From the second telephone interview with Joe Anne Vanover, by Linda Ann Lloyd Danielson, August 7, 2010

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“Did you hear about how your mother died?  At the end of Mildred’s life she was living in a miserable, miserable place off of Cordova in Anchorage in one unpleasant room with a bed, a curtain over the window, a little shelving and cabinets to put stuff in, I think a chair, with a shared bathroom and kitchen – cheap room.

I am remembering why I had gone in there.  She wanted something.  I had seen her a month before and had agreed to meet her to go someplace to eat.  She needed to go to the store, and when I got there she was on the floor and couldn’t get up.  I called 911 that time but when they got there they said they could not take her as long as she was coherent and clean even if she couldn’t get up.

So I had seen her on the floor before, and I helped her up and went and got her some stuff.  I went back the day after to check on her and she wasn’t there.  I asked others who lived there where she was and they said she had knocked on her door and asked for someone to help her get up.  When they opened the door and found her another boarder called the paramedics who took her.  Her room was a mess.  She had been using newspaper for toilet paper and there were feces all over.

She had a strangulated bowel so that feces was backing out of her mouth.  I went over to the hospital and found her in one of the emergency room’s cubicles.  She would not agree to surgery.  She WOULD NOT let the hospital call her sons and had kept telling the hospital personnel that Joe Anne would be there to see her.  She was glad to see me.  I left the cubicle and called your brothers anyway and the boys came right over.  They were very kind.  They asked me if I would back them for institutionalizing your mother after surgery and I said yes.

With her boys there she agreed to surgery, but she died under the prep.  The anesthesiologist was devastated.  He had never lost anyone before, but Mildred had so abused her body for so long it was not his fault, and I told him so.  The boys went to collect her stuff.”  Died January 28, 2003

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I have no idea where Mildred’s money went.  [Bill’s retirement gave her $3000 per month to live on.]

Years before she started starving herself for four days at a time.  Mildred said she needed to practice so she would know if something happened she could live that far, for that long and survive for four days without food.  I would find out and then take her out to eat and she would overeat, gorge herself because she would be starved.

She had no idea – she loved her kids but not you, obviously, but the others until they got old enough they could question her.  She had no idea how to go about being a family or a mother.

[I asked her what she thought about Mildred’s mother.]  My impressions on your grandmother was that she was very businesslike.  One year when she came up to Alaska she did testing on both of my boys [related to their schoolwork].  She was not unfriendly, but not real friendly.  I think she was a very weird lady.  What she did to Mildred was horrid because Mildred did not know how to love.

[During the homesteading years] Mildred would work out these fantasies.  One time she told me she had built a fire down by the creek [where Bill filled our water cans for our drinking water] and pretended she was an Indian princess, washing clothes. [My thoughts are growing about early infant-child damage to my mother as it involved her imagination, ‘pretend play’ that never moved through the Theory of Mind developmental stages required to differentiate ‘true reality’ from ‘pretend reality’.  Remember that I include the operation of DENIAL past the childhood stage of pretend play as being a reversion back to that stage of childhood thinking.]

Mildred had never been loved.  She had been told her dad was dead when he was alive all those years.   Her mother did her such disservice.  All of your family is very smart – but her mother drained out of her everything that would have let her know how to be happy.

Her mother didn’t want her to be happy.

When your father had his stroke, Mildred was extremely concerned he get the best of treatment.  [This was long after their divorce.]  I never heard her say a hateful word about Bill.

Your mother had the most fascinating ability to take any place and fix it up and make it look homey and nice.  That’s why it was such a shocker at the end.  It was terrible!  I knew she was sick, it was terrible, just terrible.  She wouldn’t take help from your brothers, from anyone, I am one of the few people.  [Joe Anne expressed regret repeatedly that she didn’t force someone to intervene on Mildred’s behalf.  I believe Joe Anne did all that was humanly possible considering my mother’s insistent and belligerent refusal to have contact with family, or with anyone else other than Joe Anne at the end of her life.]

I have great compassion for Mildred because I have had wonderful life, loving parents, a great family, a good life.  I have been in the same house since 1951.

The year before she died I knew she hadn’t been anywhere for a long time and I took her to Hatcher Pass.  She loved it and it gave me much pleasure.  Your brothers were so kind as to give us the pictures we took that day.

Underneath she felt really sorry for herself.  She expected more of everything, wanted more of everything, yet had no idea how to achieve it, how to have a family.

Her brother Charles was mean to her.  Underneath I don’t think Mildred was sure about anything .

One time [long after I had left home and after their divorce, when my youngest son was a teenager] Mildred got $20,000 from some relative.  She bought a horse, hired guy to do stuff on homestead, didn’t know how to manage money.

Your mother was probably attracted to Bill because he was kind, quiet and gentle and a heck of a worker – times he worked away from home because it saved his sanity.

I think she was afraid all of her life.  For years she had a set of pearl suitcases, and kept her things in them and took them everywhere with her.

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I remember when I first met your mother, when your family first came to Alaska.  I would go over to see her right after you older ones got on the school bus in the morning.  The house would be perfect, too perfect, that always amazed me.  I never understood that.  And when I would go over your little sister [Sharon, just turned two] would always climb up in my lap and just sit there.  I never understood why she did that, either.

Your mother used to tell me that she would have you girls and nightgowns and she’d have your father brush you girls’ hair.  She never said Bill did anything, but I took it she was setting him up to do something.  The way she told the story about having him do it and how much he enjoyed it, she was wanting to see what would happen, what he would do.  Took it, even then, she was trying to provoke something.  [No matter what our mother said about our father molesting his daughters from the time we were very young, even babies, Joe Anne adamantly said, “It was not true.  Your father never, never, never could have done such a thing.  He didn’t.]

