Rosemary’s Remarkable Journey
How I Was Blessed to Have the Most Amazing Mom
This will be the seventh Mother’s Day without Mom here. I miss her every day. She was my greatest champion. She believed in me until I was able to believe in myself. One of the true blessings of my life were the years that I was able to give back a little of what I got from my Mom.
After Dad died, I felt like I really got to know her. Despite being one of the strongest women I’ve known, she often stayed in Dad’s shadow within the family. She wouldn’t openly criticize or contradict him, at least not in front of us. Dad was a large man, with an even larger ego. He worshipped Mom. He knew he had a keeper with her, and did his best to do right by her. But, they definitely had a complicated relationship.
Once, several years after Dad had left us, Mom was visiting us in Virginia over the Thanksgiving holiday. We decided to take a drive over to Arlington National Cemetery one afternoon to visit Dad there. Dad was a real storyteller. He had written many of his stories down and compiled them into a book, “Random Thoughts of a 75 Year Old”, a couple years before he died. Something we’d discovered when we’d moved Mom from their place in New Jersey down to Pawley’s Island, South Carolina, was several cassette tapes Dad had made, of him reading all of his stories.
I suggested we listen to the tapes on the way to and from Arlington. Mom didn’t object. I thought it was a fine day, visiting him, hearing him tell his stories on the way and back. As we were pulling into our driveway at the end of it, Mom couldn’t contain herself any longer. “Imagine the ego of that man, to think that ANYONE would be interested in all that crap!” I was really taken aback. I, for one, was. But that statement revealed to me more than anything else, how much she had kept her opinions of Dad to herself, all those years.
Of course, when I started to write down all my stories, I expected a similar reaction from her. But, quite to the contrary, she raved to one of my brothers about what a fine writer I had become. This validation from her meant the world to me. Mom might have held back a little when she didn’t think highly of something, or someone, but she never sang anyone’s praises unless she truly believed it. She was as authentic as they come.
Mom had led an interesting life. Born into an Irish-German Catholic family (like me, she embraced the Irish heritage much more than the German), she’d been very precocious, skipping a few grades of school as she grew up. Her family moved around a lot. At each new school, they would test her knowledge, and place her according to her intelligence level. She graduated high school when she’d just turned 15.
She wasn’t planning to go on to college — her family were “as poor as church mice” — but a nun took her under her wing, insisted she at least try, and obtained a number of scholarships for her to attend Duquesne University, at no cost to her family.
At first excited to be going to college, Mom quickly became disillusioned with her college experience. They had a football coach named Biff teaching English, and not very well, at that! Very unimpressed by the quality of the education there, the final straw came when she discovered that one of the scholarships the nun had arranged for her was to play basketball for the women’s team. Mom, despite her young age, was a very tall girl, just a little under six feet tall. But, she was not into sports at all. She thought running up and down a court trying to put an orange ball through a metal hoop was a complete waste of her time. She only went for that one year.
I suspect that part of why she quit and went to work for the phone company also had to do with her family’s needs. Her Dad’s printing business had gotten ruined by the 1936 flood in Pittsburgh. Her Dad (my namesake, Pete Egan) was also an alcoholic, which didn’t help matters. He was apparently difficult to work with, when “in his cups.”
Some bad things happened to her between then and when she met my Dad, at age 20. She’d desperately wanted to get the hell out of Pittsburgh. When World War II broke out, she tried joining one of the female uniformed services, but they refused her because she worked for the phone company, where they felt her services were most needed.
By then, she was drinking a lot of beer. On their first date, she told Dad, “I’m an alcoholic, just like my Daddy.” Dad didn’t believe her then — how could such a gorgeous, intelligent young lady be an alcoholic? (19 years later, he believed it!)
Dad was fresh out of a 6-year stint with the Christian Brothers, so he’d been off the dating market for a long time. Mom was the first date arranged by his younger sister, Ruthie, who had other girls lined up for him to meet, if it didn’t work out with Rosemary (Mom). Ruthie and Rosie were best friends, so Mom knew what was up. She decided pretty quickly that Jim (Dad) was a keeper. At the end of their second date, as he was kissing her good night, she looked up at him and said, “Oh, Jim, why do you want to marry me?”
Jim was flabbergasted! He’d never even mentioned marriage! However, being new to the dating game, he didn’t want to say anything to chase this one off. She was bright and gorgeous, and a lot of fun. So, he simply said, “Why, because I love you, Rosemary.”
In short order, they were married, then he was drafted into the Army. It was January, 1945 — World War II was still going on. She followed him to Minneapolis, where he studied Japanese at the University of Minnesota (he was to be an interpreter), but could not follow him to Hawaii. It was back to Pittsburgh for her, where she would deliver their first of seven children while Jim was still away in Hawaii.
