pretty good lutherans

That’s my mom, the Vet, to the left.

She grew up poor and Irish in rural Missouri. She’s the kid who walked two miles to school every day (her parents never owned a car).

After high school, an uncle sent her a bus ticket to St. Louis and money for nursing school. She’d never been so far from home.

She studied hard and dreamed of being a medical missionary. When World War II broke out, she learned of the shortage of nurses and joined the U.S. Army Nurses Corps.

“Maybe I’ll get to see Des Moines,” she thought. The Army sent her to Africa, where she was stationed with the St. Louis University Military Hospital. She tended to wounded soldiers brought there.

She remembered those soliders all of her life. No matter what difficulties she encountered, she would recall the suffering she witnessed and said her problems seemed insignificant by comparison.

The soldiers’ ordeals helped her deal with her oldest daughter’s murder in 1988. She remembered the soldiers, too, in old age after she was left paralyzed and bedridden by  two strokes in 2005. Because of them, she refused to feel sorry for herself.

Living in rural Missouri meant there were few choices for good health care the last two years of mom’s life. But I’d heard about three new retirement centers for veterans and visited them with hope that mom could get the kind of compassionate care she deserved — the kind of care she showed others.

Sadly, the fancy new centers were not equipped to serve our country’s female Vets. My hope is that the story will be different for women Vets in the future.

We buried mom on Halloween three years ago. A military color guard turned out. With her coffin draped in a U.S. flag, the soliders filled the countryside with the mournful blare of a bugle playing “Taps.”

Today, I remember her story and the stories of those veterans that she passed onto our family. And to all of the patriots who put service to others before any selfish desires.

______________________

Photos and story copyright © Pretty Good Lutherans / By Susan Hogan

Note: My mom was never a Lutheran, but her best friend was a pretty good one. In middle age, they took swimming and sewing lessons together.

Thanks for visiting Pretty Good Lutherans. Come again!

Tags: Irish, Missouri, mom, nurse

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 at 8:29 am and is filed under Commentary, People. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.