In Loving Memory of Doris Suzanne (Dumais) Gousy, 1935-2014, My Mother
Saturday morning, August 9, around 1:00, after around two and a half years fighting off the physical effects of acute myeloid leukemia, my mom finally passed away. Several hours before this, having spent my mom's last uncomfortable waking hours with her in a hospital intensive care unit, my dad, my brothers, and I had decided that, consistent with my mom's wishes and the fact that medical professionals at the hospital had exhausted every non-aggressive treatment to keep her alive, we would allow the hospital staff to make my mom as comfortable as possible and allow her to pass. Neither I nor my dad were there when she finally passed - it had been a long day for all of us and my dad was very tired; we said goodbye to my mom and left with my brothers Norm and Bob with the hope that she might still be there in the morning. She passed a few minutes after we left the room, accompanied by my brother Mike, his wife Denise, and Norm's wife Michelle. I could feel some degree of guilt for leaving, but, under the circumstances, I think my mom would understand and, in any case, the important thing was that her time of suffering was over. In any case, before I left, I brushed back the hair on her forehead, told her that we loved her and that everything was going to be alright.
This post is, in part, a personal eulogy for my mom. It is also a means for me to thoughtfully mourn her passing. Lastly, it is a space for me to recount a good many memories of my mom and our relationship and commend them to the timelessness and spacelessness of the Internet in the hope that, if someday her memory starts to fade in my mind, I have a record of memories that were meaningful to me that I can return to and, maybe if I ever have children of my own someday, to share with children who never met their Mémère. Beyond that, perhaps, it can be a therapeutic moment for me, to reflect on all of the ways that I wish I had acted differently with my mom, to express my regrets at some of the distances that I created before she was gone, to explain myself, to learn to be a better person in the rest of the time that I have with my family and that I reside in the world.
My mom was born in a little town in Québec on the south shore of the Fleuve St. Laurent, St. Pacôme-de-Kamouraska, on a hillside in the shadow of a metal cross (although it may have been wooden when my mom was born) overlooking the little tributary Rivière-Ouelle where our Lévesque, Bérubé, and Miville ancestors from Normandie first settled in the 1670s with the Seigneur Deschamps. Her dad, my Pépère (grandpa) Dumais, was a son of the town's former mayor who hated politics and politicians - he was a proud and simple workman in the middle of the Great Depression when it was hard to make a decent living anywhere. Mom was the oldest of four siblings. In 1941, Pépère took his family from St. Pacôme to Windsor, Ontario to work at the war production plants in Detroit. The English-speaking folks in Windsor were less than kind to the migrant Québécois workforce, so they only stayed a couple of years. They moved back to Québec in 1943, to Drummondville in the center of the province, where they bought a little house in the neighborhood/paroise of St. Simon. From what my mom used to tell me, they were always fairly poor. Her mom, my Mémère (grandma) Dumais, had depressions so severe that she had to go away for months at a time to seek medical care, leaving their four children with my Pépère who, in turn, had to leave town part of the year to do lumbering up in the Laurentides. Mom, Aunt Lisa, Uncle Pat, and Uncle Jean-Louis spent a short time growing up in an orphanage until Pépère came back and Mémère was well enough to tend to the household. It seemed that they, like most Québécois families of modest means, did a good job of getting by without very much - they always had a little vegetable garden behind the house and put it to good use, and they took in friends and relatives as borders from time to time.
My mom finished school in town and went off to the école normale of St. Léonard run by the Sisters of the Assumption to learn to be a school teacher in 1952. She made a number of friends there that she kept in touch with the rest of her life, like Jeannine who we would always visit in Drummondville and Angèle in the Montréal suburb of Longeuil who would always treat us to a feast whenever we would stop to see her and her husband Réjean at their little house where, standing on the front sidewalk, you get a beautiful view of Olympic Stadium in Hochelaga across the river. When she finished normal school in 1954, she found an assignment in Drummondville teaching a class of first grade boys. It was before the "Quiet" Revolution (la révolution tranquille) of Prime Minister Jean Lesage and the Liberal Party of Québec - all the schools were run by some order or another of the Catholic Church and, at least in the lower grades, it was gender segregated. I remember the last time that I went to the Mondiale des cultures festival in Drummondville with my folks that my mom somehow ran into one of the boys that she had had as a student back then. It seems that she was well liked by both her students and by the sisters who ran the school.
