Day 56 – Somebody to take care of Mama…
When Mama got divorced, it was hard on her. Yes, she got out of an abusive marriage, but in the 60s, divorce was still not acceptable to most people. Debby and I were still in high school, so raising two teenagers and paying all the bills on her own without anyone to talk to or share her life with, was very stressful.
Mama was an attractive woman with a dynamic personality, but how do you meet someone, anyone in the late 60s as a prospect for a second marriage? It’s not like she could go out at night with us there at home and she worked all the time. I remember her going to bed after dinner each night and just watching TV in bed until she fell asleep. Being a junior and then senior in high school, I was living my own life and didn’t think much about it at the time, but it had to be hard. Where was her life going…she wasn’t getting any younger.
With her job at the Tuberculous Association, she had national health conferences once or twice a year that she would attend to represent Eastern North Carolina. At one of these conferences, she met a man named Swede Nixon, who I mentioned yesterday. He lived in Northern Kentucky, just outside Cincinnati.
Swede was a real businessman who had come from deep poverty, gone to college, worked hard and became a true “self-made man”. He had been married before, but his wife died. He was raising two adopted children about the same age as me and Debby. Swede met Mama at one of these health conferences and was very interested in getting to know her, but he lived just outside of Cincinnati and Mama was in Greenville.
I didn’t know a lot about how they connected whether by mail (typical back then) or by phone, but after two and a half years of being alone, Swede asked Mama to marry him, and she accepted.
If you remember from my stories, by the age of 12 I was determined to be on my own. I didn’t want a father, I didn’t need a father and I probably had a bad attitude, but I did want to see Mama happy. Swede was the perfect man. He loved Mama deeply and cared for her until she passed away. He was also wise enough to leave me alone and just be a friend as I was reaching manhood.
I had a football scholarship for college, so I wasn’t a burden financially to Swede, but he did take on the extra responsibility of paying for my sister Debby’s college. As a college graduation present, he paid to have my silver cap on my front tooth replaced with a natural white porcelain one. My first father had knocked my tooth out and now my new stepfather gave me a new one so you couldn’t tell it had even happened.
Swede was always there for me, and Debby and I really appreciated him for all he did for us, but especially for Mama. They were married for 38 years wonderful years before Mama passed away allowing the 16 years of pain in the first marriage to fade into the distant past.
Swede was a very sharp businessman and I enjoyed talking to him about investments, business, and his life. He was in the Navy during World War II and drove a landing craft in the Pacific Theatre, which was no easy thing. He could not have children of his own, that’s why he and his first wife adopted a boy and a girl, but now he had four of us and for the first time for me and Debby, it felt like a real family.
Mama passed away first at the age of 77, which was very hard on Swede, and he died about two years later. He had amassed some sizable investments which he very kindly split evenly with all four of us children.
When I did Mama’s funeral, no easy task by any stretch of the imagination, I made sure to publicly thank Swede for all he had done to care for this wonderful woman and for me and Debby. When Swede died, he had said that he didn’t want a funeral, he just wanted his ashes mixed with Mama’s ashes and today they sit in an urn in my sister Debby’s home eternally together.
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