Oct. 2 marked 10 years since the death of my mother, Laura (Willoughby) Hardesty.
This isn’t just going to be a column about the life and times of my mom except to say she was a born-and-bred Portage Countian: raised in Brimfield, graduated from Field High School in 1965 (hers was the first class to go all the way through the new high school), played basketball and ran track for the Falcons, and was a majorette in the band. In fact, her baton was one of her prized possessions (that, and her red Field High class jacket), and I can remember Mom getting her baton out and showing me some of her moves with it when I was growing up. I was mesmerized that someone could have that kind of dexterity and hand-eye coordination; it was like the baton was a part of her arm.
When I tried it, I nearly took my head off.
I mentioned Mom played basketball and ran track. When I’d be out shooting baskets at my grandparents’ house in Brimfield, she’d often come out and challenge me to a game of H-O-R-S-E or “21.” I don’t remember beating her. Ever. She just didn’t miss. She didn’t even hit iron. Everything was nothing but net. Once when I was in high school, I remember saying out of frustration: “How come you never miss, Mom?” To which she responded: “Gramps (her father) used to work with me shooting the ball all the time. Plus,” she added, “I’ve been shooting at this basket a lot longer than you have.”
Mom ran middle distance and hurdles in track. My dad was a sprinter at Kenmore High School in Akron, running on the same relay teams with the Cardinals as the great Bill Heideman. You know how certain genetic traits can skip a generation? Let’s just say that held true when it came to footspeed in the Hardesty family.
Mom also cherished her Field High School yearbooks. She had all of them, ninth through 12th grade. I cherished them, too – especially the photographs of Field football players, often pictured slogging through mud on the fields of Portage County. I would stare at them, wishing I could have been a part of the action, hoping someday I would. In the interim, though, my 5-year-old brain determined that the next-best thing would be to actually hold the photos in my hands.
So one morning when Mom was sleeping, I grabbed the scissors and cut out every football photo from Mom’s cherished yearbooks. It wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be: some were on opposing pages, so I had to determine which was the better photo and cut it out – at the expense of the other photo that got chopped up on the other side of the page (choosing the best photo was great early practice for a career in sports journalism, by the way).
When I was finished and examined all the great Field football photos I had in my hands, I couldn’t contain my excitement and raced into my parents’ bedroom to wake up Mom and show her my handiwork. Bleary eyed, she groggily peered at the photos, then her eyes widened. “Where did you get those?” she asked. “From those red books over there,” I said, pointing.
“YOU CUT UP MY YEARBOOKS?!” Mom exclaimed.
“No,” I said. “I cut up those red books.”
“THOSE ARE MY YEARBOOKS!” she said.
Ah, so the red books and the yearbooks are one and the same, I thought. This is bad.
I can’t verify if Mom stuffed the photos back into the yearbooks or taped them back in. I can’t verify, because I was never allowed to touch her yearbooks again. And I didn’t. Yearbookgate actually became humorous over the years, Mom and I both laughing about it whenever the subject came up. Once, she even joked that as paybacks, she should cut up my Mogadore yearbooks. At least, I think she was joking.
So when I got the call Oct. 2, 2014, that Mom had died at age 67 at her home, memories like those and others instantly filled my mind. Dad had died in 2005, so I was in uncharted waters: I would have to go the rest of my life without my parents.
I had no blueprint for it. Like a lot of things in life, you never know how you’ll get through something until you have to. You do the best you can, try to get through each day, apply the lessons you learned from your parents to cope with their loss when that time comes.
But other than that, we’re left to pick up the pieces and carry on with our lives, which suddenly look and feel very different when we lose a parent. We’re told that grieving is part of the healing process, and volumes of books have been written about it. But we’re taught very little about how to move forward after losing a parent. It’s a massive loss, a void that time doesn’t fill, and the practicality of learning how to live without them is every bit as important as dealing with the grief itself.
Of course, this can be extended to any loved one, family or friend, human or furry. I’ve found that as you age and the losses pile up, so does the emotional weight you carry each and every day. I’m not even sure it’s possible to fully recover. We just become a little bit different version of ourselves, a little more pragmatic, a little more mindful of time and a little better understanding of what’s really important in life.
I remember seeing the look on my dad’s face at his dad’s funeral in October 1977. I was 9 years old. Dad was 36 at the time and had just lost his first parent, somewhat unexpectedly. Dad just looked … lost. He still had his mother and his younger brother, and his wife and son, but he was now starting the rest of his life without his dad. Like most of us, Dad probably assumed that one day he would have to bury his dad, but when that day came, he didn’t have a blueprint for what it would actually feel like or how he was supposed to move forward. So he felt – and looked – lost.
I remember sitting in the chairs in the funeral home that autumn day in Akron, looking at Dad and seeing the tears rolling down his face. It was the first time I had seen my father cry. And in that instant, at age 9, it hit me: One day, I would be sitting in a funeral home with tears rolling down my face at his – and Mom’s – services. It was a terrifying thought.
But as the pastor read Psalm 23:4, that day seemed far off into the future – so far off as to be virtually irrelevant. Even during such an emotionally vulnerable moment as my grandfather’s funeral, I felt secure because Mom and Dad were both there with me.
Then, on July 1, 2005, Dad was gone. The day I had thought was so far in the future had come. Three decades passed in the snap of a finger. It was like I went from the chairs in one funeral home to the chairs in another, except during that drive of 20 minutes I aged 28 years.
Nine years later, Mom was gone, too. And now it’s been 10 years since that day, and I still don’t have a blueprint for how to switch gears in life from having my parents to not having my parents.
Yes, I’ve carried on. But I haven’t moved on. I’m not sure we ever move on from that kind of loss. It stays with us, becomes part of our psyche, part of who we are. It doesn’t define us, but it’s always there. We feel that void – and we feel their love. Because, although our loved one is gone, their love for us – and our love for them – is not. It remains very much alive.
As do other feelings and emotions. Just because our loved one is no longer here doesn’t mean they no longer affect us. We think about them and laugh. We think about them and cry. We think about them and wish some things could have been different. We think about them and thank them for everything they did for us.
I know I have. I thank my mom and dad all the time for working hard and making sacrifices so that their only child would have a chance to succeed in life.
I thank them all the time for their love and support, and for giving me tough love and discipline when I needed it so I wouldn’t enter adulthood totally unprepared for the stark realities of the real world.
I thank them all the time for their guidance in helping me make the right decisions at the right time at key points in my life.
And on the 10th anniversary of Mom’s death, I told her I was sorry that happened to her, I was sorry she died so young, and I was sorry she died alone.
And yes, I’m sorry about your yearbooks, Mom.
Tom Hardesty is a Portager sports columnist. He was formerly assistant sports editor at the Record-Courier and author of the book Glimpses of Heaven.