At the time, Pépère had made his way down to the states where he had found very lucrative work as a form maker for the construction of route 91 in Eisenhower's interstate highway system. It took him down to the Springfield area, where a Québécois diaspora had built up since the 1890s. He saved up enough money to pay off the mortgage on the house in Drummondville, but the jobs were so good for construction workers down in Massachusetts that he decided to sell the property and move the family down. Mom probably could have stayed in Drummondville if she wanted - she was twenty and had a steady teaching job, but she decided to go with the family. Drummondville, before the Quiet revolution was a sleepy little crossroads town without much going on (now it is a bustling little crossroad on the TransCanada highway with lots of foreign investment, especially from Asia, in assembly plants targeting North American markets). By contrast, Springfield was bustling back in the fall of 1955 when they all moved south. They rented a little apartment in the Brightwood neighborhood off Jefferson Ave. in the North End, nowadays a virtual San Juan, Puerto Rico but at the time the Little Québec of Springfield. All of the houses were big, old Victorian era homes built when Brightwood was a streetcar suburb for Anglo-Protestant Yankee New Englanders working downtown, subdivided into multi-family houses, in some cases, by previous generations of Québécois migrants living out their American dream of owning property with an apartment on the first floor for themselves and a rental for some hardworking countrymen upstairs. All the neighbors were from somewhere in Québec, many from around Drummondville, from Kamouraska or Bellechasse, but many more from the Richelieu Valley, Ste. Hyacinthe, and other places nearer to Montréal. The neighborhood had lots of shops for the locals, there was the Jefferson theater where you could spend all afternoon watching movies for a quarter, and there were buses downtown where you could shop at Forbes & Wallace department store or, if you were a little more affluent, at Steiger's. And there were lots of factories and workplaces looking for help, from little garment shops to big machine tool works like the American Bosch complex straddling the Springfield-Chicopee line.
Neither mom nor Aunt Lisa spoke very much English, but they pretty quickly found jobs in some of the workplaces that accumulated young, mostly female Québécois laborers - they started out sewing clothes for dolls but the bosses were horrible, so they moved on to sewing baby clothes for Carter. Mom spent a number of months working for Carter before someone suggested to her that, with her education, she should try to find an office job somewhere. If I remember it right, she took some night school typing classes, worked hard on her English, and took an exam to try to find a job with Mass. Mutual, one of the prize jobs for young women without a college education in Springfield at the time. Surprisingly, she passed and started doing filing work at one of the departments in the main Mass. Mutual campus on State Street, I think, in late 1957. At the time, she thought she might be on a career path with the company.
Meanwhile, back in Little Québec, Mémère was busy trying to find a decent young man from the neighborhood for her daughter. It turned out that she had a friend from Drummondville who was living next door to these folks originally from Granby around Montréal, my Pépère and Mémère Gousy, whose oldest son, my dad, was off serving in the Army down in DC. Mémère Gousy sent my dad a photo of mom and he apparently decided that it would be worthwhile taking some time off from keeping track of potential subversives in the Counterintelligence Corp to come up to Springfield to meet this girl. Several months of dating, my dad's departure from the Army and permanent return to Springfield, and his polite efforts to deal with Mémère Dumais' cooking when he visited (my dad has an extremely finicky appetite!) led to their eventual engagement and their marriage in September of 1961. A couple of months before they married, they bought the house that my brothers and I grew up in in West Springfield, at the top of Tubbs' Hill (my Pépère Gousy did his best to convince his son of the merits of moving to somewhere on high ground after the Great Flood of the Connecticut River in 1936 innundated my Pépère's home in Chicopee when my dad was less than a year old). Within a few months of getting married, mom was pregnant with my oldest brother, Mike. She worked at Mass. Mutual until a few months before she gave birth and never returned. Within the next five year, they had three sons. I didn't come along until 1974, when my youngest brother, Norm, was eight. Mom finally got back into the labor force when I was about eight - she started baking in the school cafeteria at St. Thomas, where my brothers and I all went to primary school. It gave her a few bucks of spending money a week and still enabled her to get home before my brothers and I to prepare dinner and do other housework.
Mom lost her dad around 1981 to heart problems - he was a lifelong pipe smoker and the rich traditional Québécois diet that he and my Mémère consumed was quite tasty but not very kind on the arteries of either of them. The loss was very hard on my mom. She was very close to her dad. Her parents had bought a big house around the corner and down Boulevard Street from my folks (within walking distance), and Pépère had converted it into a two-family, with my Uncle Pat, his wife, my late Aunt Helen, and Helen's son, my cousin Doug living upstairs when I was young. Pépère was over at the house all the time when my brothers were young, and he did a lot of work on my folk's place. He extended the kitchen, produced all of the cabinets and the kitchen table from scratch in his little workshop at home, and created a downstairs bathroom. Mom didn't drive until I was about eight or nine, so Pépère would drive her wherever she needed to go during the day in his big green '67 Oldsmobile Cutlass, a car that I both remember riding in and, after Pépère had passed, collecting dust and rust up in Windsor, Mass. by Pittsfield at my Uncle Jean-Louis and Aunt Ellen's continuous "a work in progress" self-constructed house in the Berkshire Hills (at least it was incomplete while I was growing up; I think it has been pretty well completed for some years now, however - I don't go up to see them enough!). When I was very young, I spent a lot of time at Pépère and Mémère Dumais' house - Mémère would take care of me a lot while mom and Pépère went places that it just wouldn't be convenient to take a rambunctious youngster to. After Pépère passed away, mom not only lost her ride all over the area, she lost a dear daytime companion. I remember the way mom would talk about her dad, his love of life, the way he would probably be enthralled with all the fix it innovations at Home Depot(!), and how much she relied on him, both when she was young back in Québec and even after she was married and keeping the house, years later.
