After
six of the most horrendous weeks I can possibly imagine, my amazingly tough
mother, Audrey Joan Cutts Mendenhall, passed away on February 20, 2012. The determination that
defined her final struggle characterized her entire life. She did everything on
her own terms and she never let anyone else's expectations limit her. She spent
her entire life defying odds and expectations. Life handed her more obstacles
and low blows than any five people should ever face, but every time something
was denied her or taken from her, she took stock of what remained, dreamed new
dreams, and started fresh.
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| Audrey Joan Cutts, December 1931. |
Audrey
was a bright and willful child, the youngest of six born to Scottish-Canadian
immigrants Fred and Christina Cutts. She was the “bonus child,” born after all
the others were grown or nearly grown.
She was the little princess and she didn’t mind capitalizing on it,
although she was by nature a tomboyish, lively girl who loved to spend time
with her big brother, Fred, swimming in the Atlantic, sailing, running,
dancing, and singing.
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| The face of a determined child |
Before entering the sixth grade, the parents of children
in the Boston school system in the 1930s and 40s had to decide the educational
fate of their children, which provided the foundation for the rest of their
lives. Academically promising children
whose parents could pay for college entered the college-bound program. The rest
of the boys learned a trade or prepared for a career in business. Girls
received basic classical educations, along with home economics and secretarial
training. As a very young child, Audrey dreamed of becoming an attorney, but
in 1940, there were only about 10,000 attorneys in the country and fewer than
150 of them were women. Audrey's blue collar, Presbyterian, practical parents
didn't even send their sons to college: they sure weren't going to send their
baby daughter and they found the notion of becoming a lawyer to be laughable. Audrey lost that battle and never got over her
hurt and disappointment. Decades later, she was still angry that she had been
denied the chance to follow her dream of becoming a lawyer.
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| Audrey at 17 |
Audrey's
parents were determined that their wild child would find a nice, stable
boyfriend after school, marry, and settle down. She had other ideas. She still
wanted to go to college. As a junior in high school in 1947, she was on a
homecoming date with a beau in New York City and was approached by a representative
of the Warner Bra Company who asked her if she would be interested in working
as "an industrial bra model." Warner was the leading manufacturer of
brassieres at the time and was attempting to improve upon the recently
introduced alphanumeric system of sizing for bras. Because she was considered
to have an ideal figure, they offered Audrey enough money to pay for the first
year of college for one season of modeling "test bras."
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| Audrey the hottie! |
Following
graduation, Audrey had a hard time getting into college, largely because in
1948, America’s colleges were flooded with men returning from World War Two,
using their GI benefits to advance their educations. She did manage to get into
Boston College, but found she had to spend the entire year taking classes she
should have had in high school. Discouraged, she moved to Washington, DC, where
jobs were plentiful, in the hope of earning enough to return in a year or two. She
moved in with her older, married sister in Northern Virginia and got a job at
the Navy Annex in Arlington.
Through her brother-in-law, she met our father,
Richard Mendenhall, a handsome military engineer ten years her senior. They
married in January 1952 and Audrey immediately became pregnant.
Audrey
lived the typical housewife life for the next several years, keeping house and
raising me from 1952 to 1956. During this time, she also learned to make
pottery. She was so good at it that
after only a couple years, she opened her own studio in our basement and held
classes for adults and children. Unhappy with commercially available glazes,
she began to experiment with other formulas, which also lent her creations a
unique and easily identifiable look.
Then, in quick succession, my brother,
Kris, and sister, Kippy, arrived. Audrey had her hands full, with three small
children, but she still managed to be the good wife and mother while also
running her pottery studio. She was also active in our church and community and was the head of the local
Republican Women’s group. In addition to all those responsibilities, we served
as an official State Department “host family” for visiting diplomats who wanted
to understand American culture. Although we hosted people from many cultures,
the bulk of our “customers” came from Japan, Germany, or France because my
parents spoke those languages. There was tremendous pressure on Audrey to
maintain a gracious and restful environment for our guests while tending to the
needs of three very active children. We were not a well-off family at all – we
had a tiny house and scavenged furnishings in what was then the boondocks of
Alexandria, Va – but Mom made every guest feel like they had received the best
that America could offer. (And, boy, did she made us toe the line! We had the
manners of little princes and princesses, thanks to that darn program!)
All that
came to an end one icy November evening in 1960, when an auto accident nearly
killed her and left her – six months pregnant – with a shattered spine. Told
she would have to lose the baby (who is now 51 years old) and would never walk again, she volunteered to be the
first human recipient of an as-yet untested procedure in which surgeons removed
her three demolished vertebrae and crushed
discs and replaced them with bones and discs from sheep. After nearly three
agonizing years in traction and therapy, she took her first steps in 1963.
