If my mom were still living, yesterday - the 17th - would have been her 70th birthday. It's hard to believe. She died when she was only 46. I had just turned 17. She's been gone for over 24 years.
Let me introduce you to my mom.
Where to begin? I guess at the beginning. Marlene Ann Haugland was born on Easter Sunday, 1938, in North Dakota, where she lived all her growing up years.
She was the daughter of Alice Isabelle Rhodes and Melius Sigurd Jorgan Knute Haugland (S. K. for short.) Her dad was the county treasurer or something, but when she was 9 they moved to the country and my grandpa started farming. She had one brother.
She graduated from a country school in a class of 9, and was valedictorian.
She went to teacher's college in Valley City, North Dakota, where she met my dad, who lived in Valley City, and was also going to teacher's college. They married in 1959,
and had 2 children, both girls.
They lived in North Dakota for a time after they were married, and moved to Minnesota in the late 60's.
Mom taught elementary school for many years - 4th grade, sometimes a 3/4 split. She was a very good teacher - many have told me that she was their all time favorite teacher.
Her hobbies were reading (big thick books like James Michener - she was a very fast reader, and seemed to stick with historical novels), knitting (I still have and treasure a pair of pink mittens that she made), sewing (she made many of her own clothes, and in several of my elementary school pictures I'm wearing outfits she made), baking (I remember her telling me that she could make a cake from scratch by the time she was nine. We ALWAYS had dessert.), researching the family tree (we made a trek to Salt Lake City one summer so that she could do research at the Mormon complex there. I have 2 binders full of information that she dug up. She used to keep all her family tree papers in a box from the grocery store that said "Mixed Nuts"), she had a good sense of humor, she enjoyed going for bike rides, tennis, camping trips (we had to stop at pretty much every museum we came across - her favorite diversion on those trips), writing letters (she wrote both her mother and her mother-in-law every single week for years and years and years, and a separate handwritten letter each Christmas to each person on her Christmas card list, which contained dozens of names). She took Norwegian language lessons, was part of a card club - (they played hearts, I think) - and a study club - they took turns researching a topic, and presenting it to the club.
Most importantly to me, she was a wonderful mom. She was loving, kind, understanding, had a wry sense of humor, and was a good listener.
In 1976, at age 38, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a mastectomy and went through chemo. It was really scary to a 10 year old kid. I had a horrible fear that I wouldn't always have her, and I came to really treasure Mom. She was unable to finish that school year, but went back the following fall, if I remember right. Life resumed a fairly regular course, but with lots of medical appointments. I remember the day she came home with a wig - they told her she would go bald, but she never did, and never had to wear the wig, to her relief. It was a mercy.
In 1979, we were on a camping trip in Manitoba and she got sick - very weak and tired. When we got home we found out that she was very anemic because the cancer had spread to her bones. She went back on chemo. She continued to teach when she felt well enough. The waiting rooms at the hospital and clinic became very familiar places. She had a few hospital admissions for different problems that arose, and also had to have occasional bone marrow biopsies, which were excruciating. She did not have "easy" veins, and had to endure a lot of painful pokes for weekly blood cell counts during chemo treatments and for the chemo drugs themselves. After the veins in her arms got too scarred, they started drawing blood from her ankles, but after a nasty bout with phlebitis, she got a Hickman catheter installed right into a vessel in her chest, which gave her a much-needed end to the pokes, but also required daily cleaning and injections of Heparin, which she learned to do herself.
One evening when she was hosting the study club group at our house, she lost her vision in the upper half of one eye. She continued hosting, but she had suffered a stroke in her eye, as a side effect to one of the drugs she was taking. I remember this being a big deal, because it could happen again, but in her brain. This was a worry, but I guess her cancer was bad enough that the drug was really needed, and she continued taking it. In January of 1983, she did end up having a major stroke. I woke up before 6 a.m. that morning to the sound of very loud voices and commotion in the house. I got out of bed and looked out the upstairs window onto the driveway and saw the ambulance parked there, and my heart filled with dread. Dad came up the stairs soon after, telling me that mom had fallen and could not move or speak clearly. It was an awful day. I remember her doctor showing us the CT scans of her brain. There were huge dark areas on the scans where there was lots of bleeding in her brain. Mom went into a coma for weeks, I think. She slowly came out of it, and had to learn to talk all over again, but was never able to speak totally clearly again. I remember sitting with her on her bed as she read Reader's Digest to me, stumbling over the words, and I would correct her and it felt like such a strange role-reversal. She never regained use of her right side at all, and was wheelchair-bound. She was admitted into a nursing home, where she lived her last months as the cancer continued to spread, and she died the end of November, 1983.
There is a big hole where Mom used to be, and I still miss her very much. I know she would have been a wonderful grandma.
