At Times end...
Aynne has told you all a little about my mother, Thelma Gertrude Petty Morison, from her perspective and how my Brothers and I are not panicking. A little Background on the Petty side of the Family and "Dirty Gertie" may help you understand us a little better.
Her parents were both born in the late 1800's.
As a child my grandfather, William Franklin Petty (Frank), picked weeds from between the cobblestones of Old Town Alexandria Virginia for $.25 a day. His mother would put him in a dress and tie him to the barn door if he miss-behaved. He served in France during WWI during which he lost hearing in one ear and 60% in the other. He worked as a crane operator at the old Grain Silos on the Alexandria Waterfront. He was a waterman for a while on the Intercoastal waterway. He lost his first wife to the Spanish Flu Epidemic. He once drove a Stutz Bearcat. He was drinking buddies with the last Lighthouse Keeper for Alexandria at a time when shipyards stood where the Wilson Bridge now spans the Potomac. His life molded him into the person that became know as The Meanest Man in Alexandria.
My Gradnmother, Rose Olive Helwig, was the daughter of German immigrates that settled in Baltimore in the 1870's. In her youth they lived in Oxen Hill Maryland and for a while she worked in the Shirt Factories of Baltimore and her father ran a local Tavern. At some point the family moved to Alexandria Virginia and she married a Mr. Davis and had one daughter by him, my mother's half sister Cathrine. The Davis's and Petty's were friends and nieghbors. My Grandmother lost her first husband to a brain fever (Stroke) not long after Frank had lost his wife to the Flu. The two of them married and started to produce a family, all girls, Bertha, Margaret, Florence...
On June 18, 1929 a fifth child was born to them...another daughter - Thelma Gertrude. To say she came into the world with a bang is an understatement. At the time she was born, the Petty's lived on S.Lee Street across from a tiny, poor, Church with a black congregation. To say Frank Petty was an intolerant bigot is the same as saying the Pope is Catholic. That morning the choir was practicing at the time My mother came into the world and upon hearing that he had had yet another girl and not a son to carry on the family name...let's just say according to family stories choir practice was interrupted by an alarm clock flying through the Church window and Frank Petty yelling for them to "Shut the hell up!"
Off to a Great Start!
She married my father, John Martin Morison, to get away from her abusive father and his iron fist rule of the household. Granddad knew my father's father (drinking buddies again I think) and approved of him (wouldn't let the boy she really liked even step foot on the porch, didn't like his family at all). However in latter years she was the only one that could talk back to the old man, in some respects she was the son he never had, a chip off of a very hard old block.
My father was a government worker at Fort Belvoir in Virginia for his entire career, my mother worked various jobs when needed to bring in enough to raise her three boys in Woodbridge during the 50's and 60's. During those years my mother also assisted with programing for a locale Country Music Radio Station, WXRA, where she picked up her nickname "Dirty Gerty". It seems she had a lot of titles in her collection that they didn't and she would loan them to them(she still has many of those albums to this day. And since she listened late at night there was more than one time she would hop in the car and go wake up the DJ's when they fell asleep in the middle of a tune. During these years she also suffered physically first from Endometreosis, which led to a Hysterectomy to correct, but also from a Ruptured Disc in her lower back which also required surgery to correct and started her life of back pain. She was also in a severe winter car accident involving ice, a curved ramp and the side of a hill. that nearly took her nose off but they were able to stitch her up - didn't help the back any either.
In '68 my folks decided to stop living the farce and get a divorce, surprisingly they were better friends afterward which confused everyone else. My oldest brother Wayne was in the Air Force(and having just completed his 2nd hitch in Nam)my other brother Rodney was married and in the military and Nam as well. So I decided to live with mom since the choice was given to me to make. Everything was tight then, but two could live on $3,000. a year plus the $160. a month Dad paid in child support. Nothing unusual happened, she worked hard kept food on the table and a roof over our heads went out of her way to be sure I stayed in the High School I started in instead of transferring (it would have been at least three times before graduation)and went through several bad boy friend relationships and one very short,bad second marriage.