Mom's relationship with Mémère was different - she loved her mom, but Mémère always had her peculiarities. She suffered from depressions that were debilitating to her and to the whole family. After Pépère's death, new problems arose. Mémère had a number of small strokes that progressively robbed her of her eyesight. I remember when I was young that Mémère used to have a beautifully manicured back yard, with a little multi-tier water fountain that I used to play around. She grew tomatos and cucumbers and even potatoes, and maintained flowers stretching up the front walkway into the back yard bordering the vegetable garden. After she started going blind, everything deteriorated. Mom and her siblings deliberated and decided that it would be best if mom could take Mémère into our home. Uncle Pat, a construction contractor like his dad, built us an addition onto the back of the house with a bedroom upstairs for Mémère and a sunroom downstairs for us to enjoy our little back yard from. So Mémère moved in around 1985 or '86. Her eyesight continued to deteriorate until she was completely blind, and she also went largely deaf and continued to go through her recurring depressions. My mom might have looked at it as her labor of love to her mom, who, despite everything, worked hard to give her children a good life coming out of the Great Depression. In hindsight, I think it was at least a significant share of my mom's purgatory, especially toward the end when she started to argue with her siblings about what was the best course of action for their mother as her health deteriorated. In the last year or so of her life, Mémère began to show legitimate signs of dementia, if not full-blown Alzheimer's disease. She died around 1992, ironically enough, around almost exactly the same time my dad lost his mom. The passing of my two Mémères (and, as such, the loss of all connections to their generation - my Pépère Gousy had passed away before I was born) was, in some respect as I remember it, the closure of a somewhat acromonious period between sibling in two families, intersecting with my parents.
Through this period, I grew up and my brothers graduated from college and, for Mike, optometry school, found jobs, moved out, got married, and started families of their own. And through it all, my dad continued to be the stable breadwinner for the house. He worked incredible quantities of overtime as a letter carrier for the U.S. Postal Service, where he started around 1962 and worked over 35 years. (I want to point out, at this point, that, even for the fact that I hold a bachelor's degree in history, I am terrible with dates, especially for events within my family! If everything in here seems to overlap or bleed together, it is because I remember the events much more strongly than when each of them actually happened - what matters is how everything relates to everything else. In this sense, I might not be able to tell you what year the Northern Sung dynasty in China ended, but I know what significance the dynasty had in the development of Neo-Confucianism in China and its temporal relationship to the rise of the Jurched Jin and Mongolian Yuan dynasties that replaced it.) In addition to the Post Office, he worked part of the year for many years for the City of Springfield, going door to door after work in the poorest and most decrepit neighborhoods to collect census information, where police officers doing census work in their spare time did not dare knock on doors. Every name was worth fifty-cents, and, in neighborhoods with many large Puerto Rican and immigrant families, he could make a lot of money on the side of his day job (and learn little bits of Spanish, like the word for dog (perro) and date of birth (fecha de nacimiento)). Among the postal carriers delivering in Springfield, my dad was a consommate professional and dedicated to doing the best that he could at his job, delivering the mail like clockwork to each address on his route everyday and never, ever cutting across people's lawns to do it! He would always get through his route inside the hours that the Post Office allotted to him and often "pivot," helping other carriers to finish their routes. And he trained an innumerable number of other carriers other the years, many of whom can still recount the discipline that he instilled in them in doing their jobs.
All of that hard work, to keep bread on the table, put four children through parochial school and then four years of college, and to save up for the unanticipated future of himself and his dear wife, took a terrible toll on my dad. Around 1998, dad hit a wall - he had a major depression. The man who I remember working like a religious zealot behind the cause of "neither wind nor rain, nor..." for my entire childhood was out for over a month and, at mom's behest, sought psychiatric help. As I remember it, mom was beside herself. She had spent so many years watching her mom go through depressions, now she was watching her husband face the same fate. When dad finally got back to work, he lasted two more months before finally deciding he had reached the end. He retired and settled down to figuring what he was going to do with himself, in the company of his beloved wife, for the rest of his life if he wasn't working.
