Remembering my mother
Oct. 1, 2009
JERSEY CITY -- Cool and sunny this morning for my public transportation commute to my job.
I walked the first part of the trip to the light rail station at Ninth Street in Hoboken. This takes me across the belly of Jersey City Heights, a long hike by most standards, but refreshing in weather like this.
This walk took me passed the corner of Congress and Passaic, where in 1993, I looked at a possible apartment to house my mother after she was asked to leave my uncle’s place in Toms River.
The people showed me an already occupied apartment and asked me to sign over the money order to cash. They wouldn’t take a check. I balked, thinking the whole thing was a scam.
I still wonder if it was. At the time, prior of the aborted exchange, I had thought the whole thing fate that my mother should be living on the corner of Passaic Street one block up from Paterson Street. She and I both lived on Passaic Street – she on the Garfield side of the Wall Street bridge, me on the Passaic side. We both lived in or on the border of the City of Paterson for most of our lives.
Eventually, I found a small studio apartment on the first floor of a building at the foot of the Heights, a better location, but at a much greater price.
I remember the insanity of moving her north when I rented a van from a less than respectable rent a car company and had the passenger side door swing open half way back from Toms River. My mother had to hold the door closed until we reached her new residence.
She loved the place and fought me when I tried to locate her at a subsidized place in Hoboken, near where I worked, a much roomier and better constructed place, a quarter of what we paid for the Jersey City place.
But keeping her in the Jersey City place required my working seven days a week, five days for the newspaper and then two days as a baker in Bloomfield.
My boss, Joe Barry, arranged for my mother to get placed in one of his buildings on 11th and Washington streets in Hoboken, and since I worked on 14th and Washington streets at the time, it seemed logical.
But mom hated the idea of being forced to move – perhaps because all of her life people have pushed her from one place to another, even forcing her to move to Toms River, which she hated. That move was even more full of turmoil, when she had to give up the apartment in Paterson, where she lived with my grandmother to take up a room in the basement of the Toms River house, living under the scrutiny of people – her brother and his wife – she distrusted. My mother claimed she had to fight to get my grandmother enough to eat as if my uncle and his wife were waiting for grandma to give up the ghost and die. My mother’s helping my grandmother kept the old woman alive longer than anyone expected, and her death left my mother an even more unwanted guest in their home.
The moment Sharon and I bought our own place, my uncle pressed for us to take my mother off his hands.
It was, of course, the correct thing for us to do, but Sharon was uncomfortable with taking her in to live with us, so I worked extra to pay my mother’s rent, until finally, Joe Barry helped place her.
My mother claimed that the Jersey City apartment was the best place she ever lived, allowing her with the help of a shopping cart to do her own shopping, and with a five block walk, she could attend church daily, and do other things.
While she was nearly as independent in Hoboken, she always felt as if she lived under a cloud, and for the most part, I had to help her with shopping because the supermarkets in Hoboken were too far from where she lived and by far too expensive (pricing themselves on the incomes of Wall Street professionals rather than poor residents like my mother).
All of this went through my head as I came down the elevator out of Jersey City Heights to wait for the train at the station in Hoboken, of how things might have been different if I had made other choices, if we had taken my mother in later when we got more room in our Heights home, how I might not have had to place here in a nursing home in Union City where she eventually died because no one was watching her as she choked on some food.
Yet, despite the regrets, I know I did my best, and that in spirit, she is still with me, following me passed the corner of Passaic and Paterson, and most likely laughing at the coincidence the way I still do.