All was well until Dec 16, 1976. That day She and her boyfriend, Willie, got into the car to drive from Centerville to Dulles Airport to pick-up Wayne, it would have been the first Christmas since before the divorce that all of us would have been together, Mom, Dad and all three boys. US Route 28 had not yet been widened at that point and was still a two lane road as it passed Sully Plantation on what was know as Dead Mans Curve. That day it showed how it got that name. A Drunken Fool (unfortunately also an Air Traffic Controller)was going home from a Christmas Party at the Airport in his fancy Porsche Sports car and decided to see what it could do. According to the reports he hit the car in front of him at approximately 100mph just as they were going into Dead Mans Curve. When he hit, his car flipped and rolled an estimated 6 or 7 times landing on top of him, fatality one. The car he hit disintegrated at the firewall the front half crossing into the oncoming lane and hitting the car behind my mother, the driver of that car was fatality two, the back half of the car also crossed into the oncoming lane and hit my mother's car head on, totaling it. It should be pointed out that she was driving a 1968 Ford LTD Land Yacht at the time, the engine was in the front seat. Does that give you a clue as to the force of the impact? It was also fatality three, Willie. Willie never wore a seat belt and was thrown through the front windshield, it was instant. It took them a while to find mom in the wreckage and at first they thought she was the forth fatality and by rights she should have been. Left and right arms crushed, tendons of both knees severed, left leg broken on four places, right leg crushed, facial lacerations, ruptured colon and spleen.
When we arrived at the hospital the surgeon told us "if she's strong she has a 50/50 chance of pulling through surgery" - I stopped worrying at that point, I knew my mother, she was after all Frank Petty's daughter.
After six weeks in Fairfax Hospital's ICU she was moved to a regular room. After six months she was released from there and moved into her sister Margaret's house where my Uncle Woody had converted the old sewing room off of the sun porch into a full bath, that porch became her home for the next six months. She had lost most of the use of her hands and was told she would never be able to write again, she nearly lost the right leg and was told she may never walk again, obviously she would never be able to drive a car again and she would likely be in pain the rest of her life. WRONG ANSWER CHIEF! over the next six months and a lot of hard and very painful work she got enough use back into her hands that there was very little difference between her handwriting then and from before the accident. She learned to walk again going from wheelchair bound to using crutches, to using a walker then a cane and finally un-assisted. Nearly a year after the accident she was able to move into an apartment of her own again with me coming down on the weekends to do the heavy cleaning. One day her new boyfriend had gotten stuck when his car broke down and the spare was at the apartment. Mom screwed up her nerve, got in the car and drove to where he was to pick him up. She had her freedom again and never looked back. The only thing the Doctor's had gotten right was the pain.
A couple of years latter she found a lump. The mammogram didn't look good and the doctor scheduled an exploratory. Again she beat the odds there were multiple sites of Pre-Invasive cancer in both breast, she was able to have a double, modified mastectomy right then with reconstructive implants. Unfortunately the plastic surgeon was only recently out of residency and didn't place the implants exactly right causing her years of discomfort.
The chronic pain never left her, ever, nor did the IBS because of the damage to the colon but she continued to prove them wrong, it was her way. Even holding down a job as an answering service operator for a local medical group.
When My Grandmother was no longer able to keep house after my Grandfather passed away she moved in with Mom (after a short stay at Margaret's in the same Sun Room Mom had lived in)for the remaining years of her life. This nearly causing Mom a heart attack or stroke from stress during the last year.
Not long after Grandmom passed away Mom was stricken with Bell's Palsy on right side of her face (for those lat don't know this is were a virus attacks the central nerve controlling the muscle tone of that side of the face disturbing the nerve connection, causing that side of the face to droop). Again after long and painful work she was able to overcome most of the effects of the condition leaving only a slight droop to her mouth, a slight slur to her speech and issues with her eye not wanting to close properly.
Due to the economy in Northern Virginia, she sold her trailer (which she had just paid off not long before) and moved into the Mother-in-law Suite on the back of my brother Wayne's house in Destin, Florida because she could no longer afford to live up here on her disability.