Five more children were born over the next eight years, including me (I was number six). After the first three, they had moved to a little town in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Derry, Pa, which Mom hated even more than Pittsburgh. By the time I came along, they had just moved back to Pittsburgh. Mom’s alcoholism was in full bloom by then, along with a burgeoning addiction to prescription medications. It was all she could do to cope with the stress of raising a large family, and trying to be the perfect wife.
She always made sure all of her motherly and wifely duties were fulfilled, but she was growing increasingly despondent with her life. I wouldn’t have known it then, as I always thought she was full of life.
The household was quite chaotic. I was always wandering off on my own, a very independent child. They were always sending search parties out to look for me, sometimes involving the police, but I always made my way back — I never thought I was lost — just wandering. Dad would always be fit to be tied upon my return, but I always felt an understanding soul in Mom. While she would tell me I shouldn’t do that, the twinkle in her eyes revealed an understanding and compassion for my wandering ways. I think maybe I was doing what she would like to be doing!
I was a bed-wetter, and nothing we tried seemed to be solving that problem. I was still waking up with soaked sheets at ages 8, 9…then one day, Mom got sober. Her little brother had found A.A., and was instrumental in introducing her to the program that saved her, and ultimately the whole family’s, lives.
If you ever saw the movie “The Wizard of Oz”, which begins in Black and White, then switches to color when Dorothy lands in Oz, that’s what my life was like, before and after Mom got sober. Before, it was all in Black and White. After, everything was in color. Having a Mom who was there, emotionally, was a game-changer for me. I almost immediately stopped wetting the bed. I felt, more than ever, like Mom was in my corner. She encouraged me to find my first real job, in a restaurant.
After I’d discovered alcohol, and then drugs, and was having a high time for a couple years, from ages 15 to 17, it was Mom who cleverly challenged me to try stopping it all and moving with the family to Connecticut. She did a one-woman intervention with me — and, it almost worked!
I managed to go three months without anything, and wasn’t even struggling — life was an adventure, and everything in the new town was going great. But then, it all crashed down, I got loaded again, then in short order I was suicidal, a real mess. Mom helped me to deal with that (she’d been there), and I came out of that depression with the help of a shrink she set me up with.
I joined the Navy where I learned to drink and do drugs like a man. I was an inveterate letter writer my whole four years in, and Mom was my favorite correspondent. She always returned a letter, and kept me in the loop of what was happening in the family. I hated writing to Dad, because his letters back were always full of lectures and warnings of the dangers of alcoholism and addiction.
When I got out of the Navy and everything fell apart for me, it was Mom who I admitted to having a drinking problem to. She was, by then, running the Ala-Call Hotline for the state of New Jersey, the only one of its kind at the time. It was her dream to work with alcoholics in a professional capacity, so she went back to college in her 40’s, got a degree, and landed at Contact 609, which included the hotline she ran for 27 years, helping thousands of alcoholics and addicts to find help for their condition. I was one lucky drunk to have her for a mom.
She pointed me in a direction that eventually led to my recovery. It wasn’t easy, but I doubt I ever would have found it, if not for her example, and her guidance.
I got to spend quite a bit of time with her, her last year with us. She had made it to age 88, far surpassing all expectations despite having been a chain-smoker well into her 60’s. She was still pretty sharp, mentally, to the end, still playing bridge regularly, still keeping up with current events — I always made sure I was up on what was happening in Washington, as she would always have questions about what I thought of this or that, and since I was living and working in the District, she expected that I was up on these things, and respected my opinion.
I had some memorable conversations with her that last summer. When I got her talking about her father, my namesake, she said something that floored me (I’d always thought she didn’t much care for her father — I was so wrong about that!) She said, “He was the most educated man I ever knew.” Her dad had dropped out of school by the 6th grade, to go to work to help support his family. But, he was an autodidact who read voraciously, so he knew a lot about a lot of things. It turned out, despite his alcoholism, she really did admire him.
That was the summer that my writing really took off, and she was such a champion, reading as much of my work as her dying eyes would allow, grilling me about this and that, really absorbing it and pleased that I’d found my passion for it. My fondest memories of that summer with her were the two times I got her down to the beach, once at Pawley’s Island, and once at Debordieu Colony. There, she was truly in her element, beaming with life, and for those few hours spent on the beach, she was not a dying woman, she was fully in the moment, awake, alert and alive.
When I held her hand as she drew her final breath of life, it was one of the greatest privileges of my life, to be with such a remarkable woman at the final moments of an even more remarkable life.
I’ve missed her every day since she’s been gone. But, I’ve also been grateful every day to have had such an incredible mother.
