Read on the morning of Jan. 2, 2016, at the funeral for Gladys Irene Browning, age 90, who died Dec. 29, 2015, at her home in Hot Springs.
I’m Roy Ockert Jr., also known as Tony to my mother and many others in my family. More than 10 years ago I knew that the moment would come when I’d need to stand up and explain who my mother was. The time has come, and the best I can do is this: My mother was an enigma. I knew her for all 70-plus years of my life, and I’ve never totally understood her.
She was barely out of high school when she met my father, who was stationed at the Army-Navy Hospital here, training to be a medic as World War II wound down. They were soon married, and I came along in 1945, my sister Linda a year later. He was transferred to Oakland, Calif., and we moved with him.
Their marriage didn’t last much longer, and she brought us back to Arkansas. She spent the next 10 years fighting off his efforts at joint custody. Somehow she managed to confound some of Hot Springs’ best attorneys and stall court orders to allow Linda and me to spend part of the summer with him until I was almost 12 years old.
Mother could be uncommonly thoughtful, incredibly generous and downright mean — all in the same breath. I exaggerate; it usually took few breaths.
She was a handful. Anyone dealing with her learned sooner or later that she had a temper with a quick trigger. What was so bewildering was that after a storm — the next day or the next week — she could pretend that nothing had happened. But others who experienced the wrath of her rage didn’t forget so easily, and that cost her many good relationships.
In “Love Story” Ali McGraw’s character told Ryan O’Neal’s, “Love means never having to say you're sorry.” If that’s true, she loved us all very much.
I learned early in life about my mother’s temper, but it was seldom directed toward me. For those early years her mother — my grandmother — was the only one who could calm the storm, and she saved Mother’s second marriage several times. Unfortunately, Mama, as I called her, a dynamo all of 4 feet, 11 inches tall, and 95 pounds, died young of cancer.
I was the dutiful son who always tried to please her, and it usually worked. As I grew older, I took on Mama’s role as the family peacemaker. But as a child I seldom brought friends home, and the first time I brought a girl home was a disaster. During my years in college she got married for the final time, and the emotion-charged arguments soon broke out. Because I was usually in Jonesboro, I’d get a call first from her telling me how Harry had mistreated her. A little later, I’d get a call from Harry telling me his side of the story.
This is where it got tricky because each adult wanted me, a college kid, to tell the other he or she was right. And with Mother, “You are either with me, or agin me.” Often she would end an argument with, “I don’t need nobody!”
I spent much of my life explaining her side of the story, defending her words and actions, trying to sooth her feelings, picking up the pieces.
I don’t say this in search of sympathy. I made my choice to be loyal. She needed me, even though she seldom said so. As I grew older, I tried harder to reason with her, to explain what she had done wrong, and that usually didn’t go well. There were occasions when I hung up the phone or left her house, thinking I’d just walk away, as so many others had done.
That was the darker side of her — the inner demons that she never fully conquered. But most of the time she was a sweetheart, and that’s why I never gave up on her.
In her lifetime she experienced great heartbreak and tragedy, pain and suffering that would have broken people of lesser will. Her father walked away from her mother when she was a baby. While her mother soon remarried a good man, both of them died young, when Mother still needed them. Mother had four marriages, none of which was really successful. Her fourth husband shot himself on their bed one morning after she had gone to work. Four years later her daughter, my sister Linda, was murdered, and her killer has never been brought to justice. She outlived her best friends and a couple of good neighbors — those who never walked away.
For much of the second half of her life, she was essentially alone. She was fiercely independent, unable to live peacefully with anybody, content to live out her days with only a dog by her side. However, she mellowed over time, and for a few years she was very active in the Hot Springs Emblem Club, a social auxiliary of the Elks Club. She made a lot of friends and rose to be president, all the while working behind the scenes on parties, meetings and charity events.
Most of all, I will remember her for Christmas, and I knew that she would make it through this last one, even though she couldn’t have enjoyed it much. For most of her life, she was a single working mother, at a time when that wasn’t as common as today, and she lived paycheck to paycheck. But at Christmas-time, she turned into Santa Claus — by which I mean nothing gave her more joy than to give her kids and grandkids whatever we wanted. Even in later years, that always meant maxing out her credit cards and then spending six months or more paying off the debt.
When she was more secure financially in her later years, she would fill her car with presents and drive to our house at Jonesboro, Batesville or Russellville a day or two before Christmas. It was almost like the arrival of Santa’s sleigh as we unloaded that car.
I remember the magical Christmas when she bought a doll house kit for our grandchild Olivia — no doubt an expensive one because it must have had 10,000 parts. This was no ordinary kit. It was a log cabin dollhouse that had to be put together, one tiny log or roof shingle at a time. Lori, Pat, Mother and I worked on that dollhouse until about 3 a.m. Christmas morning, finally giving up due to exhaustion with the job about half done. When Olivia woke up, we explained that Santa had decided it would be great fun to let us put the rest together ourselves, and that we did over maybe the next month.
It’s now a family “earloom,” as Olivia called it — waiting in my attic for some other little girl to enjoy — after a few repairs.
Her last Christmas trip was to Jonesboro after Pat and I moved back there in 2001. I started worrying when she hadn’t arrived and the weather was getting bad. I joked that maybe I needed to call the police — she had no cell phone then. Soon I got a call from a state trooper I knew, and he said, “Roy, I’ve got a lady here who says she is your mother.” Sure enough, she had gotten to within five miles of our house, to a sweeping curve in the road known as Gibson’s Switch, when she went straight instead of following the curve and slid into the parking lot by the grain elevator on the other side of the road. Luckily, she didn’t hit anything or anyone, she was unhurt, the car (full of presents) was undamaged, but she was too shaken to continue. So the trooper suggested I come and get her, which I did.
