“Well, that was something,” she said out of the blue on a Tuesday. A phrase she was fond of saying for nearly any event from the grand to the not-so-grand. Two days later, she died. My mom was nearly 98 years old.

You wouldn’t have known her, of course. My mom was a housewife most of her life. No awards. No claims to fame. No streets named in her honor. She was born, she lived, she died. In the in-betweens she raised eight kids, buried a husband before he turned 50, cared for sick friends and a sick daughter for years, and cooked more than her fair share of pies, cinnamon rolls, pastries, and thousands upon thousands of meals. The idea that food could be a love language was unimaginable for a child of the depression. Food was survival. But food was her love language. Which was a boon for this pastry lover.

She did have a beginning. She was born in Williams, Iowa, and an old picture shows her in the front row with a quizzical smile, round cheeks and a short bob haircut.

Her family moved to a farm outside of Stratford, Iowa, while my mom was still young. The farm had a “rustic” flair — water was drawn from an outside pump, the outhouse seemed miles from the side door, and a corncob furnace in the basement heated the first floor, at best. By the time I came along, a pump for water was just off the kitchen, but the rest was the same for many years. Her dad Bill Smith was a farmer, a trapper/hunter and a rumored card player who may or may not have almost lost the farm. Her mom Mae Smith was a tough, independent teacher who traveled on a steamship to Europe in the early 1900’s with a fellow teacher before eventually settling into marriage and farm life. 

My mom ended up in a roundabout way at Marycrest College in Davenport. There she met my dad. He was an ambitious mathematician chasing a brand new field much later called computer science. My mom had his number and they were married when he was still a senior at St. Ambrose in Davenport and she was a junior.

Children started arriving as the young couple followed my dad’s career around the country before finally landing in Iowa City, Iowa. He eventually became chairman of the Department of Computer Science, “a big shot” — my mom’s favorite words used to describe people who were “all that.” He was all that. And so was she.

She ran a household of eight kids, hosted the necessary social activities for my dad, and cooked and gardened and “warshed” until bedtime. My dad eventually became ill with a brain tumor and he died three years later, in 1977. She cared for him at home the entire time while half her kids were still in grade school and high school. A hard time. But as she would say, she “got that over with,” which described anything from laughing with her beloved grandchildren and great grandchildren to burying her husband before he was 50. “Got that over with” for sure.

I was with my mom when she died just weeks before she turned 98. She was healthy both mentally and physically until right up near the end. But she was dying. Her Catholic priest came to give her whatever the Church now calls the last rites. After he had performed the short ceremony, he asked me if he could sing her an Irish Lullaby — “Over in Killarney, many years ago, my mother sang a song to me in tones so soft and low, ….”

“Of course,” I said. 

And he sang the song . . . and she died. Just like that. I looked at the hospice nurse and asked: “Did she just die?” The nurse slowly nodded her head. I let out a sob. 

“Got that over with,” I heard her say in my head.

But . . . wasn’t that something?

May she rest in peace. 

Joe