YEARS AGO, YET I STILL MISS HER

By Emilie Clothier Harting

My father pulled me toward him as we sat in the back seat of his brother’s car, “Mommy is in the hospital,” he said.

He stopped talking for a moment and then said very slowly, “I’m afraid she is not coming back. The doctors told me they did everything they could to save her, but they couldn’t.” Then, perhaps as a contemplative afterthought, “She died cleaning your wool clothes. The basin of Renuzit exploded. I wanted to go back to that night and tell her that it would have been OK if my clothes were a little dirty. I imagined what she looked like pouring the Renuzit on my plaid wool skirt and rubbing the material together to get out the spots, for I had seen her do that before.

My entire head was full of tears, like a three-foot-wide fishbowl of gurgling water. I wished I could move my arms and swim out of the awful dream. Since I was shaking, I had trouble not bumping against my father. “Don’t press on my arms,” he said again in a gentle voice. I could smell the salve on the gauze wrapped around them.  “You’ll need to help Jimmy understand,” my father continued, after a long pause. “He’s so little.”

My mother died when I was seven, but I did not know she had taken her own life until I was nineteen. My stepmother was anxious to tell me something she wished my father had explained to me before he died. “She did that to herself.,”my stepmother said succinctly. 

It was the early 1960s. I was sophomore in college then and, of course, I immediately researched suicide in periodicals using the Review of Periodical Literature, that tall green reference book every library had at that time. And I combed the indexes of psychology books in the library to see if there was any information on suicide. At that time suicide seemed to a heinous criminal act. 

 From the time I found out the truth, I just could not talk about her death for thirty years. It was so horrific that I had to push it to the back of my mind and close a door there. In fact, I could not talk about her until the late 1980s–when I was in my forties and fifties–and then only slowly when I began to share material with my excellent writers’ group, and querying her close relatives who were still alive.  Yet I knew early on that she had been such a positive influence on my life.

Others in the family talked about only rarely, but I could tell she had been much loved by her family and friends. It was probably too painful for them to talk about her.  My book, Taking Care, A Daughter’s Memoir is available in both paperback and Kindle on Amazon.  https://www.amazon.com/Taking-Care-Emilie-Clothier-Harting/dp/B0FJM9MHSQhttps://www.amazon.com/Taking-Care-Emilie-Clothier-Harting/dp/B0FJM9MHSQ, It has scenes and reflections on my mother until I was in my late seventies   She was always with me.

In addition to the influence she had on my development, a major theme of the memoir is secrecy. I did not realize until recently that she was an abstract guiding star. I had to be like her. I had to go to college as she had. I went overboard trying to copy her professional level sewing skills. I had to be a most attentive mother to my own children, and replicate her elaborate children’s birthday parties, with all food, in addition to the fancy cake, homemade from scratch.  I had to read books and socialize with friends who did so. I had to create the perfect house.

In the memoir, I write about a visit to the cemetery the Easter after she died. I put a letter to God on her grave saying he was all wrong.  He was supposed to bring people back to life, not take them away, and we needed her to make us new clothes and help my little brother with bathroom tasks. I described how we were shuttled around to different relatives for a while until my father got a job in the middle of New York State, 253 miles away from our extended family and friends, and convinced his mother to come and keep house for us.  And, in spite of how hard she worked to keep the household, I did not have warm feelings for her since she was not the same as my mother. Eventually, my father remarried and we had to adjust to a community that was so different from our close-knit extended family several hundred miles away. I longed for my mother in that new town. If only she had been there to guide me through life as I progressed into my teenage years, where she would have fit in with other mothers. I had the fantasy that had she been there with us in that town, I would not have been so unhappy. As I married and had a lifelong career as an educator, I kept thinking of my mother and how old she would be if she were alive at that time. Would she have been proud of what I was doing?

In my fifties I discovered long stored away diaries and other memorabilia I had seen when I was seven and could not read. They revealed so much about her happy early life, and gave me much joy. At the end I am with my husband, children, and grandchildren visiting her gravesite. There I achieved some closure, but I know I will miss her forever.

About the Author

Emilie ClothierHarting had a long career in education: two years teaching at Rider College, now Rider University, and forty-one years at the Community College of Philadelphia in Center City where she retired as a full professor.

In the 1960s, she earned a B.A. in English from Keuka College, and an M.A. in English from Seton Hall University.  She also did graduate work in English at the University of Pennsylvania. In the mid-nineties she received an  MFA in creative nonfiction in the non-residency program at Bennington College.

She has written four books, one on literary places in Britain, another on literary places in New England,  and a third on Staten Island history.  She has also written a number of travel narratives for major newspapers.