After arriving in New Mexico we found that Mom was on the rebound and doing better. The hospice nurse said that she had been doing hospice for 25 years and her case was very unusual. Generally people progress through all the stages and then pass away. Sometimes they go back a stage for a spell, but rarely do they do that more than once. But there were several times where mom was near the end and then rebounded and so it was this time.
So we decided to spend time at the ranch (where we could stay for free) and then visit on the weekends. I was able to get a little bit of work done on the ranch while we were there such as painting the pump house, fixing a broken window, and so forth. I am not much of one for just sitting around and well with no TV, internet, and sporadic radio reception – there was simply not much else to do.
On one of our early visits Mom wanted to sit up, then she tried to get out of bed. There was no way, she was simply too weak to even stand. Her will and her mind were still strong, but her body was weak. She was wanting me to take her to the ranch, but there was no way that would work out.
But as time went on, she began fading again. When we visited, she would only stay awake for like 15-20 minutes then fall asleep again. Other times we would try to wake her up and she just wouldn't awaken, so we just let her sleep on those visits. On our last visit, she was not very responsive and mostly slept. She did open her eyes and smile at Becky when we kissed her goodbye. The caregiver said that she had been awake over night and kept asking for her handyman from the ranch. When she asked why, Mom said she wanted the handyman to drive her back. So she was fixated on the ranch to the very end.
Our last visit was on Monday morning and on Wednesday morning we got the call that her eyes were locked open and that she was not responding. The caregiver, Barb, said that we should get there as soon as we could. We were about 3 hours away and we were about halfway there when we got the second call that she had passed.
A little side note to that morning. It is dry and arid in New Mexico. So we rarely saw fog or mist in the mornings when we had stayed at the ranch, well that morning I noticed the light patchy fog on the valley floor and how it looked in the morning sun. It was a unique morning compared to what we usually saw. I called out for Becky to come out and look at it too. I recall saying at Misty's Memorial Service that whenever there was a misty dawn that I would think of her – which I did. Then when I got the call later that same morning, I recall wondering if that was a sort of sign, or omen. Maybe a coincidence, but perhaps not.
The funeral home was Johnny on the spot. They were already there when we pulled up. We asked for a few private minutes with Mom. I prayed that she would meet the Father (Eric Tweedale-Hill) that she never really knew and the Father (Grandpa Freedman) that she had known her whole life. Grandma, Misty, and Matt – I hoped that they would all meet together. I was glad that her suffering was over. She could not have been happy at all the last 6-7 months of her life after being shuffled from one medical institution to another and being confined most of that time.
She had an interesting life and a very unique one. She rose, fell, rose again, fell, and had a lot of turmoil. One constant was a love of horses. This interest was cultivated from an early age. She went to dude ranches out West with her family as she grew up and her family had horses that she would ride to the swimming pool in West Alexandria in the summer.
When she married my Dad, they raised horses on the farm that they bought. After the divorce she had horses for a short while but then got in trouble with the law. She had gotten mixed up in drugs – hard drugs. So she had to get rid of the horses as she went to jail, fled the country at one point when her pardon was revoked in Mississippi, and finally came back home when she tired of living on the lam.
While she was in Europe she met a guy in the Playboy club in London. Ali Golshani, who's Father was an importer in Iran. She married him and went to Iran, where she stayed until the Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis. She finally had to leave the country when she started to hear that people were wanting to turn her in to the Revolutionary Guard.
She was tragically in a house fire in 1980's in Dayton. The fellow that rented the basement of house had ripped off a drug dealer. To get even he poured gasoline around the house and set it on fire. The dude got out, but Mom didn't. He did run back in the house and got her out, but she had burns on almost half of her body. She was given about a 25% chance to live and she did live but spent months in the hospital recovering. I sure hope that karma caught up to that drug dealer.
It was around this time that she got back into horses again, this time in earnest. She kept horses in SouthEast Ohio. She also gave back as I would find out later when I was going through her belongings. I found tokens from Alcoholics Anonymous in one of her drawers. I never knew she had a drinking problem, but maybe she had an addictive personality with both alcohol and heroin being her primary substances of abuse. In her papers, I found that she had founded a chapter of AA in the Cambridge, Ohio area. She had been president and there were some cards and letters where people had thanked her for her help in getting them sober.
In that same paperwork she had a speech that she had delivered to the AA chapter that described her life and the cost of addiction. Spent time in jail in both the US and Europe. Had people shoot at her, knew people who had been shot – and killed, knew people who had been the shooter – and killed others. A very stark portrayal of life on the other side of the law.
I recall saying to her that I had watched Breaking Bad and could not watch the entire series because at one point it was so dark and I just couldn't watch it anymore. She told me that desperate people do desperate things. She went on to say that the depths to which people will go as depicted in the series had accuracy.
We made peace about 6 months before she passed away. She apologized for leaving home and us kids. I told her that the sum total of what we are is created by the experiences and people that we deal with. A Chinese proverb says that a child is an empty book upon which everyone they meet writes a page. So yes it hurt when she left, but the challenges and changes that occurred shaped us kids into the people we became.
I told her that I learned from her to accept people that are different from us and by the same token, not to be afraid of being different from everyone else. To keep an open mind and to be adventurous. We were allowed to bicycle 4 miles to town by ourselves when we were growing up – in today's world that just wouldn't happen.
There is some irony that a horse is what lead to her demise. My sister, Heather, and I both pleaded with her multiple times to cut back on the horses and stop raising them. We tried to get her to sell off the herd, maybe keep a couple of old mares to keep for companionship and to sell off the rest. But when I visited and found that she had not 1 but 2 stallions, I knew that she was determined to keep raising horses until she just physically couldn't do it any longer.
She was trying to get a halter on an unbroken filly in a trailer when it spooked and knocked her over. This frightened it more and it started to jump and fight the rope. It knocked her over and then landed on her leg and broke it. She recovered from the injury – after several surgeries, but never got her strength back. If you raise livestock you know that sometimes when a horse gets down, it generally does not get back up again and so it was with her.
I plan to put together a story of her life. I don't know that it will ever be published, but I want to document her life's arc, because it certainly will be worth a read by future generations. So feel free to contact me with stories and antidotes about her life. Both positive and negative stories are OK as I know that she could be a polarizing figure. Contact me at chrisaukcam@gmail.com