Things went well health wise for her, or as well as could be expected. My brother's family was there if she needed them but she maintained her independent lifestyle with a stubborn tenacity that is usually used to describe Bulldogs. She had knee replacement surgery on the "good" leg. She eventually had her implants redone, which was an improvement until she lost her footing one day and fell forward and one of them popped. She said the hell with that and had them both removed and said "If I'm worried about it I'll use rent-a-tits"
Then things started to go down hill, she started to have difficulty getting in and out of the car as the pain and numbness in her legs increased. At the point were she could no longer drive we convinced her to move back up here with my brother Rodney since by now she was in Wayne's house pretty much alone, his job having sent him to Saudi Arabia and his girls all either going off to college or starting families of their own.
Once up here they discovered the cause of her problems with her legs, she had a benign tumor growing on her lower spine that would eventually cause paralysis from the waist down. She could have opted to have surgery but at the risk that it could cause paralysis as well. To her way of looking at it it was "damned if I do or damned if I don't". She opted not to have the surgery.
Over the past two years she has slowly lost the use of her legs, has steadfastly refused to let us place her in a nursing facility were she could get the 24hr attention she needed and that Rodney is no-longer able to give her (he's 60 this year and himself a cancer survivor). They have had a visiting nurse on a regular basis to help but it's not the same.
Since the turn of the year she has become bed ridden, been fighting a constant infection, has developed a bad sore on her heel even with the care my brother has been giving her. She has been hospitalized a couple of times. But now that flying alarm clock is winding down.
She is resting in the hospital, they are doing what they can to make her comfortable as the clock ticks down.
We are going to try and get down there before it runs out.
Am I panicked - no I have had her here for 33 years longer than they expected in December of '76.
Will I sorrow, yes.
Will there be regrets of things not said or things not done, yes.
Will I be thankful for what she has taught me about surviving, I am with every breath.
The clock is still ticking.
Will she make it to he 80th Birthday, if she has anything to say about. She'll tell Death to Shut-up and wait, she'll go when she's damn good and ready.
And then she'll wind that clock a little more. But even clocks wear out I'm afraid.
And when she's ready watch out "Dirty Gerty" will have her freedom again.
Her parents were both born in the late 1800's.
As a child my grandfather, William Franklin Petty (Frank), picked weeds from between the cobblestones of Old Town Alexandria Virginia for $.25 a day. His mother would put him in a dress and tie him to the barn door if he miss-behaved. He served in France during WWI during which he lost hearing in one ear and 60% in the other. He worked as a crane operator at the old Grain Silos on the Alexandria Waterfront. He was a waterman for a while on the Intercoastal waterway. He lost his first wife to the Spanish Flu Epidemic. He once drove a Stutz Bearcat. He was drinking buddies with the last Lighthouse Keeper for Alexandria at a time when shipyards stood where the Wilson Bridge now spans the Potomac. His life molded him into the person that became know as The Meanest Man in Alexandria.
My Gradnmother, Rose Olive Helwig, was the daughter of German immigrates that settled in Baltimore in the 1870's. In her youth they lived in Oxen Hill Maryland and for a while she worked in the Shirt Factories of Baltimore and her father ran a local Tavern. At some point the family moved to Alexandria Virginia and she married a Mr. Davis and had one daughter by him, my mother's half sister Cathrine. The Davis's and Petty's were friends and nieghbors. My Grandmother lost her first husband to a brain fever (Stroke) not long after Frank had lost his wife to the Flu. The two of them married and started to produce a family, all girls, Bertha, Margaret, Florence...
On June 18, 1929 a fifth child was born to them...another daughter - Thelma Gertrude. To say she came into the world with a bang is an understatement. At the time she was born, the Petty's lived on S.Lee Street across from a tiny, poor, Church with a black congregation. To say Frank Petty was an intolerant bigot is the same as saying the Pope is Catholic. That morning the choir was practicing at the time My mother came into the world and upon hearing that he had had yet another girl and not a son to carry on the family name...let's just say according to family stories choir practice was interrupted by an alarm clock flying through the Church window and Frank Petty yelling for them to "Shut the hell up!"
