Mom Lived a Life Filled with Hope and Love

The room is mostly empty. Her bed and favorite pillows are gone, donated to patients at the nursing home who don’t have relatives to care enough to visit them or are long gone. Her clothes have been donated as well, the new stuff she did not have a chance to wear still hanging in her closet.

The nightstand holds her glass case and her favorite knick-knacks she could not part with. The dresser and the chest of drawers contain memorabilia she collected over the years, photos, and a few frames with her portraits and those of her two granddaughters and two great-grandsons.

The room is white walled with oil paintings of landscapes and an icon with her favorite rosary blessed by the Pope which we brought back from the Vatican years ago. She liked to pray every night and sometimes in the morning. She crossed herself at every meal like a good Orthodox would do.

She never wore the scarf required by modesty and church attendance for married women in her country – she loved her soft, thick hair colored auburn and we jokingly called her Lucy.

Her baptism name was Niculina (Nicole), but her two brothers and three sisters called her Bibica. Her husband of seven decades called her his Mimi, a term of endearment. To the rest of the family, she was Mimi as well. To her granddaughters, she was Maia, short for Mamaia (Grandma).

Mom loved to walk her oldest granddaughter, a precocious three-year-old, in the nearby cemetery at the university. And Eileen asked her with the innocence of toddlers, “Maia, when are you going to die so I can come see you at the cemetery?” That innocent question has finally come to pass, and mom’s soul flew into the starlight; grief enveloped all of us like a thick fog.

Her semi-bare bedroom and the bathroom, have an echo of emptiness as I step on the cold marble tiles. It is not just hollow of her earthly presence, but it is empty of her happy soul, of her laughter, her chatter, of her tears, her pain, and her loving advice. Bogart can no longer jump and purr in her lap when she watched TV. Her Romanian soap operas were legendary, and she loved to watch them with her adult granddaughter.

Gone is her zest for life and her almost childish happiness at Christmas when she strung the lights everywhere and placed ornaments in the fir tree. Gone is her soothing voice that seldom rose in anger. Her suite is quiet, so quiet that I can hear the rain drops outside. It is an almost eerie quiet, as if rejecting every earthly sound.

She is no longer coming down the steps slowly and carefully, afraid of falling. She is gone in the light, energy that is no longer here. If physicists are correct that energy is never lost but transferred, then where is she?

If something cannot come from nothing, energy cannot be created nor destroyed, but rather transformed into various forms, then where is her power? There was so much light and energy about my mother, what was she transformed into? Is she our guardian angel? Is she the monarch butterfly who found us in the cold October day at Lake Champlain in Vermont? Is she the black and white butterfly who flew about and around our bodies and faces when we took a walk in the woods the morning that my mother died? Is she the dragon fly that surrounds us on the deck, her favorite spot to watch nature and animals?

I talk to her every day, but it is a lonely monologue, not a spirited day-by-day dialog with a human being with a heart, mind, and soul. People tell me that she is in a better place, but what does that mean? What better place? I miss her laughter and her voice. Despite the many hardships she experienced under communism, she always kept a positive outlook – nothing phased her too much and always joked about it.

Mom’s ashes rest in a box in her favorite room to sit down and relax after a walk with Bogart at the edge of the woods. The small altar contains a lock of her hair on top of the urn, her last photo, a large candle which burned at her memorial, her glasses, the last doily she crocheted without a pattern, from the memory jumbled in her dying brain, the crochet needle, her favorite icon and rosary, and her straw hat. She tended to many vegetable and flower gardens wearing that hat.

Mom wanted to be with her siblings, in the family crypt in Romania. The war in Ukraine and the fear of traveling so close to a war zone is depriving mom for now of having her final wishes fulfilled. When the war is over, I hope to be able to carry her urn then to Romania and have mom finally laid to rest in her chosen spot.

For now, I feel like she is home, where she wanted to be before she developed dementia. She was a home body, the perfect domestic engineer who kept us fed, in clean clothes, and a home that was spotless.

My children’s friends were always welcome in our home even though mom could not speak English. But she spoke the language of welcoming strangers in our home, offering them good food, an occasional coke hidden in the unused dishwasher, and simple desserts. Nobody knew her recipes, they were in her head, a pinch of this, and a spoon of that. Once her brain started dying, the recipes were gone too.

The greedy corporatists, who locked the population down for two years to sell their vaccines, have robbed mom and me of the opportunity to see each other as much as we wanted. I could not touch her, I had to see her through a window and on Face Time. As her mind died faster for lack of conversation with me or the staff and complete lack of any mental stimulation from the nursing home which used the Covid lockdown as an excuse to abuse and neglect all elderly by locking them up in their rooms, she sunk into total inability to recognize us. Some days I was her mom, other days her sister, a friend, and even though it was painful to see her decline and the complete erasure of our shared past, I knew her and loved her and that is all that mattered.

