You know what, Mom? You’ve got grit.

The silence over the phone led me to quickly guess that no one had ever said this to her before.

All her life she’d been the sweet, kind poet. Generous, quick with a smile and a hug. Gentle voiced.

All her life, she’d also battled depression, anxiety, and an unhealthy dose of Irish-Catholic guilt.

Yet somehow she prevailed.

You never give up, Mom. No matter what the situation, you dig down within yourself and find a way to help your family, a friend, someone in need.

That’s grit.

Joan Virginia* Cassidy was born on April 6, 1930, in New Haven, Connecticut, to first-generation Irish Americans.

*”Virgin for short, but not for long!” her naughty teenage beau would tease. Dad’s family had moved in right across Chatham Street from the Cassidys. They married in 1952.

When Dad returned from serving in Korea, they started their family and his career. Suddenly the young woman – who’d lived in one house all her life, surrounded by Irish grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles – was living in another town, in another state.

The children came quickly. Three in three years.

I was the third born and brought with me the baby blues, now called postpartum depression. Mom told me when she looked into toddler Dave’s eyes and saw sadness, she knew she had to get help.

And she did.

Our red-haired colleen of a mother did whatever it took to be the finest mother and wife possible. Even during those long winters in Holley, New York, when bundling up three little ones meant the first was unbundling before she had the third mittened up. She’d load us into a sled and cheerfully walk to the grocery store in the snow.

We relocated to Connecticut and then to Massachusetts (General Electric liked to keep its young executives on the move), where my third brother was born. Bill is six years younger than me. Mom volunteered at the children’s library, reading to disadvantaged youth. Books and words were comforting to her and to her children, whether she’d given birth to them or pulled them up on her lap during story time.

Then it was back to Connecticut for a few years. Just weeks after oldest brother Harry left for college near Boston, our suddenly smaller family moved to Indiana.

Through it all, Mom made sure that we knew we were treasured. How she managed to blockade the depression and feelings guilt from our door, I’ll never know. She fiercely battled those wretched demons and kept them away from her beloved children. The scars were there, but we never saw them.

Once I was off to Indiana University (by now, all three older sibling were there), they moved back to Connecticut.

In 1976, Mom wrote:

househunting

I am looking for the house that I can die in

windows for sun
doors for people
a hearth against the winter
skylight for stars
a garden where the roots grow long

I am looking for the house that I can live in
I am looking for myself

Mom and Dad retired to Madison, Connecticut, after finding a house with giant windows, loads of trees, a writing room, and plenty of squirrels. Dad added a skylight to the kitchen.

Mom passed away in that house late Sunday evening, November 24. Dad was holding her hand as she slipped away. Demons had returned to lay claim to the last decade of her life, but she fought back. She fought like hell.

Dad would tell me how the depression that comes with Parkinson’s would descend on Mom like a cast-iron curtain, robbing her of hours or even days of happiness.

But those two never gave up. They smiled and laughed and sang every chance they got. Dad started saying it, too: Your mom’s got grit.

There were good days, too. Hearing newborn great-grandson Evan cooing on the phone as his mom, Becky, held him close. Watching seven-year-old great-grandson Cameron via FaceTime just last week as he demonstrated his hard-boiled-egg-peeling technique for them. “Great-grandma, can you talk?” he asked. “Oh, yes!” she managed to reply clearly and firmly.

Parkinson’s is a cruel disease. We’re asking those who wish to honor Mom to please donate to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research.

Mom devoted her life to her family. She never gave up on us, and she never gave up on her friends. Each time we moved (long, long before the internet existed), she kept in touch with her friends, writing them notes, remembering their birthdays, sending hundreds of hand-written Christmas greetings.

Mom’s legacy is her 67 years of love with dad, four children, seven grandchildren, three great-grandsons, and hundreds of poems. All came from her heart and will live in ours forever.

Memory Is A Closet

Memory is a closet
where, piled high,
the unwrapped presents
of living lie.

The rainy Christmas
you lost your tooth,
the quarter you put in
the new tollbooth,

the orange mittens
that Grandma knit,
the summer pajamas
that never fit,

the night the toad
got under the car,
the night you believed in
the wishing star.

Birthdays and holidays,
the woods and the sea,
live in the closet
of memory.

“househunting” and “Memory Is A Closet” © 1976 Joan Vayo. All rights reserved.

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