Questions and some answers: My Mom

My Mom was born on March 9, 1916 in Aberdeen, Scotland, the oldest child of William and Jean Sim. Like so many immigrants, when she was six her parents brought the young family (she had a 4 year old and a 2 year old brother) to the United States for a better life and made a new home in Chicago, Illinois. Always interested in music, one of the first purchases my grandparents made was a piano so that my Mom could further her musical education. In those early years in the US she fell in love with singing and spent the rest of her life as a singer.

During her teenage years and into her early 20s she entered and won many singing competitions throughout the Midwest. She sang on the radio and in front of 90,000 people at Soldiers Field in Chicago, and entertained at USO Shows around the Chicago area. She eventually took a position as a chorister at the Chicago Lyric Opera Company and stayed there for several years while still performing all over the area. In early 1945 she moved to New York in order to take her career to the next level. She auditioned for, and won a position in the chorus of New York's Metropolitan Opera, America's premier opera company.

My Mom and Dad 9/20/47

In October of 1945 she started rehearsals for the Met's 1945 opera season. This also happened to be when my Dad came home from four years in the US Army and resumed his career with the Metropolitan's chorus. From the way my Mom told the story, she hated my Dad in the beginning. He was a brash Italian New Yorker, who after spending four years traveling the world with Irving Berlin's all soldier show, This is the Army, must have been a handful in his first months back in civilian life. Whatever the problem was, it obviously didn't last long, because less than two years later, on September 20, 1947, my Mom and Dad were married.

Mom and Me

On January 2, 1950 I came along and I always like to tell folks the story of what my Mom's work schedule was around the time I was born. New Year's Eve, 1949, fell on a Saturday, and as was usual on a Saturday at the Met, there was both a matinee and an evening show, and my Mom did both shows. I was born at 9PM on Monday night, so that means that less that 48 hours before I was born, and fully nine months pregnant, my Mom did two opera performances!

Perhaps befitting someone who left everything she knew and traveled across the ocean at the age of six to a whole new world, my Mom loved to travel and experience new places. Every spring, the Met toured North America; first by train, and then by plane for eight weeks. The tour took them to places like Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, Atlanta, Dallas, Minneapolis, Memphis, and even Toronto and Montreal in Canada. I still have memories of being a little kid and being on tour with them to various cities and opera houses, and memories of traveling the country by train. In later years they even went to Japan with the Met.

Mom and Dad on the beach in Ocean City

In those days the Met's season was relatively short, and as there was little other work an opera singer could get, most summers were spent collecting New York State Unemployment Insurance. In 1955 we went to Ocean City, New Jersey for the first time, at the insistence of another married couple at the Met. Walter and Kathy Hemerley were originally from Philadelphia, and his family had a house in the 3100 block of Asbury, and got us a room in a rooming house right next door. For the next five years, we spent 6+ weeks of every summer in Ocean City on Asbury, right across the street from Campbell's Sea Food. It was great way to spend a summer, and became a real way of life. Every Tuesday morning, my Dad would take the Public Service Bus (what is now NJ Transit) from 9^th Street, back to New York to sign for his unemployment check. He'd be back Tuesday afternoon, and then on Wednesday, it would be Mom's turn to make the trip. I think they got $50 a week, and I guess we weren't rolling in money, but we had five great summers!

Mom, Dad, and me in Cincinnatti

In 1960 my Mom and Dad got invited to be a part of the Cincinnati Summer Opera, and so our summers were spent in Cincinnati and not New Jersey. They did that for five years, and that was always followed by a car trip. In 1960 we went to California, and in subsequent years, Florida. As the Met season grew in length, their ability to do outside work diminished, and eventually the job at the Met became year round, and their only one. Still, my Mom and Dad would travel. One year it might be Europe, and the next Hawaii. I'm sure that she figured that would be their life after they retired from the Met, which they did after 40 years of service (my Dad a couple of years before my Mom). But my Dad, never a lover of travel on the same level of my Mom, had some health problems which precluded extensive travel.

In 1983 my Dad, at the age of 73 died suddenly one evening after turning down my Mom's bed. She'd seen him slowing down, and had been doing more and more things that he'd done over the years, because she knew she would probably be alone. It was hard for my Mom, because not only had they been married for 37 years at that point, but for all their years at the Met, they'd spent 24 hours of each day together! But my Mom was tough and bounced back, and still had a lot of living to do!

Number one on her list was singing. She started doing extra chorus work at the Met. She would work the nights of productions that needed the regular chorus to be augmented. Many of these operas were new to the Met's repertoire, so not only was she still singing at the Met late into her 60s, but she was also learning new music. She also joined our Church Choir, as well as two neighborhood choirs in her area. She had spent her life singing and wasn't about to stop. She also wasn't about to stop traveling!