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| Photo from Audrey's first real estate license |
During
those years, Audrey could do little but examine her life and she realized that
she still resented not having the chance to become an attorney. She believed it
was too late for that dream, but she decided that the life of the typical 1960s
housewife and mother was not for her. She wanted a to be a career woman. So, to the astonishment of everyone and to the
dismay of her family, she announced that she intended to obtain her real estate
broker’s license. In no time, she was a licensed real estate salesman. After three years learning the business, she
got her broker’s license and opened Showcase Realty, the first woman-owned real estate brokerage in the Washington, DC
area.
After
six years, Audrey sold the business and moved with the three youngest kids to
the Delmarva peninsula (I was in college in Texas). Delmarva was ripe for
development and
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| At the airstrip at Bayview |
Audrey had ideas about how she could be part of that. She also hoped that a move to the country
would be good for the kids. Back then, Delmarva was one of the most insular
places in America. There were about six last names. “Westerners” were not
welcome except as tourists. Anyone from
the city who intended to break into the tightly controlled world of Eastern
Shore real estate development would have had a difficult time in 1970. A
divorced working mother from D.C. who intended to do “man’s work” was anathema.
Anybody else would have given up and gone home after six months of the hazing
she endured, but Audrey stuck it out. She first moved the family into an
abandoned – and barely habitable – farmhouse adjacent to an 800 acre property
she intended to turn into a planned community called Bayview Estates.
She
needed to build a model home – and get the family out of the dangerous
farmhouse – but she lacked the cash to do so. One day, she saw a farmer
dismantling old chicken incubators, which were made from 10-inch thick solid
redwood panels. She bought those redwood panels and, with the help of the few
local people who would speak to her, she designed and built “the chicken
incubator house” for less than $12,000.
During
the next dozen years, in addition to Bayview, she developed or helped to
develop some of the most significant communities in that area, including Hidden
Harbor and Mystic Harbor. Remembering
the difficult time she had trying to obtain education beyond high school, she
played an important role in establishing Wor-Wic Community College in 1975.
Audrey made powerful friends and powerful enemies, but she proved that she was
a force to be reckoned with and she succeeded in spite of herculean efforts to
make her fail.
In the
end, it was the banking industry that brought her down. In the late 1970s, Audrey began selling log homes as
affordable housing alternatives. After building one herself, she was convinced
that these homes provided the best combination of sturdiness, beauty,
individualization, and economy for those seeking to build their own homes.
Unfortunately, as homeowners made deals then found themselves unable to secure
funding to pay for the homes, Audrey got caught in the middle and went
bankrupt. In 1979, she left Delmarva with nothing and moved to Florida to begin
again.
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| Selling timeshares in Delray Beach |
While enduring some tough years selling time
shares, Audrey encountered many doctors, engineers and other professionals,
who were looking for investment properties. She realized that many of these
folks had no business acumen whatsoever. She heard them tell of their
unmanageable staffs and bemoan the fact that they had no idea what happened to
most of the money they made. She decided to develop a company that would offer
business management services to this clientele and partnered up with others who could get the business off the ground.
This new business, TriMega, took off like wildfire. However, disaster struck
again when Audrey was attending a medical conference in Atlanta to promote the
business. While checking out of her hotel, she tripped over some luggage that
someone had placed behind her, fell on the marble floor, and shattered her back
again. This time the surgery went very badly. Audrey could not walk, was in
agonizing pain, and to top it off, her health insurance company dropped her and
her business partners stole all her assets, leaving her bankrupt again,
penniless, and unable to work. She came by air ambulance to Virginia to receive
additional surgery and to recover. After two long years, she was once again
ambulatory, although she would live the rest of her life in extreme pain.
During
that long recovery time, she once again reflected on her life. This time, she
realized that her fierce ambition had undermined her personal relationships and
that many of the tenets by which she had been living her life – and many of the
associations she had made – were no longer compatible with who she wanted to
be. She resolved to put her children and friendships first and to become “a
kinder, gentler” version of herself. To
help her deal with the deep depression she was in, and to pass the hours alone
while I was working, she decided to learn to paint. By doing so, she reignited
her earlier artistic passions and discovered that she had a wonderful talent
for painting. She began to paint
morning, noon, and night, in spite of her pain. It was therapy and a crash
course in technique all at once.