For the next decade or so, mom and dad did a lot of things together. They took vacations here and there. For their fortieth anniversary (the first week of September, 2001), we bought them airline tickets to Paris, but, after 9/11, they decided that it might be safer to vacation at home to New Orleans, ironically right before Katrina. In the end, I think they finally cashed in those tickets for a trip down the West Coast. They spent their winters for six or seven years down at Cape Canaveral (Indian Harbor Beach) in Florida, where my mom's sister, Aunt Lisa, and her husband Uncle Bernie, a retired Air Force full-bird colonel and former base controller at Patrick AFB, lived. Mom got to spend all kinds of time with her sister and their family. They spent lots of time on the beach. My dad, who walked religiously from his Post Office days, would walk the causeway over the Indian River near Melborne. He would come home sporting a lovely brown hew from the sun! For many of those years, I passed many hours watching the house and watering mom's houseplants, even though, for most of those years, I was happily settled up in Northampton, busily taking classes for grad school or writing my dissertation prospectus. They started off taking two months down in Florida. It eventually became just one month, largely because the price of their condo went up. Then they gave up their condo and rented one from my cousin, Caroline, who lived in Arizona but maintained the place so she could be closer to her folks. Then, in 2011, they stopped going altogether - they couldn't find a reasonably priced place where they could stay when they wanted to go, and they missed the prospect of celebrating Easter with the family in Massachusetts. I felt sad - it seemed like my parents had submitted to permanent grounding at home. I did not know what might be coming next though.
The other "big" thing in the lives of my mom and dad in this period was, ironically enough, candlepin bowling! Mom started bowling around 1997 with some older friends of hers at the Springfield Plaza on Liberty Street, where my dad delivered the mail, before dad retired. After he retired, dad joined in. It got really serious then. They joined a league, and won several championships. For a few years, dad was the league president, largely because he enjoyed keeping statistics (much more so than his son who was busy getting confused with statistical regressions in econometrics classes at UMASS at the time!) and he didn't mind dealing with the business end with the bowling alley. Like everything else, things change over time, however, quite often not for the better. The bowling alley at the Plaza closed up, I think in 2011 - candlepin bowling was dying out even in Western New England, one of its homes. Mom and dad moved to a candlepin alley in Agawam, but many of the other people in their league at the Plaza just dropped out - most them were in the upper eighties and the change was probably too much for them anyway. They found new people and kept going.
In January 2012, I found out, I remember by accident, the bad news about my mom. She had been really tired over the holidays and went to her doctor, who told her that she was suffering from anemia and sent her to an oncologist, who told her that it was acute myeloid leukemia (AML). She told me that the oncologist had recommended to her that she go to the Dana Farber clinic in Boston. The first thing that came to my mind and out of my mouth was, "I'll drive you and dad there." And so, I ventured with my parents to a world class center of cancer research, with the certain thought in the back of my mind that this was, for all intents and purposes, my mom's death sentence. It might not be soon, but barring some extreme measures, not possible on a woman her age or, at least, not recommended for anyone with high blood pressure and a family history of heart disease, she was eventually going to die from complications from leukemia, and I was going to lose one of my parents.
In hindsight, mom fought leukemia as hard as anyone in her situation possibly could. She went through her first regime of chemo-therapy, one that her oncologist told her normally works for only around six months for most patients, and strung the effects of the disease out for over fifteen months. Toward the end, however, it seemed as though she was living and working over at the hospital, getting blood transfusions, platelets, and chemo-therapy shots that were supposed to reduce the frequency with which she would need transfusions and platelets. There is only so much that you can do with a disease like AML and mom gave the disease a good fight.
In the months before the end, I would drop by my folks' house in the morning off the bus from Northampton before I went to work at the store (around the corner from their house, which was always convenient during high school and probably as much a reason for why I've stayed there for the last twenty-five years as any other!). I stopped last Wednesday to use the bathroom and see what mom was up to for the day - dad goes to mass at St. Thomas every morning, so I knew he wouldn't be around. When I walked in, it looked like the house was empty. I went upstairs and saw that mom and dad's bed was already made, but I did not hear mom until I left the bathroom. She was in her chair in her bedroom, still in her pajamas. She had been having mouth sores of late that were causing her a lot of pain and she told me that dad was going to take her to the hospital to tend to them when he got back. I sort of shrugged this off - my mom practically lived at Mercy Hospital since she started chemo. I said that I'd see her later and wished her the best with her mouth sores. She asked me to keep her in my prayers(!). In hindsight, it is really hard to conceive that you are seeing your mom in her home for the last time that you will ever see her there! I wish I had known, but that is, succinctly, impossible. Ainsi soit-il.
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