I knew your dad had a temper, but I never saw it.

I remember one time when your family was homesteading your mother told me she had taken dirty clothes down by the creek where your father got water.  She said she had built herself a camp fire, and had pretended she was an Indian princess living there in a camp, washing her clothes.  [Joe Anne expressed amazement and puzzlement at this, that she never understood this, but I didn’t write down her exact words.  I will ask her again later.]

Toward the end Bill could hardly stand her.  Their divorce?  She egged him on.  I think she wanted the divorce.  When everything went down in the 80s she had the money. she could have bought a condo.  Back before your brother started his bookstore, when he was selling real estate, your mother had money and he tried to get Mildred to buy something, like a condo.  She would not consider it.  Your brothers used to invite her for holidays, to dinners, but at the last minute she would say she couldn’t go, say it’s too difficult.

But Mildred used to really worry about your brother Steve that he would never make it.  She really enjoyed you brother Dave’s two girls.

Mildred used to tell me that the only time remember happy when she was growing up was when she was walking out in the woods.  She told me how much time she spent walking – that’s where she found her comfort.  [I think that’s why she liked Alaska so much, it reminded her of that.]

She told me she was very uncomfortable in high school, but after, when she went to work in a hospital, she really enjoyed it and had a good time.  [I mentioned to Joe Anne my memories from my mother’s stories that she wanted to study theatre and go on stage, and her Bostonian mother and grandmother told her, “NO!  Only whores and harlots are in the theater.”  Nursing was THEIR choice, not my mother’s though Joe Anne said that Mildred enjoyed the nursing.]

All her life she was thwarted on what she wanted.  She didn’t know how to get it.  She had a terrible, terrible crush on her shrink, such a crush on him, it was pitiful, pitiful.  {I asked Joe Anne if she believed the ‘shrink’ ever responded back to my mother inappropriately and Joe Anne said, “No.”

Much later, when she was living on Government Hill she invited me over.  At first it was empty and she slept on a mat on floor.  I called paramedics but they wouldn’t’ take her.  The she got the bug and fixed it up like a doll house and asked me to come over to meet this Guatemalan she liked.  He wanted to marry her.  I went up there, and met them.  He had worked on a crab fishing boat but he was getting too old.  I couldn’t believe it.  Her actions were wanton –  I don’t know if she was aware of how sitting, posturing, what she was saying.  I talked to her afterward.  I told her he won’t marry you, unless he thinks you have money or he wants to bring a family into the country.  I was totally amazed, aghast, it was so out of character for her.  She was like a teenager trying to entice a boy she wants and would do anything to get.

After the divorce she used to go to dances.

[Now this statement for difficult for Joe Anne to tell me, and I am glad she felt ‘safe’ enough with me to do so.  It is an important one.]  I felt sorry for her.  She was so squirrelly.  I had never met anyone like your mother.  I never knew what to make of her.  She fascinated me, but to me she was like a bug I had on in a pin.  I have felt guilty for feeling this way.  But she was beyond anything you could imagine.  I liked to watch her.  I felt terribly sorry for what she was doing to herself.

[I reminded Joe Anne that if she ever directly confronted Mildred on what she saw and M didn’t like it, M would not only ignore here, but would disappear – sometimes for years.  As far as the ‘bug on a pin’ image, I realized last night as I talked to my daughter that it really was my mother’s mental illness that Joe Anne nailed on the head of a pin — which is what I wish COULD happen to the icky, nasty, invasive, consuming kind of mental illness my mother had!  I think inside herself Joe Anne DID care for the WOMAN, the individual person my mother was.  It is no small testimonial to the importance that Joe Anne played in my mother’s life that it was Joe Anne she knew was coming at the end of her life, was Joe Anne that my mother was glad to see.]

[I noted another comment I will ask her about again:  When Mildred, her mother and grandmother were driving across country from Boston to Los Angeles in 1945 when she was 19, they ran out of money for gas in Nevada and had to sell Mildred’s pink record player which made my mother very sad.  Joe Anne said my mother never got over this.  Considering that the family sold or left behind them many ‘nice’ possessions for this move, this record player (I seem to remember when Joe Anne mentioned this that it was a gramophone) would have been one of only a very few most important and prized possessions that they were able to fit into the car as they traveled.  I suspect even this experience fits into my mother’s ‘psychosis’ and continual moving, and is tied to her losing any sense of a safe and secure attachment connection with her entire childhood life ‘back East’.  I believe as I carefully examine the words that survived about my mother’s story, that this move was just about the worst thing that could have happened to her in her ‘condition’.  In insecure attachment disorder terms, Mildred’s record player was probably a ‘transitional object’ connecting her with her past attachments – not in itself a ‘bad’ thing.  But according to Joe Anne, my mother never got over losing this object.]

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I didn’t stay glued to my computer during this interview when it seemed to slip into conversation, so much of what Joe Anne said over the span of these two hours did not get recorded.  I am not worried because I know there will more interview-conversations in the future.  Joe Anne (widowed) is about as opposite from my mother as she could be.  She is in her mid-80s, busy, active, involved with family, entertains guests, has lots of friends, has a large and beautifully kept home she cares for herself, lots of lush plants and flowers both inside and out, travels, is close to her children, and is healthy and very, very happy.

She believes that part of what kept my mother in touch with Joe Anne for 45 years was that Mildred believed that Joe Anne the kind of ‘family’ and ‘home’ that Mildred imagined for herself, yet never had any idea how to ‘get’.