Cyrenaic

Cyrenaic

Thursday, April 25, 2019

I remember my mom, Joan Otto


By SJ Otto
My mother, Joan Otto, died in December of 2012. I usually write obituaries on friends and family members when they die. Maybe I forgot or I just can’t find it. But I’ve decided to write about her now.
I was always very close to my mother. There are few people I was closer to than her. Before she died I had a hard time imagining a world without her. But people get old and parents die. A year before she died, she deteriorated, both physically and mentally. When she finally died, I could hardly recognize her. She died of old age, pure and simple.

I had a lot in common with my mom. She was somewhat liberal. Not so much about free sexuality or using drugs, but she was against prejudism and racism. She taught me and my brothers to treat black folks with respect and equality.  She was against any kind of intolerance or racism. In later years my mom said “I may have over done it with teaching you tolerance.” That is because I occasionally made friends with some hard core street people or lumpen proletariats. One thing I learned from my mom was that standing up for what a person believes is right is a real important personal value.
My mom was a life long Democrat. She was a left of center liberal. She was not as far to the left as I was. While she believed in equality for all people, she did not share my beliefs on sex. She said that my dad and she were virgins when they got married. I had no reason to doubt that. She and my dad never smoked marijuana, as I used to years ago.  My mom often listened to the latest rock music, at least some of it. She wasn’t close minded. She didn’t like the Beatles at first. But over time she changed here mind and like some of their music. She was like that with a lot of new music and musicians.
She was also a devout Catholic. She told me she regretted that none of her sons followed in their parents footsteps when it came to religion. I could understand how she felt, but we all had to decide what we believed in and for most of us, it just wasn’t the Catholic religion. My dad died a few years ago and now Catholicism has simply died out in our family. Some of us chose no religion, others found different religions. One branch of our family is Baptist. They are definitely Christians and not Catholic. I consider myself an Epicurean. I got tired of telling people I was an agnostic or atheist. People kept saying “so you don’t believe in ANYTHING.” I believe in a lot of things. God and the afterlife just aren’t among those things.   
My mom tried her hand at several types of artistic pass times. She spent a year as a writer, about a year as a painter (she painted a portrait of my dad and a painting of all of us when we went fishing one year.) She spent a year as an actor. She worked for several years as a sales lady at Sears. If there is one thing she was really good at it was being a mom. She raised six boys and did a great job at it. When her and my dad got married, that was a time in the 1950s when a wife was expected to stay home and keep the house clean and raise the kids. She was a bit neurotic over her house-work. People did not understand how serious she was over her house-work. But my dad and us kids had to live with that.
But my mom was a person I often came to when I had a problem or needed advice. She always seemed to have an insight into things. She was a very spiritual person and I often enjoyed discussing things with her.
I miss my mom. Every person’s parents are different. Some guys are more close to their dads or their moms. I was very close to my mom and I miss her a lot. But life moves on, parents die and the rest of us live on until it is our turn to die. I have a son and I hope I can be as much of an inspiration to him as my mother was to me.


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