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| Very early oil painting: Mabry Mill, VA |
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| First watercolor |
Audrey had always wanted to
travel and had never had the opportunity to do so. The happiest I have ever seen her was in the
spring of 1988. For her birthday the previous December, I told her I would take
her on a trip to anywhere in the world she wanted to go. Though I had visions
of Africa, New Zealand, or at least Florence or Prague, she wanted to go to
England, so off we went, for a two-week, whirlwind tour of England, Wales, and
Scotland. I’m telling you, it was better than taking a kid to Disneyland
(another destination she loved). She was an intrepid traveler, although the
currency exchanges baffled her, and she tried to make friends with every person
we met – which is a daunting task among the characteristically reserved
British. She got along great with the rowdy Yorkshiremen, though, and it was
easy to see what part of England HER family was from!
Eventually, Audrey returned to Florida, hoping to
support herself as a painter and crafter.
Her work was shown in several
galleries and at numerous craft shows and although she was officially a
“starving artist,” she was reasonably happy, living with one son and near other
relatives. She invented several painting techniques and popularized “sand
paintings,” three dimensional paintings that incorporated beach sand and other
materials into the canvas.
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| Early sand painting |
She
wasn’t feeling well, though, and was plagued by health problems. She had a
heart attack, badly controlled high blood pressure, and other ailments. A
vascular problem destroyed one kidney. She also had strange visual symptoms, severe
headaches, and dizzy spells that doctors put down to her high blood pressure.
In early 1998, Audrey was told that she had three
giant inoperable aneurisms in her brain that would definitely kill her in the
near future and should have killed her already. The exact words of her neurologist
were, “Go home, drink, smoke, take drugs if you are so inclined, enjoy
yourself, and prepare to die.” This was not her plan, so she enlisted my help
to locate other options. Amazingly, we discovered that the National Institutes
of Health was conducting a trial at the University of Florida, six hours away,
that explored surgical alternatives to repair giant cerebral aneurisms. Audrey
was a perfect candidate for the surgery.
The doctors made it plain that the procedure was
extremely risky and she had little chance of surviving, but she signed up
anyway and had the surgery in early June 1998.
One of the anerysims could not be repaired, but the two most dangerous
ones were. After a week in recovery, she was ready to go home. She danced with
the surgeon in the waiting room while my brother fetched the car – and promptly
collapsed in a coma from cerebral vasospasms, a rare complication of brain
surgery. The effect of the vasospasms was identical to a stroke and it left her
blind and deaf on the left side and completely unable to speak. The
professional talker was struck dumb.
Another year spent in rehab, learning to speak
again. Another year of frustration and
anguish. Although she was as sharp as
ever mentally, she was never able to regain her speech fully. It was a mental
struggle to formulate every word and thoughtful listeners had to spend a bit of
time learning her new patterns. Nothing hurt or frustrated Audrey more than to
see that others in the conversation were talking around her or not listening when
she tried to speak. Although she boiled inside, outwardly she was nearly always
gracious and accepting.
She discovered that she could no longer paint the
way she had done before, both due to diminished strength and because with only
one eye, she had no depth perception. She suffered another deep depression, but
pulled herself out of it and began to experiment with other painting and craft
techniques.
She began to spend more time up north, living either
in Virginia with me and Nikki or in Maryland with my brother Kerry and his wife. Although
the cold bothered her, she found the environments more stimulating and she made
many new friends. She also loved having kids and animals around her. She
rediscovered her playful side.
Life went on that way for a
while, with Mom splitting her time among all the kids, but eventually feeling
most at home back on the Maryland eastern shore. She was aging, but gracefully,
still painting and crafting, and still telling entertaining stories – to those
who took the time to listen to her.
At
Christmas 2006, we had another scare, when she suffered another major stroke
while at my house in Virginia. After a couple months in the hospital and
another short stint in at-home rehab, though, she was raring to go again.
She dreamed of entering her paintings in a juried show – something she had never tried in the past – so in 2008 she applied to Arts Alive, a large, competitive show in Ocean City, MD. She was accepted and could not have been more thrilled. This was the big time. Other artists warned her that the judging in the show was not fair and open: winners all tended to be either members of the local Art Guild or students of the judges. Audrey didn’t care so much about that – she just wanted people to see her paintings (and buy some!) She absolutely adored interacting with the people who stopped by her booth!
