Moms’ love and humor bless their children’s lives with joy
Janine Schorsch had a closeness with her late mother, Vivian Wedig. (Submitted photo)
(Editor’s note: The Criterion invited you, our readers, to share your stories and tributes about motherhood from two perspectives—the gift of having your mom and the gift of being a mom. We’ve received so many wonderful responses that we will continue to share them throughout May, the month of Mother’s Day and a month dedicated to the Blessed Mother. Here is another collection of stories. See part two)
By John Shaughnessy
The touching scene has played out in the lives of many families, especially when the moment involves a parent at the edge of death.
Amid the heartbreak that is nearing, the children—often grown by now—gather around their mom or dad. And while the tears flow, so do the stories that connect them, frequently leading back to childhood moments of joy, love and laughter.
So it was when Janine Schorsch and her five siblings came together while their 91-year-old mother, Vivian Wedig, was in hospice.
“We saw her constant giving in the daily tasks she performed for us—the meals cooked from scratch, the constant laundry and cleaning without the help of modern appliances,” recalls Schorsch, a member of St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross Parish in Bright.
“In one of our few helpful moments of giving back, we decided to clean the basement for her. Of course, she had just hung a load of laundry on clotheslines in the basement. All of our efforts resulted in her having to rewash the laundry. It appears that we managed to transfer the dirt from the basement onto the wet clothes. Still, she loved us.”
Schorsch also remembers the uneven gift exchange that she and her mother shared one Christmas.
“When I was about 6, my mom—with a newborn baby, no less—worked at her sewing machine as I slept, making a wardrobe to go with the doll that I would receive for Christmas. Of course, in my mind, it was all the work of Santa. In the true spirit of giving, I brought her the gift of three baby field mice I found in our garden. There was a definite return of that gift! Still, she loved me.”
Her mother’s love also extended to a moment when Schorsch flirted dangerously with getting detention in grade school and in trouble at home.
“About the age of 9, I decided that the daily Mass that began our school day was boring,” she recalls. “I dawdled on my walk to school, consistently arrived late, and told my teacher that I had to help my mom with the babies.
“At a conference, the teacher mentioned how wonderful it was that I was able to help my mom each morning. My mom didn’t ‘rat me out,’ but I was never late for Mass again. Still, she loved me.”
The stories have kept Schorsch’s mother alive in her memory. So has the overall gift her mother gave her children during her 91 years.
“You can imagine all of the memorable events that six active children gave to my mother over the course of her life,” Schorsch says. “Through it all, through her frustration and exhaustion, we always knew that we were her life, her love, her heart.”
‘An intense message of love and regret’
LuAnn Tanzilli still cherishes the letter from her birth mother whom she never met—a letter that Tanzilli calls “an intense message of love and regret.”
In the letter, her birth mother refers to Tanzilli as the “diamond” she left behind.
“The letter meant so much to me because a child of adoption sometimes may wonder if they were disposable, even when God has blessed them with his very best.”
“The “very best” that Tanzilli mentions is the couple who adopted her.
“As an infant, I was blessed with the most amazing mother and father through God’s loving hands,” says Tanzilli, a member of St. Christopher Parish in Indianapolis. “They had prepared a beautiful room, showered this young baby girl with God’s love, as well as grandparents, neighbors and later, classmates and lifelong friendships.
“This devout couple instilled all of God’s love and their own strength and love to raise their daughter as a kind and loving child of God.”
Tanzilli felt her adopted parents’ love so powerfully that she didn’t search for her birth mother until she had a health concern.
“While records were sealed in earlier years, there was no strong desire or need to delve into genetic history, until later in life when a serious eye disease caused concern for a cure and genetic predisposition.”
When Tanzilli searched for her birth mother in 2009, she learned the woman had returned to Indiana in 1987 to search for her, but the records of the adoption were sealed by the state of Indiana then. She also learned that her birth mother had died in 1989. Still, there was the discovery of the letter that her birth mother had written to her in November of 1986.
On Mother’s Day, Tanzilli thought of her mother who gave her life and her mother who adopted her and gave her a life.
“Let there be no doubt that God has his loving hand and wisdom in each circumstance in our lives. And may God bless all mothers each day throughout their lives.”