She started spending winters out in Palm Desert, California with her youngest brother, and the two of them traveled back home to Scotland on almost a yearly basis. They also traveled to Australia and New Zealand, but her travels weren't exclusively with my Uncle Jack. Over the next 25 years, she and various friends and groups traveled to Russia, China, and Greece. She also made several solo trips to Scotland to visit with her Cousin Jack and his wife Chrissy, as well as various trips around the United States. When our kids were little, she planned a trip for all of us to California and Oregon, and the next year to England and Scotland. The only thing that slowed her down was when her health started to cause her problems in her late 80s!

At the age of 86 she had a valve replaced in her heart and it took her almost a year to fully recover from the surgery. For the first months after the surgery, she was sorry she'd had it done because the recovery was hard for her. But as she started feeling better, she resumed all her activities, including singing and traveling. In the end, she was very happy that she'd done it, but at 91, when the doctor told her that another valve was leaking, she realized another surgery was more than she could take, and she'd live with it.

She continued to do as much as she could, including singing, but this lady who had rarely even taken an aspirin was now on a number of prescriptions daily. She was still driving, but now it had been discovered that she also had pulmonary hypertension. This is a degenerative disease that causes shortness of breath, and along with the leaky heart value made her medical condition very difficult. The number of daily pills increased and she slowed down greatly. The start of 2009 found her having more and more trouble, and in February of that year she went into the hospital. This was a month long stay, and at the time we thought it was the end, but she did bounce back some, and after a four week stay in rehab, she returned home. Her life now though, was very different.

My Mom with a younger
Kenny, Krissi
and Billy

The first major change was that she gave up driving, and gave her car to our daughter Krissi. Her eyesight was getting worse (she'd had a stroke in one eye several years earlier and only had vision in one eye), her ability to walk was diminished, and her stamina was much lower. She was still stubbornly independent, and continued to live alone in her house, but her life was very different. Compared to the active life she'd lived just months before, this was really more existing, than living. Her days were made up of reading or watching television, and her nights were often sleepless. We now needed to visit her 3-4 times a week, have food delivered, and Susie needed to set up her large daily medication regime. The only time she got out was when she went to one of the many Doctor's appointments she now had, or when she was at our house.

She didn't feel up to Thanksgiving 2010, and we brought food to her. When she said she was feeling better at Christmas, we made sure that she was at our house. She was there for our traditional Christmas Eve lobster meal, and she ate everything that was edible on her lobster and enjoyed every bite. She spent the night in Krissi's bed (even though it was hard for her to get upstairs to her room), and was there on Christmas morning to watch her three grandchildren open their presents, as she has been every Christmas morning since my Dad died in 1983. She said that she wanted to go home before Susie's family arrived Christmas afternoon, but I said no, they want to see you too. I'm glad I didn't yield to her desire, because later she thanked me for not taking her home, and that she enjoyed every minute of the day!

Then the snows came! On December 26^th it started, and for the next month we got snow storm after snow storm. With the cold temperatures, the snow and ice everywhere, there was no way she could get out of the house even for Doctor's apportionments! She started having pain and swelling in her legs, and as stubborn as she was, in February she couldn't take it any longer, and agreed to have us call an ambulance to take her to North Shore Hospital.

The next seven weeks were hard for her, and hard for us. She was back and forth between the hospital, the rehab facility and the hospital, and her condition kept deteriorating. She was ready to go, and often wondered why she was still here. On March 9^th, 2011 she celebrated her 95^th birthday at North Shore Rehab. Krissi, Kenny, Susie and I spent about an hour with her that night, and I think she put on a good show for two of her three beloved grandchildren. She tried hard that night, and did a good job of pulling it off. On a Friday in the end of March, her breathing became labored, and they sent her back to North Shore Hospital. Over the next two weeks her condition rapidly deteriorated, and early on Friday morning April 8^th, 2011, we got the call that her suffering was over.

Back at the end of 2010, she and I were sitting in her den, and she said to me that one of the biggest regrets of her life was that we would all remember her as this poor, helpless, homebound woman. As I've said, she was proud, and this thought really bothered her. I promised her that day, that when she left us, we'd remember the lady that would go out with the "girls" for lunch after church on Sunday, and who'd then stop at out house several hours later because she needed to use the bathroom before she drove home. We'd remember the gutsy woman who loved life, who lived it to the fullest, who lived her dreams, and who lived long enough to see her grandchildren grow to be successful adults….and we will!

As was said alot around the days of her funeral, 95 is a good run, but if the truth be known, I think my Mom would have been happier to go at 93, and leave on her terms! She was a great lady, a great friend, a wonderful Gramma, a heck of a Mom and a great roll model of how to live a full life. She had an amazing life and really, what more can one ask.