remember what's important in life.

+5 Michael Wilbon 5 hrs

There are so many things for which to be grateful, even in the immediate aftermath of my mother's death. At the top of the list, just after having her for 93 years, was how lucid she was, how clearly and dependably her mind worked right up until her final days. I'd sat with her any number of days in recent years in the dining room at Brookdale, the assisted living facility in which she lived. I'd seen brilliant people much younger than my mom drift into a place where they struggled to be who they were all their lives. But not, gratefully, my mother. And that's probably a good place to begin this tribute.

So many of her peers, most notably her younger sister Betty, were suffering from severe memory loss, dementia or worse that my mother began taking steps to try and preserve her own. Late at night, she told me a year or so ago, she would recite the names and birthdates, in order, of her 10 brothers and sisters, or maybe the names of all her first cousins, or my father's 19 siblings chronologically. Either her tactics worked like a charm or, more likely, there was simply nothing wrong with my mother's memory, not even at 93 years old. Yes, her kidneys and heart failed her last week and ended the earthly part of her extraordinary life. She'd lost her sight a few years earlier, roared right through triple-bypass surgery 14 years earlier when doctors were reticent to even try such a thing a procedure on a woman nearly 80 at the time. She endured diabetes for what had to be 45 years or so. But none of it took her memory, or for that matter her mind. Don and I were always amazed that our 93-year-old mother was pretty much as clear-and-present as she was at 73 or 63.

A few years ago we started something we should have done decades earlier: On Christmas night, I would interview Cleo Bailey Wilbon over Christmas dinner on one specific topic. Less than a month after checking off one of her bucket list items (visiting the National Museum of African-American History in Washington, D.C.), we talked that Christmas night about Emmett Till, his barbaric murder in Mississippi and subsequent funeral back home on the South Side of Chicago. Her description of the lines of people, tens of thousands, waiting to see Till's mutilated body in an open casket perfectly matched some of the magazine photos from September 1955. She'd stood in one of those lines herself to file past that casket, now in the national museum. The next Christmas I wanted to know something more personal. How and why did she come to Chicago in the first place, at 14 years of age, to live with her Uncle Jack and Aunt Idela?

Turns out Uncle Jack, on a trip to Tennessee, had said to my mother's dad, "R.J. we don't have any kids and you've got so many. Why don't you let us have one, let one of these kids come live with us and go to school in Chicago?" The conversation took place within earshot of my mother, then 13 or 14 she recalled. And soon enough she went to her father and asked if she could be that child who would leave Tennessee for Chicago and live with Jack and Idela and go to school...really go to school. She had grand ideas, of high school then college, then maybe beyond. Big dreams for a little black country girl in 1940. And to her surprise, Frances and R.J. said yes. So she boarded a train, by herself, and traveled through the Jim Crow south at 14, the same age Emmett Till was when he was beaten to death and plunged into the river for nothing. And because young Cleo had never been on a train or bus, for that matter, she didn't know she had to sit in the colored section and naively rode the train sitting with the white folks. "The conductor walked over and asked me why I was sitting there, and I told him I had no idea what he was talking about, and he just walked away and left me there." No, there was nothing wrong with my mother's memory. short little white items

To fast-forward, my mother attended and graduated from DuSable High School, then Chicago's Teacher's College (now Chicago State), then Loyola University for a Masters' Degree, in Counseling. Then she taught public school for 35 years. She worked, she lived in Bronzeville but traveled the world. Newspapers in Haiti, among other places, heralded the black American schoolteachers (she and her girlfriends) traveling abroad. Early on, my mother recalled, her salary was $2,600. She had a second job, working at the dime store. She gave some "rent" money to Uncle Jack, sent some money to her parents in Tennessee, and later to Betty and Anna to help them through college. She had a fascinating life for a woman born a mere 60 years after the end of slavery. She married a Georgia boy short on education but long on mother-wit and hustle and they had two boys, bought a house whose broken living room window (brick from a bigot who didn't want the young family in his neighborhood) had to be replaced before they could move in, and lived the American dream.

Somehow, I never noticed I had the cool mom. Well into my 20s I asked Don, why did cousin Sharon always want to talk to mom about the boys she was dating? Why did Gregory "come out" to mom of all people? Why were teenage friends always at our dining room table when we got there, and we were hardly ever at anybody else's table? I can count a half-dozen of our friends, Don's or mine, who call my mother "Mom." I remember asking one of our closest friends, Ron Laurent, why he always engaged my mother in these conversations over the decades and he looked at me like i had two heads and said, "Don't you know your mom is the shit!" Turned out counseling wasn't just a degree or a job.

I think Don and I got to know my mother best when she moved to Chicago for her - let's say - final chapter. For three years she and I shared an apartment. I never got to know my father as a man; he died too young, at 60 of lung cancer. I was 27 and had spent the last 10 of those years away at college and settling into professional life. Some of what my mom and I have done during these three years isn’t all that that different, (screaming at the television during Bears, Bulls and Cubs games) than when I was living at home before college. Some of it has been a complete parental turnabout, like the night I was on edge when she was out too late with Bobbie Ross and I had no idea where she was… only to get a late e-mail with an attached photo of her (and Bobbie) posing with Wynton Marsalis at Millennium Park after his concert. What, her cell phone didn’t work?! Some of it has been a hoot, like the night I returned to the apartment a little late - okay, 2:30 a.m. - to find her playing “baseball,” full-tilt, with then 3-year-old Matthew. When I asked, perhaps a little annoyed, “What the hell are you guys doing at this hour?” she said, “Having a 50-year-flashback! Go to bed!”

And some of it has been scary, like receiving a call at 7 a.m. from the driver picking her up for a trip to the airport who reported instead she had collapsed and was being rushed to the hospital, (low blood sugar, as it turned out) or finding that a preposterously freakish accident would contribute in no small way to losing the sight in what had been the functioning eye…or seeing little Matthew, not yet 4, position and climb up a step stool on the counter to the spot where his Tata had “hidden” candy from him because he could sense a low blood sugar episode had rendered her unconscious.

I am thrilled to have been at her side so much in these last eight years, whether it was the three of us, Alison and Jordan eating Sunday dinner while watching the Bears in her apartment, or sneaking to Harold’s Chicken, the drives out to my father’s gravesite or her refereeing yet more brotherly screaming matches between her two sons. I am appreciative to have awakened many Sunday mornings to the smell of fresh biscuits and the realization that my mother, then in her mid- to late-80s had made the Sunday breakfast that had been my favorite since I was a little boy.

The years are bound to reduce anyone physically. In the dining room at Brookdale where she lived her final five years, it was common to see educators and judges and scientists, very accomplished men and women, become challenged mentally as the years piled up. It was impossible to not notice that my mother, while slowing down, was as spirited as she was 30 years ago, as quick-witted and as forceful in conversations, as mentally engaged as any super senior could reasonably be. Surrounded by people every day losing bits of their ability to do those things anymore, I started to ask her, "Mom, knowing what you know now would you trade your..." She cut me off and said, "No. I know what you're going to ask: if I'd trade my mind for my sight back. No. Not a chance." If it sounds like I’m in awe of my mother, I guess it's because I am. When the loss of her sight led her to conclude one night in despair, “I can’t see Matthew and Jordan anymore” I told her while that is truly a shame what’s more important as they grow up is that they can see her, and even more importantly, see, hear from and be challenged by her.

So many of the people who've reached out this last week were engaged by her at some point, an activity which eliminated any difference in age and clearly enriched us and her until the very end.