When Mother was better off financially, she also indulged herself with clothes, purses and the like. Because she sacrificed so much for her kids, she never had the nice things when she was younger, and she made up for it with a vengeance. She always dressed up when she went out, even just to the store. So She would go to Dillard’s or a women’s shop, see a dress she liked and buy it without even trying it on. If she found later that the dress didn’t fit, it stayed in the closet. When I cleaned out her four closets full of clothes a couple years ago, I found many things still with the store tags on them, other things barely worn. She had a better selection than most of the shops did.
Her health started declining about 12 years ago, starting with colon cancer. After being on chemo for just a couple of weeks, she had a stroke. Home alone, she managed to call for help, and the paramedics had to break into the house — she had five locks on the door. When I got to the hospital, I thought she would not live through the night. But she did, and that was just the first of many times that she bounced back.
The stroke left her with a right hand and right leg partially disabled, and over the years they became less and less useful. Nevertheless, she continued to drive to such necessary places as Kroger, Wal-Mart, her beautician, the doctor and the veterinarian.
After the stroke she had to spend her first time in a nursing home, which (my brother) Ken, Pat and I picked out with great care, and she didn’t like it. She also had her first experience with physical therapy, and she didn’t like that either, in fact considered it torture. It’s fair to say that she probably changed the career plans of several young therapists over the years.
She also didn’t like hospitals, and I don’t either, but she was in and out of St. Joseph’s, Mercy, St. Vincent’s or whatever it’s named now so many times I’ve lost count. And on more than one occasion she awakened an entire floor while objecting to some procedure or another. One time somebody at hospital lost her false teeth, and I was never convinced it was an accident.
She had another bout with colon cancer a couple of years later and some more time in a nursing home with physical therapists. Certain that she had worn out her welcome at the first, I found a new one on Highway 7 near Hot Springs Village. She stayed about three weeks, and after being told she should stay another week, she called me: “Tony, you can come get me now, or I’m going to start walking home.” She probably would have, too, or at least called a cab, so the next day, I went to break her out.
The final stretch for her started in August three years ago. She called Ken, said she was having trouble getting out of bed. He called me — Pat and I were on the road to Kansas City for a concert so we were even further away than him. I suggested he call Toby and Vicky and ask them to check on her. I didn’t want her door to be broken in again unless necessary, and she’d had a couple of minor incidents. Calling her grandson was a bit of a longshot because they hadn’t been on good terms, but I really didn’t know anyone else who might help.
Let me tell you they came to her rescue and no doubt saved her life that weekend. By the time I could get there Monday, she was going downhill, and eventually the hospital decided she was in full kidney failure.
She would never again have that independence she so loved. Toby volunteered to bring her to the Edwards house after more recovery and rehabilitation. As it turned out, Toby and Vicky for the next three years would operate a 1-person nursing home out of their house, then out of Mother’s house. They might not have done it if they had known then how long or difficult it would be.
They became her guardian angels. With a little help from home health aides, physical therapists and finally hospice, Toby kept her mostly in good humor and did much of the heavy lifting, and Vicky did anything and everything that needed to be done. Neither Ken nor I could have done what they did, and the only other choice would have been a nursing home. She probably lived two years longer and was able to die in her own bedroom of her own house. They are the heroes of this story.
The last three years for her, and us, have been very difficult, and every once in a while Mother would fire Vicky or even Toby and announce her determination to live alone again. But I know she loved them and appreciated what they were doing for her, and I do, too. They were always loving and caring.
Mother loved her animals, maybe more than people. She pampered the three dogs that kept her company for the last 30 years of her life — more and more with each one — none of them were really house-broken because she couldn’t raise her voice to them. The last, a Schnauzer named Regis, was spoiled rotten. She decided that dog food wasn’t good enough for him so she started cooking his meals — three a day plus a couple of snacks.
After her stroke she only cooked for him, usually having a TV dinner for herself — not because she couldn’t afford better but because he was more important, and Regis needed her time and energy. If he didn’t like the fried chicken she made for him, she’d throw that away and cook something else. Eventually, she decided he needed to be fed by hand. That dog ate better than any of her kids. Once I found that she had gotten a filet mignon for his birthday dinner or some other special occasion and I told her, “Mom, you used to feed me Spam.”
When she couldn’t take care of him any more, she replaced him with various stuffed animals that she kept at her side constantly. Last week Lori brought her a new teddy bear. She was delighted and named him Johnny Carson — that gave her five animals.
One morning Vicky came in her room and found all five on the floor. She asked what happened, and Mother told her she threw them out of bed. “If they’re with me when I die, they’re going to go in the ground with me, and they’ll be dead, too.”
Two of the older ones will be, but the other three are being adopted by her great-great-grandbabies.
When Pat and I were there last weekend, she was fading in and out, and I sensed the end was near. The last few weeks she had grown too weak to be moved from her bed to her chair, and she didn’t like that. Two weeks ago she decided she’d get out on her own and fell hard to the floor, suffering a concussion, bruises and cuts. That probably hastened her death, but still she wanted to get up — begging me numerous times over the weekend to help her to the chair.
I’m convinced that it was really her spirit trying to escape from the painful trap that her body had become. Much of the time she was talking low and incoherently, and occasionally she would hold her left hand out, reaching and staring into space. To try to comfort her, I held her hand. But once she took her right hand, which she seldom used, out from under the covers and took my hand, then used both to try to lift herself up.
She was on her way to the hospital when we left that day, and I knew it was good-bye. I’m sure that she is at peace now and has no more pain. But I also know my Mother well enough that if not, she’s letting someone up there know about it.
Thank you all for being here today.