Two Deaths
On April 30, 2011, I was in Washington, D.C. I had been given the great honor of judging a national competition for high school students sponsored by “We the People”, a nationally acclaimed civic education program that focuses on history and principles of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The competition was “The Citizen and the Constitution”.
Panels of high school students are given very challenging legal scenarios, and the students must arrive at a position based on our constitution. Seeing the quality of the student responses made me very proud to be an educator in a public school.
Late that afternoon I received a call from my father. My mother was in the latter stages of Alzheimers, and he did not expect her to live through the night. He did not want me to come home to Illinois; he thought it best if we just all wait. I ended the call and felt an incredible feeling of sadness but also relief. The long goodbye of this horrible disease was finally ending for my mother and our family. If you have lost a loved one to this disease, you will understand the conflicting emotions. My mother was dying.
I was invited to dinner by two of my friends, one an educator from our town in Tennessee and the other a former Oregon Supreme Court Justice and constitutional scholar. There was nothing to be done, and so I joined them. It was a relief to have something to take my mind off of my mother for a few hours. My friend, the constitutional scholar, is a great educator and has a way of making the most difficult concepts easy to understand. I always enjoy my time with her.
Pam and I have stayed in touch over the years and spent some time with her in Monterey, California, last year. She always wants to know what I am reading. I don’t get asked that question where I live.
My mother, Dorothy Moit, was born in 1929, a child of the Great Depression. She was a twin, but her sister Doris died as an infant. The family story was that my Grandmother, Florence, had the two girls in bed with her and that Doris somehow suffocated during the night. I remember going to the cemetery with my mother every year to put flowers on the grave of her twin sister. I always sensed the sadness of her loss.
In those days, times were hard and money was scarce. When my mother was 13, my grandmother left my grandfather, and he moved to a different town. My mother, the youngest, dropped out of school and went to live with him. Often she would live at the YWCA as my grandfather moved around looking for work. She supported herself as a teenager by working as a waitress at Boylan’s Candies on Front street in Bloomington, Illinois. It was a diner with a candy counter. The chocolate candy was made upstairs and hand dipped. Each piece had a swirl on top to match the filling inside; “C” for chocolate, “O” for orange, “L” for Lemon, etc. Years later, my father would always buy her a box of Boylan’s candy on Valentines Day. She also worked at Kresge's department store as a cashier and eventually became the head cashier, making sure that all registers balanced at the end of the day. She was still a teenager. When I was a high school student, she returned to school and received her GED diploma. I think she just had something to prove to herself.
The next morning I was eating an early breakfast at the hotel when I received the call from my father that my mother had died. We cried together and then discussed our plans. He wanted me to complete my commitment in Washington. “It’s what Mom would have wanted”, he said. He was right. It was one of the many things she taught me.
As I started judging the morning competition, I felt like the death of my mother was a secret that I should tell my fellow judges, but it isn’t something you easily drop into a conversation with strangers. I heard my mother’s voice say, “Quit whining and finish your job”. At lunch I had a chance to speak with one of my heroes, Mary Beth Tinker, who in 1965, as a 13 year old Junior High school student, along with her brother, had worn a black arm band to school in protest of the Vietnam War. She was suspended from school. The case went through the courts and in 1969, the U.S. Supreme court ruled for Tinker in the famous case of Tinker vs Des Moines. The majority opinion was that students do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate. Mary Beth related a story to me that years after the decision, she met Dr. Seuss and asked him how he felt about the state of our country. He replied as only he could, “We can…and we’ve got to…do better than this”. My mother would have smiled to have heard of my experiences of that day. I finished my schedule late that afternoon. It was May 1, 2011, and my mother was dead.
I was invited by another friend, a proponent of civics education, working in D.C., to join him and a friend of mine for a dinner at Dupont Circle. It was great conversation. He was a close friend of retired Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor and told great stories of events surrounding her tenure. He told me that he would be happy to arrange a meeting with her if we were ever in the same town at the same time. My mother would have liked that too.
On our way back to the hotel we drove by the White House and you could see that a group of people were assembling. My friend remarked that this was unusual at this time of night and that “something was going on”. I got back in my hotel room, turned on the TV, and all of the news stations were alerting the public that the president was about to make an important announcement. Rumors were flying around and so I decided to go to the lobby and see if anybody knew anything. The giant TV in the lobby was on, and in a few minutes, President Barack Obama walked to the microphone in the White House and announced to the world that special forces of the U.S. military had killed Osama Bin Laden in a raid. The most wanted man in the world and the architect of the 9-1-01 attack was dead.
Some other people from our group were in the lobby. One of them suggested that we go to the White House. I jumped into a cab with a couple of guys I really didn’t know and rode the few minutes to the White House. We arrived when the crowd was fairly small, but within minutes, the crowd grew in size and enthusiasm. Chants of “USA”, “USA”, were everywhere. I was living, in person, a moment of American history. I had never in my life cheered the death of a human being, but I cheered that night. This went on for awhile until the crowd became drunk and disorderly. I stepped back into the shadows to watch. It was May 1, 2011, and Osama Bin Laden was dead and so was my mother. I caught a cab by myself and went back to my room.
The next morning I flew back home, Chicago to Bloomington. I spent some time with my dad and tried to relay to him my conflicting emotions surrounding these two deaths and the amazing experience of the past few hours. My father was a World War II and Korean War veteran, and I’m sure he recognized the power of these conflicting emotions. It was May 2, 2011, and I was still grieving one death and celebrating the other.
