A Sad Farewell But Memories Of A Beloved Family Friend Will Never Fade Away

We met in St. Louis, rented two cars and were soon heading east over the Mississippi. It had not been easy to coordinate the schedules of five adult brothers, but this was important.

Our business here was personal. It had been years since any of us had seen her, and we knew there might not be many more chances.

She was 95 now and in a nursing home.

And alongside our parents, she helped raise us.

Born Theresa Schmock, she was known always by a name easy for children to pronounce. Tata - both a’s pronounced as in ‘pat.’

Her title? Role? That’s easy: “Family.” What else do you call someone who is part of a household for two generations?

See, she helped raise my mother, too. Tata did not marry, and when my mom did, she followed into that household.

Poor woman didn’t know what she was getting into. Soon, five sons.

“You boys.”

That’s what she called us.

Growing up, I was with her almost every day, but now hadn’t seen her for 10 years.

We slowed down for a road sign. “Aviston,” it said. “Population 1,000.”

That’s where Tata grew up. She left Aviston for Chicago, a few hundred miles north, when she was perhaps 20, at last returning home at age 90 to a nursing home called Countryside Manor.

We came because we missed her, but I had another reason, too, and didn’t know it until now. I looked around, at her roots, and realized I wasn’t sure I knew who Tata was.

We boys were family to her, but we were also work. For most people, work is not their soul, not what they would most like to take with them at their end.

I wondered: For her, what would that be?

Before any of us spoke, the lady at the reception desk knew.

“You must be the five boys,” she said. “Theresa’s told us about you.” Tata, she added, had been counting the days since we’d first mentioned our plans weeks before.

We were escorted to her room, and there she was, in blue and green dress and white sweater.

One of my earliest visual memories is of Tata. I think I was 4 or 5 and she in her late 50s. This is probably more a comment on a child’s perceptions than an adult’s aging, but to me, she looked no different now at 95 than then.

I shouldered the brothers aside. “It’s Mark,” I said. “Your favorite.”

There is an essential skill for those in the business of caring for siblings, and Tata had not lost her touch.

“You’re all my favorite,” she answered.

Her room was small and uncluttered with a wooden cross on the wall above the bed. On the side table, there was a picture of Jesus, and another of hands in prayer bearing the words, “Give us this day our daily bread,” it said.

Perhaps, I thought, that was it. Her faith.

I told her she looked no older than when I was 5.

She never liked a fuss, and still didn’t. She waved her hand as if to say: “Go on.”

She used to say that often. Many of her phrases entered family lore.

She had patience, but we tried it, at which point she’d lay down her version of an angry threat.

“If you boys don’t behave,” she’d say, “I’ll pack my grip and go.”

To this day, I’m not sure what a grip is, but I didn’t want her to go, so it usually worked.

When it did not work, there would be the ultimate threat.

She told us she would count to three.

She’d drag out the “1” for three seconds and the “2” for five. Toward the end of “2,” her voice would start to quaver in a dire way that must have registered with some primitive part of our brains.

I say that because she never got to “3.”

We spent the morning with her at the nursing home and stayed through lunch. In those hours, I learned more about her than I had in all the years she was with us.

She had seven brothers of her own, which explained how she coped with us so well. Practice.

She also had a sister - she was one of nine children. Maybe, for Tata, that was another hidden piece of who she really was.

Faith and family - her own.

I think we were expecting this visit to be part chore. It wasn’t. After lunch, we lingered on and talked.

We asked Tata if she ever wished there had been a girl or two in the family to balance us out.

No, she never did.

“C’mon, even Mom says she would have liked a daughter.”

Not Tata. “Girls always want this and that,” she said. “Boys aren’t like that.”

You don’t expect someone 95 to remember a lot. She remembered everything - how we’d come home from school and watch Bozo’s circus and eat tunafish sandwiches.

But there was a bigger surprise than what she remembered: What I learned.

I learned about a brother of hers who died after coming back from the war. “Not the first war,” she said, “the second war.”

I learned she barely went to school because back then, the start of the century, Aviston had only a three-room school house.

I learned that her mother was the master of her house because her father, may he rest in peace, well, he didn’t work that hard.

There was only one other secret I had known about her. Once, I was told, a long time ago, there was a relationship with a man, and perhaps the possibility of something serious.

But then something happened and there was no more mention of the friend.

Once, when I was 6 or 7, I innocently asked her why she never got married. I still remember her answer: “Oh,” she said with a smile instead of self-pity, “no one wanted me.”

Finally, we brothers were out of time. We walked her back to her room. We made jokes about packing her grip and counting to three, and said good-bye.

Then we headed back through the cornfields, over the Mississippi and back to our homes.

A few weeks later, Tata began to fail. My mother and one brother, Matthew, made a visit. Soon after, she died.

She was 97.

I think I learned something new about her at the end. Her faith was her center. And her town. And her own large family. We boys came in somewhere behind that.

But maybe I’m wrong.

I called a cousin of Tata’s in Aviston, Jenny Lueki. The nursing home gave me her name. She is 70, and visited Tata each week during her last years, sometimes each day.

She told me Tata was put to rest in Aviston’s St. Francis Cemetery. Her stone has a simple inscription: Her name, and the dates 1899-1997.

“She thought so much of you boys,” Jenny said.

Then she mentioned a photograph - one of the five of us with Tata in the middle. She kept a print of it in her room until the end.

During the funeral, Jenny said, they put the picture on top of Tata’s casket.

“And before they closed it,” she said, “we put it inside.”

That is how Tata was buried. Jenny said the family felt she would want her boys to be with her.