Earlier this week, my late lover's mother Sudie Floss Rose, passed away after a long battle with Huntington's Disease. She was a very special woman to me and I called her momma. Her youngest child, my lover Les, preceeded her in death by six years.
Sudie Floss Rose, an illiterate hillbilly, gave birth to Les at home alone in the small and now non-existent mining town of Fondee, Kentucky. As the story goes, Les remained connected to the umbilical cord for quite some time while Sudie waited for the midwife to arrive. He was the only one of the seven children that she gave birth to that she was allowed to raise.
Shortly after Sudie became pregnant with Les, his father, Lester Sr., abandoned his wife and kids but returned shortly after Les' birth and took the older children to live with his parents in Tennessee. They were tricked into leaving by being told that they were just going for a visit to Ma and Pa's place. With a few clothes thrown into boxes and bags, Les' siblings were taken away, never to return.
At Ma and Pa's place in Jacksboro, Tennessee, Les' brothers and sisters found themselves living in a three room shack with no running water or electricity. Vic, being the oldest, took charge of his little hillbilly brood and kept a watchful, loving eye on them for several months until a stray bullet ended his life on Christmas Eve. He was sixteen years old.
With her children gone and living in another state, Sudie was left to raise Les on her own with no financial assistance or familial support. For many years she wandered from town to town living off of the good graces of relatives and friends or anybody who would take her and her little boy in. When Les was in his teens, Sudie and her kids all finally managed to reunite in Detroit where most of them worked in the factories.
When I met Les in 1990, most of the family had moved to Pennsylvania where they were living on a farm owned by the oldest sister Norma Jean. We visited them a few months after we began living together and it was astonishing to me the amount of love and caring this hillbilly family had for each other, even though their lives had been fraught with hardship and pain.
Even more astonishing though, was the immediate open-armed and unquestioning acceptance they had for me. It was as if there was nothing to talk about or consider - I was theirs from the moment I stepped foot onto that farm and I continue to be theirs up to this very moment, even though Les has been gone for six years now.
It was easy to start calling Sudie mamma, because in so many ways, she was my momma.
In contrast to the overwhelmingly loving acceptance by Les' family, my mother completely cut me off from the family from the moment she learned that I was in a relationship with another man. She began a campaign of insults and condemnations that were punctuated by long periods of silence - only to be broken by blistering orders that I not attend family affairs or have anything to do with friends in Idaho, including not attending my class reunions because to do so would embarass and disgrace the family.
She became a tyrant, invoking mormon doctrine and authoritarian writ to insure that I understood that I was going straight to hell with the rest of those who were unworthy of god's love. It was a period of great sadness for me and one that I'm not sure I've yet completely recovered from.
When Les died suddenly and unexpectedly of cancer in August of '97, Sudie was already in the advanced stages of Huntington's Disease and his family thought it would be best that she not be told for fear that the news of her beloved son's death would debilitate her to the point of having to put her in a rest home. Les' voice and mine sounded almost identical on the phone and after having listened to him talk to his mom on the phone hundreds of times, I could easily imitate the southern drawl that he would slip into when he spoke to her.
So for the past six years, I've called Sudie up on the phone about once a month and on special occasions and pretended to be Les. She never questioned it for a moment and lived for those calls.
At first it was a little awkward and sometimes I wondered if I wasn't being terribly dishonest. But I knew it was something important to do and so I did my best to make it work. I would have done anything really, for this family that loved me so much and accepted me so unconditionally.
As Sudie's disease progressed it became increasingly difficult to understand what she was saying, but the words that always came through loud and clear were, "I love you guys. I love you and Tom." In our last few conversations over the past many months, those were the only words she could speak with any clarity. But they were enough and she said them over and over and over while I listened on the other end of the phone and answered simply, "I love you too momma. I love you too."
I can't tell you how many times I choked up to hear Sudie say that she loved me and Tom - knowing of course that she thought she was talking to Les. My name was always there in amidst her expressions of love because in her mind, Les and I were one. Never once in the conversations of the past six years has Sudie ever failed to mention my name and ask about me. Sometimes it was a little confusing for me to talk about myself as though I were somebody else: "Oh yeh momma, Tom's doing fine. He's in the other room and he says to send you his love." That sort of a thing. But hey, I figured it out and it worked.
On the one side of me I had my mormon mom whose alternating condemnations and stone-cold silences made my life a living hell. On the other side of me I had Sudie, the illiterate hillbilly woman I called momma, whose unconditional acceptance made me feel welcome and safe.
Sudie's gone now but I will always hear her trembling voice in my head - those simple little words of hers that made it clear that she held no judgement: "I love you guys. I love you and Tom."
I can't help but wonder how it is that mormonism so taints a person's heart that they can't see and understand love when it's standing right there in front of them. Maybe religion is ultimately bad for the soul, shrouding it as it does under countless layers of conditions and judgements. Sudie had no education to speak of and wasn't religious a day in her life, yet she managed to love me more honestly and more freely than my mom's been able to.
So another important person in my life is gone but the lessons about love that she and her children taught me will be with me for the rest of my days. So thank you Sudie. I love you too. And I'm really going to miss you.
Tom
July 4th, 2003