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| The Peoples' Choice!! |
Once again, however, she was
starting to feel bad. Her remaining kidney was ailing, because of the high
blood pressure and some other vascular troubles. She also suffered from COPD,
which was getting much worse. She was independent, but slowing down. Audrey
lived with Kerry and his wife and they were planning to move to
Colorado. She traveled to Colorado with them and loved it, but the thin air
made her suffer. She knew she could not move with them. She insisted that she
would be fine alone, but in July 2009, Kippy and her husband moved in with her
and Nikki and I moved down the road, just to provide backup.
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| First guests in my new house in Maryland |
Good timing, as it
worked out, because in October 2009, Audrey collapsed with what turned out to
be a very large abdominal aortic aneurysm that required immediate emergency
surgery. The risks were huge, but the
alternative was unthinkable.
Although
the surgery was a success, Audrey suffered dreadful complications, including an
inability to revive from the anesthesia, a burst spleen and another bleed that
required two more surgeries. She spent nearly five months on a ventilator, with
a gastric tube, on dialysis, either unconscious or suffering from “ICU
psychosis.”
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| We took this photo because she looked so GOOD! |
Absolutely no one thought she would survive.
Absolutely everyone was wrong. In February 2010, she was discharged to rehab.
By March, she was off the vent and G-tube. She even got off dialysis, but a
severe infection sent her briefly back to the ICU and dealt the final blow to
her kidney.
From
then on, she was forced to endure dialysis, a fate that no one wants. In May,
she was discharged from rehab to a standing ovation from the entire staff. She
came home and was recovering well, when a severe bout of pneumonia sent her
back to the ICU.
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| Proving she was ready to go home again! |
This time, doctors were again certain she would never recover
and again they were wrong. It was a long haul, but she finally came home again
in July. She also developed an enormous and painful incisional hernia that we
called “the baby.”
From that time on, Audrey suffered one health blow after
another. Repeated bouts of pneumonia, lung fluid overload, and congestive heart
failure; urinary tract infections; another aneurysm. Still, every morning she
got up and did whatever she could find the strength to do. We had to watch her
like a hawk because she was intent on being as independent as possible. She was
in the hospital more than out, but every time she got home, she pushed herself
to the limit to recover. She was doing that very thing on October 29, 2011 when
she fell and broke her hip. The surgeon told her not to bother fixing it
because, “You are a medical mess and you would never survive the surgery.” Her
response? “Screw you, sonny. Fix the hip!” He fixed it and she was up and out
of rehab in three weeks, to the amazement of everyone, especially the surgeon. We
celebrated with a lovely Thanksgiving dinner at my house.
Mom’s 80th birthday was December 4 and she had
made it plain that she wanted a BIG celebration. She knew only too well how
many odds she had defied to reach that age and how much tougher it was getting
to keep going. She wanted the whole family to come to her party and we all
wanted to be there. Kerry, the baby of the siblings, was completing treatment
for his own medical problem – Stage 2 throat cancer – so we delayed the party
until January 14, 2012.
Audrey was excited about her party and about 2012. She was
going into business with Kippy, making ornaments. She hadn’t felt this happy or
productive for a long time. In a cruel twist, Audrey learned just before
Christmas that she had advanced liver and pancreatic cancer that had
metastacized aggessively into her already damaged lungs. Her response to this
news was to grieve briefly, then shrug it off. She had a party to attend!
The party could not have been better. Eighty people braved
the coldest day of the winter to be there. They came from Virginia, Florida,
Colorado, New Jersey, New York, and elsewhere to help her celebrate her big
day. Those who could not come sent videotaped
messages. Not only did Audrey have a blast, but every guest there was clearly
having fun. What a great time!
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| Audrey and BFF Ev, still gossiping! |
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| The storyteller -- January 14, 2012 |
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| Holding court - January 14, 2012 |
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| With Kippy, Kerry and friends from dialysis |
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| Cutting a rug with longtime friend & neighbor, Jerry |
One of the pneumonias, a particularly difficult one,
just would not clear up. All the while, the cancer was spreading. Finally, even
she knew she was out of options – although she was still hoping for a loophole
somewhere.
Fortunately,
we were able to get her home, where she continued to fight valiantly for her
life, even as it became clear that she was losing. On the last day of her life,
she still insisted on struggling to her feet and transferring to her wheelchair
on her own. She even attempted to use her walker to get to the bathroom on her
own. That was our Mom, refusing to back down, refusing to accept defeat,
indomitable to the end.
Audrey
made mistakes and sometimes her singlemindedness did hurt those who loved her
the most. But she was a daily reminder of what any human can do if they try
hard enough and if they refuse to make excuses or accept society’s
limitations. There will never be another
one like her and I will always miss her impish grin, her endless creativity,
and her spunky personality. Rest in peace, Mom.
