Strength From Beauty

By Sarah Woods

My mother spent seven years dying. She had a rare form of a rare bone marrow disease called myelodysplasia and passed away at the age of fifty-six in November of 1997. I am fifty-four now, so I understand what people meant when they said she was young.

Mom spent a lot of time deep in thought in her final years. She was an avid knitter, which helped her get deep into her thoughts and process her feelings. A few weeks before she died, she made her final wishes crystal clear. She wanted her grandchildren to have a sense of aesthetics. She wanted them to recognize, appreciate, and cultivate beauty.

My oldest daughter was eleven months old, and I was three months pregnant when she drew her last breaths in her living room surrounded by my dad, brother, and me. Her last home was a three-story townhouse in a non-descript development in Maynard, Massachusetts. She made the best of what she had, but it was far from her dream home. She and Dad moved there when he, like many men of his generation, took a big salary cut when the corporation he worked for “right-sized” people they wanted to put out to pasture in their mid-fifties lest they, like pregnant people, hold up business should they need to get medical treatment or take time to care for a family member.

Mom found conspicuous consumption crass and offensive. She thought Donald Trump exemplified greedy over-consumption and self-aggrandizing ostentatious displays of wealth. She had his number long before he took a wrecking ball to the United States.