‘I was never so proud of her!’
More than 70 years have passed since the moment happened, but it still makes Arlene Millar laugh—still makes her think of her mother with pride and joy.
“Not all moms are prim and proper with starched aprons and flour up to their elbows. Mine was a proud World War II Army nurse and tough as old boots,” Millar says about her mom, Margaret Corr. “She was a stay-at-home mom even though she could have had a great career in the nursing profession. She also had a quick Irish wit that surfaced now and then when you least expected it.”
That quick wit was in full force on a day in the early 1950s, a time when not a lot of women drove cars.
“She was the first woman on our block to get a driver’s license,” recalls Millar, a member of St. Luke the Evangelist Parish in Indianapolis. “She gathered my young cousins and I in the car for a spin around our Philadelphia neighborhood. No sooner did we reach the corner when a group of teenaged boys yelled out, ‘Hey, lady driver, ya know where the key goes?’ As quick as lightning, Mom had a colorful response as to where the key could go.
“I was never so proud of her!”
‘An accidental sense of humor’
Kevin Recktenwald fills with joy when he thinks about his mother’s “accidental sense of humor.”
“She really didn’t try to be funny or even know that she was,” he says about his mom Joann. “She just was.”
That quality even surfaced during the last days of her life.
“Our mother was a woman of great faith, and when her time on this Earth was nearing the end, she was ready and not afraid,” her son says. “Over the course of two days, she said her goodbyes to her friends and family. When the parish priest administered her last rites and told her that, in her honor, he would keep his homily short, she deadpanned, ‘Well, that would be a first.’
“She also thanked dad for ‘almost 60, not-all-perfect years’ and thanked my brother-in-law for putting up with my sister all these years.”
Her accidental sense of humor also brought the family a needed smile amid the heartbreak of her passing.
“I noticed my dad standing silently by her bed holding her hand, trying to find a way to say goodbye to the only woman he ever loved. The one he put above all others,” says Recktenwald, a member of St. Anthony of Padua Parish in Clarksville.
“I noticed that she didn’t have her hearing aids in, and she wouldn’t have heard a bomb go off without them. I picked them up and put them in her ears, and in a voice loud enough to be heard several floors down, I said, ‘Mom, will you wake up so we can tell you goodbye?’ She hadn’t opened her eyes all day, but just then, she opened them, looked right at me and said, ‘Kevin, can you be quiet, just this once?’
“Moments later, she was gone. I looked at my dad, and for the first time in days I saw a slight smile. He said, ‘All her life, she has been telling you to be quiet, and it is fitting that she couldn’t leave here without telling you one last time.’
“Her last gift was making our dad smile in his saddest moment, and for that we are eternally grateful.”
‘Someday, we’ll all be jewels in heaven’
The family tradition started with a mother’s deepest pain, a tradition that has added touches of beauty through the years.
Now 84, Father John Mannion was a 5-year-old boy near the end of World War II when his parents received a telegram that contained the devastating news that their oldest son, Francis, had died when his plane was struck by lightning on a routine mission.
“Nightly, my mother would sit on the front porch with me and my sister in her lap and cry so hard that her hugs actually hurt,” says Father Mannion, a retired priest of the Lafayette Diocese who had served as a hospital chaplain in the archdiocese. “She would say over and over, ‘Look at the stars, and when you find the largest one shining, that is your brother.’ ”
Through the years, he added, her hugs also lead to an outpouring of “tears, laughter, healing, faith and a reassurance that God had never forgotten us.”
Their mother’s faith in God also helped foster the vocations of Father Mannion and one of his sisters. Father Mannion has been a priest for 57 years while Sisters of St. Joseph Sister Jane Frances Mannion has been in religious life for 65 years.
The faith that marks their lives also marks the family tradition that Father Mannion has embraced through the years.
“I have been privileged to literally hug everyone else in our family who has died—my father, my mother, my youngest sister and three brothers,” he says. “I’m 84 years old, and I still look at the stars and say, ‘There’s mom. There’s dad. There’s .… .”
“I always picture that someday we’ll all be jewels in heaven.” †
