Phyllis Todd

My kids called my mom the “educational grandma.” Because instead of getting them cool stuff for birthdays and Christmas, she would get them things they could learn with. But they didn't grow up in her household or know how infectious my mother's love of learning was at full strength.

She took us to the library twice a week sometimes. Once we would go to the Fyler branch near our home and a few days later she would take us to the Buder branch a few miles away. Because they had a limit on how many books a person could take out at any one time. My mother read voraciously. I still can't keep up with the speed with which she devoured books. But I owe my love of reading and learning to her. My greatest pleasure is still learning something new or learning something that helps me put what I've learned into a useful framework.

Neither my grandmother, nor my aunts, read that much, so I figure my mother found it a way to deal with being an only child with a prodigious intelligence, living on a farm. Not that she only read. She loved horses, She had a horse named Patches on which she learned to do trick riding, including standing on the saddle and even catching a handkerchief lying on the ground in her teeth as the horse galloped. It sounds unbelievable but I've seen the pictures.

My mother loved the outdoors, which is why we camped a lot when we were kids and why she traveled the country alone in her RV once we were grown and out of the house. She also liked hunting for and digging up wildflowers, often illegally, on winding country roads, which made my brother and I nervous when she confessed that she didn't know exactly where we were. But she always found the way home, where she would replant the flowers in her garden. And she would take us to Shaw's Garden to see the flowers and plants. She and I spread her mother's ashes there. My brother and I spread some of her ashes there as well. It is appropriate that her name Phyllis meant “foliage” and her favorite color was green. She was supposed to be named after her father Philip but my grandmother didn't know that the feminine version was Philippa. My mom was grateful for that mistake, even though Philippa means “lover of horses” and would have been equally appropriate.

My mother won a scholarship to college but her mother convinced her that going into nursing would be a more appropriate field for a woman. She became acting head of the recovery room at Jewish Hospital, the only place she ever worked. She did send herself to college later on, getting a degree in library science. She ran the medical library at the hospital and later was the tumor registrar for the Oncology department, keeping track of all cancers diagnosed or treated at the hospital, something necessary to keeping their accreditation for the American College of Surgeons.

My mom was outspoken and her opinions were usually right because she did so much research on them. She was very hard to argue with. You had better do your research first as well. I was upset to find, however, that once I could out-argue her she would just shut down the discussion. She could be infuriating.

My mother is responsible for my going to church. My earliest memory is standing on a pew. The congregation is singing a hymn. I don't know it but I want to sing as well. So I sing “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.” My mom did not correct me but looked down at me and smiled at my childish faux pas. So this was before she started losing her hearing. It's sad because she loved music and played records of tunes from her early years and operas like “Carmen,” singing along with them. My taste in music owes a bit to her as well.

We stopped going to church for a while during my elementary school years, possibly because my dad was working nights as a bartender and slept in on Sundays. But when we were “tweens” my mother started shopping around for churches. We ended up going to Memorial Presbyterian, led by the learned Rev. Dr. George Scotchmer. His sermons were very well-thought out and very long: 40 minutes on average. When I began preaching I resolved not to go for length. As Mark Twain supposedly said, “Very few sinners are converted after the first 20 minutes of a sermon.”

When Mom's hearing got so she could not follow the service she tried attending Quaker meetings where everyone is quiet for an hour unless the Spirit moves someone to speak.

My mom also introduced me to C.S. Lewis by reading and then giving to me his Screwtape Letters. His rational but conversational discussion of Christianity appealed to Mom and I. In Lewis' words about his favorite author, “my imagination was baptised.”

My mother also loved art and beauty. After church most Sundays she would take my brother and I to the art museum to eat lunch and see the exhibits or watch the series “Civilization” by Sir Kenneth Clark.

And my mom also liked to express her artistic side. She would find arts and crafts that interested her, get books on them and then buy all the supplies and start making them—embroidery, needlepoint, paintings, jewelry, chip carving, model Z train layouts. And I used the word “start” advisedly. She would get deep into them, get things half-completed and then get into a different craft or hobby. Many were the birthdays and Christmases when we were shown the gifts she was making still in-progress but never thereafter see them in finished form.

The one thing in which she achieved mastery was cake decorating. The year my dad got me a Lionel train set, she made me a train cake, with an engine and several cars on a licorice rail track with vanilla wafer sleepers. When she got me the Complete Sherlock Holmes in one volume, my cake looked like an open book and “Happy Birthday, Chris” was spelled out in the code from “The Adventure of the Dancing Men.” Cakes she made and completed.

Mom loved animals, too. We always had pets: a dog, a cat, a rabbit that got too big to be produced from my brother's magical apparatus. I remember how long she mourned Rocky the rabbit after he got out of the yard and was run over.

My mom never loved any man but my dad. Even after they divorced—twice—they saw each other frequently during the week. I think they got along better because they had neutral corners to go to, so to speak, at the end of the day. She swore she would not help him if he got sick at the end of his life—but she did. And while Dad had girlfriends during the divorces, Mom never found another man who replaced him.

My mom's last years were plagued by vascular dementia. We didn't pay much attention to her forgetfulness at first because of my dad's rapid decline during his last year. But after he died, we realized that Mom's memory and judgment were deteriorating. We wanted to keep her in the house she bought during their first divorce but eventually she couldn't live on her own.

My last memories of Mom are from February 2020. I was dismayed that during the days I visited, she was just sitting in her wheelchair, saying next to nothing, like many of the nursing home residents ravaged by dementia. And then I came at night and she was awake and active. She got up out of her wheelchair and my wife and I rushed to grab her by the arms, since she fell regularly. She started walking down the hall, dragging us to the door to the outside. She asked if either of us had a key. She explained that she was going to break out the residents of the home. She also asked if my brother had come because we'd need a car. Her brain was still working as best it could.

The last time I saw her I put her to bed in her room and kissed her on the forehead. This was a month before everything got shut down for Covid. And it was Covid that took her, several months later, on her 88^th birthday.

My mother was a remarkable person. She never made the headlines or shook the world with her intelligence. But she shaped me more than I realized. And today we shatter her ashes that she might become one with the flowers and foliage she loved in one of the National Parks she visited and in which she found joy.