I fought hard to force the nursing home to bring her out onto the patio for fresh air while I was made to sit six feet away from her, both with a mask on. When nobody watched, we removed the masks and we talked, smiled, and was able to touch my mom and give her kisses on her forehead and cheek. I read her Romanian fairytales and showed her family pictures. It was the only time that the nursing home treated her with humanity – they washed her and dressed her.

Maybe she is in a better place, without pain and neglect from the abusive west African nurses’ aides and CNAs. No matter how many times a week, each week, I would go to visit mom, varying the times, I would always find them lacking in their care.

After mom’s passing, I made a complaint to the Virginia Department of Health, the department of nursing home certification, they made a two-day unannounced visit, and they found all my allegations to be true. Unfortunately, they stopped short of accessing her medical records since she was deceased, and the nursing home declined them access to mom’s records.

If mom is in a better place, I hope that she knows that I tried my best to care for her health and needs, but my hardest was not good enough against the blatant neglect and abuse of Manor Care Health Services.

Mom lived a life filled with hope and love. She never gave up! Mom’s memory on this earth is eternal in the minds of her immediate family and the friends she made in America.

Many of her extended family members have already passed on. We will all eventually pass into anonymity and oblivion as if we never existed, our names inscribed on a cross, a plaque, a brick, a bench, or a columbarium nest. Our lives are transitory.

We are not exactly sure why God created us, gave us life in the first place, and why He takes it away when the time comes. Mom’s time was on June 9, 2022, at 12:12 a.m. She is probably in Heaven, teaching the Angels how to crochet her favorite pattern, grapes and leaves, and how to garden properly and share the vegetables with neighbors. She fed and cared for so many people during her ninety years of life.

Thirty years of fun

It is hard to believe that I spent thirty years doing what I enjoyed most - teaching. I have done this many times for free - it came so easy to me and I felt that I owed back to society my expertise and the experience I had gained through many years of education both in Europe and the United States, living and traveling overseas. I spent twenty-five years as a full-time teacher and five years as a private teacher and graduate teaching assistant.

I remember playtime always involved me as the teacher, while my friends had to be dutiful students. There was no time in my mind that I contemplated very seriously doing something else.

I remember the trepidation of the first day of school, entering the classroom and seeing the anxious eyes of my students, wondering who is going to be the class clown, the brilliant but quiet student, the brown-noser, the know-it-all, the goth, the shy, cannot-fit-in, the non-conformist, the loud-mouth, the creative, and the beauty queen who excelled at being popular.

My reputation preceded me, one generation of students told the other about the Romanian teacher who spoke 14 languages. It seemed that every year, the number of languages increased with my fame. I started with six and it had reached 14.

Meeting with parents twice a year on Parents and Orientation Day was also a whirlwind of fun since there were anxious expectations on both sides. I knew I would do my job in an exceptional way but I had to reassure the parents that their children will receive world-class education, unlike any institution they attended before. None of the teachers were unionized, most of them had Ph.D.s and considered teaching a vocation and their life's calling.

As a perfectionist, I did not want to teach unless I did it to perfection, unless I went far beyond the call of duty. No matter how much I was paid, my salary was never enough to compensate for the long hours and effort I put in to prepare my lessons and my delivery. I was always on a stage, giving 150%, whether it was 8 a.m. or 8 p.m., whether I felt poorly or terribly, my students deserved and got the best.

I had regrets often that I could not spend more time with my children as they grew up so fast. I cried when I could not spend time with them but I brought them with me into the classroom all the time. Since first grade, they were a fixture in the back of my classroom, doing their homework, rolling their eyes at mom's delivery and antics, after all, I was mom, I could not seriously be a teacher, a teacher is a goddess on a pedestal, and I was just "mom." How could I be anything else?

I allowed students to be themselves within certain understood parameters of classroom behavior. I allowed them to think, be creative, and express opinions in a non-threatening environment, while respecting the views of others. We traveled to far-away places and brought lessons back that were forever etched in their memories.

Some of the names have faded from my memory but their faces are still in my mind's eye. I have pictures of every class I've taught and, as I look at pictures of what some of my students have become, it is hard to match the high school or college photo with the adult of today.

I associate some students with minor mishaps such as accidentally shining a laser beam in the teacher's eye and blinding her for four days with minor permanent damage to one eye, special clothing they wore, hilarious hairdos, projects they completed, trips they took during which time they've gotten lost in a foreign country, winter formals, Tales from the Crypt, and Depression Day.

My students kept me young, smiling, laughing, and eager to go to work every day even though I disliked my colleagues who indoctrinated students every day into the vile communism that I had escaped in 1978. I closed my eyes and focused on the positive aspect of the job, teaching young minds to become proud and productive Americans.

Most of my pupils were naive idealists, socialists and communists at heart, wearing Che Guevara t-shirts, not really understanding the reality of what they believed in and advertised.

My former high school and college students are now productive members of society, with families, responsibilities, and I am proud that I was a tiny part of what they have become today, I am in essence touching the future, even though I have retired.