This is Dolores Jeanette Harrison, who was the smartest girl at Cleveland High School in Cleveland, Alabama. She probably would have been the smartest girl at your high school also, but being the daughter of a failing farmer in Blount County, Alabama isn’t a recipe for success, so I can’t point you to an online biography of her — though I will say that she worked full-time, with two breaks to bear children, from age 15 to age 80. She was a bookkeeper and accountant; always a math whiz … at least until recently.
Her name is unusual. She was the eighth child in her family and by then her mother was tired of coming up with names, so she delegated the task to her older daughters. They named their new sister after two favorite actresses, Dolores Del Río and Jeanette MacDonald.
Dolores married young. I don’t know much about that marriage except that it didn’t last long. She moved to Birmingham and got a job in a bank, where one of her co-workers introduced her to a nephew, Carl Jacobs. Carl and Dolores married in 1955; they had two children, one of whom is me.
After my father’s death — on their fifty-fifth wedding anniversary — she continued to live in their home in rural northern Alabama, a dozen or so miles (across Blount Mountain and Sand Mountain) from where she grew up. A family friend bought her a blue-heeler puppy named Ansel, who became her best friend and chief comforter. She was terribly lonely after my father’s death, and tended to mope. My sister once suggested that maybe she could try to move on, at least to some extent: “It’s been fifteen years since he died.” “Fifteen long years,” Mama quietly replied.
In the spring of this year she took a bad fall in her bedroom, and it soon became obvious that she could no longer live in her home; it was also evident that Ansel, now quite elderly too, was failing badly. In short: she lost everything that gave her life order and comfort at once, and since then has been rapidly declining.
About a month ago my wife Teri spent an afternoon with Mama and, during their talk, encouraged her to trust in the love and mercy of Jesus. This Mama said she did, which is a comfort to me, especially since she and my father were only intermittent churchgoers at best, and never spoke one word to me about their beliefs or lack thereof.
(I must take that back: My father once said to me that his time in Japan and China in the years following the Second World War, when he was in the U.S. Navy, made him ask why we believed that our religion was truer than theirs. Only because it’s ours, he thought. Thus was completed my religious education at home.)
Mama has dementia of some variety, probably Alzheimer’s, though it’s impossible to know for sure. It has been developing for some time, but her recent loss of coherence has been precipitous and dramatic. When I saw her ten days ago she seemed aware that I was someone she knew, but did not recognize me. She spoke of my brother — I don’t have a brother — and later that day told her nurse that she has two daughters (she has but one). Of greater concern and pain to me is the utter transformation of her personality: she has always been calm and quiet — I have quite literally never heard her so much as raise her voice — but now she is chatteringly manic. She also is often paranoid: she told me that the nurses in her care center try to drown her. (They try to bathe her.)
Before I saw her I had been grieving that I’m hundreds of miles away; now that doesn’t bother me so much — what would be the point of being closer? — but I am grieving in a different way.
But there is one more thing to say. The day before I arrived she was relatively serene and coherent, and had an affectionate talk with my sister. My mother and my sister have never gotten along, and open affection has never been part of my mother’s emotional repertoire. But on that day she held my sister’s hand and told her how much she loved her. She said that she has had a good life.
My sister asked her whether she remembered being married. She thought about that for a moment and then said “Yes.”
“Do you remember who you married?”
“Well … who am I?”
“You’re Dolores.”
“Oh! Then I married Carl! I loved him so, so much. And he loved me.”
UPDATE September 5: My mother died this morning, peacefully, holding her daughter’s hand.