Off to a Great Start!
She married my father, John Martin Morison, to get away from her abusive father and his iron fist rule of the household. Granddad knew my father's father (drinking buddies again I think) and approved of him (wouldn't let the boy she really liked even step foot on the porch, didn't like his family at all). However in latter years she was the only one that could talk back to the old man, in some respects she was the son he never had, a chip off of a very hard old block.
My father was a government worker at Fort Belvoir in Virginia for his entire career, my mother worked various jobs when needed to bring in enough to raise her three boys in Woodbridge during the 50's and 60's. During those years my mother also assisted with programing for a locale Country Music Radio Station, WXRA, where she picked up her nickname "Dirty Gerty". It seems she had a lot of titles in her collection that they didn't and she would loan them to them(she still has many of those albums to this day. And since she listened late at night there was more than one time she would hop in the car and go wake up the DJ's when they fell asleep in the middle of a tune. During these years she also suffered physically first from Endometreosis, which led to a Hysterectomy to correct, but also from a Ruptured Disc in her lower back which also required surgery to correct and started her life of back pain. She was also in a severe winter car accident involving ice, a curved ramp and the side of a hill. that nearly took her nose off but they were able to stitch her up - didn't help the back any either.
In '68 my folks decided to stop living the farce and get a divorce, surprisingly they were better friends afterward which confused everyone else. My oldest brother Wayne was in the Air Force(and having just completed his 2nd hitch in Nam)my other brother Rodney was married and in the military and Nam as well. So I decided to live with mom since the choice was given to me to make. Everything was tight then, but two could live on $3,000. a year plus the $160. a month Dad paid in child support. Nothing unusual happened, she worked hard kept food on the table and a roof over our heads went out of her way to be sure I stayed in the High School I started in instead of transferring (it would have been at least three times before graduation)and went through several bad boy friend relationships and one very short,bad second marriage.
All was well until Dec 16, 1976. That day She and her boyfriend, Willie, got into the car to drive from Centerville to Dulles Airport to pick-up Wayne, it would have been the first Christmas since before the divorce that all of us would have been together, Mom, Dad and all three boys. US Route 28 had not yet been widened at that point and was still a two lane road as it passed Sully Plantation on what was know as Dead Mans Curve. That day it showed how it got that name. A Drunken Fool (unfortunately also an Air Traffic Controller)was going home from a Christmas Party at the Airport in his fancy Porsche Sports car and decided to see what it could do. According to the reports he hit the car in front of him at approximately 100mph just as they were going into Dead Mans Curve. When he hit, his car flipped and rolled an estimated 6 or 7 times landing on top of him, fatality one. The car he hit disintegrated at the firewall the front half crossing into the oncoming lane and hitting the car behind my mother, the driver of that car was fatality two, the back half of the car also crossed into the oncoming lane and hit my mother's car head on, totaling it. It should be pointed out that she was driving a 1968 Ford LTD Land Yacht at the time, the engine was in the front seat. Does that give you a clue as to the force of the impact? It was also fatality three, Willie. Willie never wore a seat belt and was thrown through the front windshield, it was instant. It took them a while to find mom in the wreckage and at first they thought she was the forth fatality and by rights she should have been. Left and right arms crushed, tendons of both knees severed, left leg broken on four places, right leg crushed, facial lacerations, ruptured colon and spleen.
When we arrived at the hospital the surgeon told us "if she's strong she has a 50/50 chance of pulling through surgery" - I stopped worrying at that point, I knew my mother, she was after all Frank Petty's daughter.
After six weeks in Fairfax Hospital's ICU she was moved to a regular room. After six months she was released from there and moved into her sister Margaret's house where my Uncle Woody had converted the old sewing room off of the sun porch into a full bath, that porch became her home for the next six months. She had lost most of the use of her hands and was told she would never be able to write again, she nearly lost the right leg and was told she may never walk again, obviously she would never be able to drive a car again and she would likely be in pain the rest of her life. WRONG ANSWER CHIEF! over the next six months and a lot of hard and very painful work she got enough use back into her hands that there was very little difference between her handwriting then and from before the accident. She learned to walk again going from wheelchair bound to using crutches, to using a walker then a cane and finally un-assisted. Nearly a year after the accident she was able to move into an apartment of her own again with me coming down on the weekends to do the heavy cleaning. One day her new boyfriend had gotten stuck when his car broke down and the spare was at the apartment. Mom screwed up her nerve, got in the car and drove to where he was to pick him up. She had her freedom again and never looked back. The only thing the Doctor's had gotten right was the pain.
