry S. MacMillan,23,  son of Mr. and Mrs Stanley Macmillan was killed in Germany December 15.  He was one of eight from this area listed today by their families as killed in action.”

And then Harry’s letters of course, stopped.  The next grouping of papers included many cards of condolence and a copy of the service from the church as well as the minister’s sermon which did not mention Harry by name.

The letters after that were ones about my mother’s engagement and then graduation from Elmira College.  She did mention in a letter home that she was grateful for her parent’s encouragement that she complete college – presumably after Harry’s death.

There is much more I can write about this time in her life but I can only say that – yes  - she was a trooper.  She kept going in the face of enormous grief just as she did enduring a life moving her family around the country for my Dad’s work just as she did making a life for herself after my Father’s death.  Just as she did in the face living with cancer for 8 years.  She was a trooper. 

I was blessed to be her daughter