Stories
The story of
the Stevenson family
Several memories of my mother seem especially precious to me now. I was the oldest of 3 kids and so I got special attention as I was growing up.
I must have been less than 10 years old when we read the entire Bible together. I remember sitting with her on a couch on the living room in the evening after supper and the dishes were done. We read aloud, taking turns, book after book, until we had finished the entire Bible, both old and new testaments. I was especially inspired by the story of Solomon and decided that I would be like him, choosing wisdom over riches and power. It was not by accident that years later when I decided to write a novel, it was based on a re-reading of the Bible.
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(taken with my Brownie camera around 1950)
Another memory, shared with my brother, was of the music my mother played on the piano as we fell asleep at night. She was in the next room, playing Brahms, Shubert, Mendelsohn, etc. Small wonder that my brother learned to play the piano and played all his life, including at the funerals of both my father and my mother. And small wonder that I, too, have always loved classical music.
From both my parents I received strong values of social justice. Although we lived in a part of the country where many people were racist and there were still lynchings going on, they taught us children that all people everywhere are part of the same family, without superiority or inferiority. Once, I recall, my mother (who was a child welfare supervisor) was angered by the refusal of any hotel in Neosho to rent a room to a woman who planned to come to visit her. The woman was a national official in social welfare, but she was Black. Finally my mother had to call the woman and ask her not to come to Neosho.
Mother had an amazing ability to listen and respect others even when she may have found it difficult. Somehow or other she and my father found it possible to come to Cape Cod after I had attempted suicide in 1957 and to be supportive without being judgmental. Years later when my sister Connie had a nervous breakdown, they sold the house in Neosho and moved to Massachusetts to raise her kids while she was hospitalized without any sign of remorse or bitterness. And she never broke off ties with those we had divorced, in my case Nina and in my brother Jim's case, Jean. Perhaps most difficult of all she remained loving and faithful to my father over the last 30 or 40 years when he descended into a premature senility and was hardly communicative.
In her later years in Massachusetts she continued her patient work of bringing people together. She keep our family together in regular family reunions And, as a deacon of an old-line church in downtown Florence, she played a major role in merging the congregration with another, African-American congregration.
Her death was in keeping with her life. She was 90 and still an adept scrabble player, having taken part in competitions as part of a 3-generation team with my brother and his son. Visiting my brother in Minnesota, on the night before Christmas in 2001, she got over 400 points in a scrabble game. Then during the night she had a stroke and awoke having lost the use of one side of her body. She announced that with half of her dead, it was time to go. Jim called Connie and me, and along with Lindsay, we flew to Minnesota. For one week, she quietly and gracefully prepared to die. "I've lived almost a century," she said. "I don't need to see another one." Jim, being a physician specialized in dealing with the elderly, understood and helped her. The rest of us took a week to begin to accept that she was going. We asked if there was anything she regretted. "Well," she said, "I haven't heard for a year from our friends, the Woods in Neosho. Could you see if they are OK?" We called and found them in good spirits and they sent their love. "OK," my mother said, "I am ready to die." She passed away 15 minutes before midnight (EST) on the last night of the 20th Century. Outside it had been snowing all week and everything was brilliant white in the Northern sun.
Here is the poem that wrote in memoriam.
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Stages
1986-1992
Fall of Soviet Empire
1992-1997
UNESCO Culture of Peace Programme
1997-2001
UN Intl Year for Culture of Peace