A couple of years latter she found a lump. The mammogram didn't look good and the doctor scheduled an exploratory. Again she beat the odds there were multiple sites of Pre-Invasive cancer in both breast, she was able to have a double, modified mastectomy right then with reconstructive implants. Unfortunately the plastic surgeon was only recently out of residency and didn't place the implants exactly right causing her years of discomfort.
The chronic pain never left her, ever, nor did the IBS because of the damage to the colon but she continued to prove them wrong, it was her way. Even holding down a job as an answering service operator for a local medical group.
When My Grandmother was no longer able to keep house after my Grandfather passed away she moved in with Mom (after a short stay at Margaret's in the same Sun Room Mom had lived in)for the remaining years of her life. This nearly causing Mom a heart attack or stroke from stress during the last year.
Not long after Grandmom passed away Mom was stricken with Bell's Palsy on right side of her face (for those lat don't know this is were a virus attacks the central nerve controlling the muscle tone of that side of the face disturbing the nerve connection, causing that side of the face to droop). Again after long and painful work she was able to overcome most of the effects of the condition leaving only a slight droop to her mouth, a slight slur to her speech and issues with her eye not wanting to close properly.
Due to the economy in Northern Virginia, she sold her trailer (which she had just paid off not long before) and moved into the Mother-in-law Suite on the back of my brother Wayne's house in Destin, Florida because she could no longer afford to live up here on her disability.
Things went well health wise for her, or as well as could be expected. My brother's family was there if she needed them but she maintained her independent lifestyle with a stubborn tenacity that is usually used to describe Bulldogs. She had knee replacement surgery on the "good" leg. She eventually had her implants redone, which was an improvement until she lost her footing one day and fell forward and one of them popped. She said the hell with that and had them both removed and said "If I'm worried about it I'll use rent-a-tits"
Then things started to go down hill, she started to have difficulty getting in and out of the car as the pain and numbness in her legs increased. At the point were she could no longer drive we convinced her to move back up here with my brother Rodney since by now she was in Wayne's house pretty much alone, his job having sent him to Saudi Arabia and his girls all either going off to college or starting families of their own.
Once up here they discovered the cause of her problems with her legs, she had a benign tumor growing on her lower spine that would eventually cause paralysis from the waist down. She could have opted to have surgery but at the risk that it could cause paralysis as well. To her way of looking at it it was "damned if I do or damned if I don't". She opted not to have the surgery.
Over the past two years she has slowly lost the use of her legs, has steadfastly refused to let us place her in a nursing facility were she could get the 24hr attention she needed and that Rodney is no-longer able to give her (he's 60 this year and himself a cancer survivor). They have had a visiting nurse on a regular basis to help but it's not the same.
Since the turn of the year she has become bed ridden, been fighting a constant infection, has developed a bad sore on her heel even with the care my brother has been giving her. She has been hospitalized a couple of times. But now that flying alarm clock is winding down.
She is resting in the hospital, they are doing what they can to make her comfortable as the clock ticks down.
We are going to try and get down there before it runs out.
Am I panicked - no I have had her here for 33 years longer than they expected in December of '76.
Will I sorrow, yes.
Will there be regrets of things not said or things not done, yes.
Will I be thankful for what she has taught me about surviving, I am with every breath.
The clock is still ticking.
Will she make it to he 80th Birthday, if she has anything to say about. She'll tell Death to Shut-up and wait, she'll go when she's damn good and ready.
And then she'll wind that clock a little more. But even clocks wear out I'm afraid.
And when she's ready watch out "Dirty Gerty" will have her freedom again.