By Amy Singleton
The second time my mama had brain surgery, in the fall of 1989, her tumor had returned, resurrected from the dead. All it had needed to grow was one tiny, vicious, tumor seed left behind from the first surgery, tucked away in the folds of her brain, lying dormant and waiting to wreak havoc once more. The tumor, now the size of a small tangerine, wasn’t malignant, but in theory, it might as well have been. Deadly. As it grew, it wrapped its strangling vines and tendrils tighter around the major blood vessels, choking the flow of blood to the sagittal sinus that runs through the middle of the brain, a major highway, a crucial lifeline for a brain’s function. After a lengthy consult with her neurologist, my Mama and Daddy agreed to the surgery even though it was high risk.
“A little recuperating and the proper physical therapy and you’ll be good as new,” I told Mama. Or for her, I hoped, to the level of good she was at sixty-seven years old, which I don’t consider old. As I write this, I will turn sixty-four tomorrow. Mama had overcome her disabilities and managed to live a fulfilling and simple life and now, this. Undeserved. We, Daddy and I, tried to be optimistic that the cards hadn’t dealt her a losing hand this time. But we understood Mama couldn’t live a normal life with the tumor, nor could she live without the surgery. The beast in her head would continue to grow and total disability and death would eventually set in. There were still no recommendations for post-surgery interventions or treatment such as chemotherapy or radiation. They were not effective. The surgeon told us he would do the best he could to remove as much tumor possible, so she didn’t lose any brain function or cognition.
I was allowed to accompany Mama for her prep before surgery at the Medical University of South Carolina, in Charleston. I followed the nurse as Mama was wheeled into one of the smaller preoperative rooms in the operating suite the night before. She sat motionless, in silence, in a stainless-steel chair, an apron wrapped barber style encircling her neck. The light, dim from a surgical lamp in the corner, reflected off the standard cold, hard, green tile walls, offered no warmth as the nurse prepped to shave her head. My heart hurt for her. With the first scissor cut of hair, blond locks landing on her shoulders, we cried in tandem. Gently brushing the curls on to the floor, the nurse asked if she was okay to continue. She replied “yes” in her sweet voice, and “don’t want to keep the hair.” She opted not to keep the collected locks, as they were considered personal property. Electric clippers buzzed the tiny spikes of coarse hair for final removal, and she was closely shaved with foam and a hand razor, and her now bald head bathed in an antibacterial solution. The last bit of her dignity lay on the floor.
Back in her room, we talked and loved on each other. I kissed her good night, and I held her until she drifted off to sleep from the sleeping pill the nurse had given her.
The next day, surgery day, around 3 p.m., we were finally greeted by Mama’s surgeon in the OR waiting room.
“We’re sorry” were the first words spoken to Daddy and me by the surgeon.
Her surgeon began to tell us how he and the anesthesia staff believed Mama had had a severe reaction to a medication of some kind. They didn’t know when it happened but discovered it after the surgery was over and they removed all the surgical drapes. She had severe swelling of the throat and tongue. The blood supply was cut off and they had no idea the extent of her damage until the swelling subsided and she could awake up and have her breathing tube removed. As if that wasn’t a gut punch, he then went on to say, hesitantly, they could not put all of her skull back together and had to contain it in the lab for safe keeping until her brain stopped swelling. They would place the missing piece of her puzzled skull later when she recovered. Occupational Therapy would make her a helmet to wear to protect her brain until that time. He ended the conversation with another “I’m sorry,” and that we could see her when the staff got her settled in the neurosurgical intensive care unit. And then he was gone, that surgeon.
My world as I knew it suddenly tilted off its axis. Thinking to myself, how do I even begin to process this information? I needed immediate comfort. Daddy, not a hugger, needed nothing from me. He only needed Mama, and so did I. A quiet man, he simply stood, silent, picked up his walking stick, one of his favorites he fashioned himself out of deer horn for a handle and a small hickory tree limb, and walked away. I watched him hobble along; his gait aided by his stick like a third leg. He mixed and meshed amongst a blur of hospital staff, patients, and visitors, until no longer in my view. I knew he would be back, so I sat, deflated, and waited for his return. Left alone, and with my own thoughts, I cannot remember everything I pondered. All of the unknowns in our future, most likely.
Reunited, Daddy and I made our way upstairs to the neuro ICU and waited for the nurse to open the secured metal doors that protected this sacred place for healing brains. Upon entering the unit, I sensed all my previous work experiences in the operating room as a surgical technologist hadn’t prepared me for what I was about to encounter.
Pale, swollen, and fragile, the beautiful, blond, blue-eyed woman, with baby soft skin, the one I knew and loved as Mama, was unrecognizable. Yards and yards of white gauze, expected after her surgery, shrouded three-fourths of her head. Tubes and lines and beeps and alarms were relentless. And then I saw her tongue, protruding beyond her cracked lips. Bruised, red and purple, angry, it was at least five times larger than normal, or it seemed. The tracheal tube down her throat was the only thing keeping her from suffocating. The allergic reaction she had during the surgery caused so much swelling in the throat the tongue tissue was simply destroyed when the blood supply was cut off. Feeling helpless, I knew the path to her healing and a recovery would be uncertain, but we held space for that hope.
The first time my mama had brain surgery was in the summer of 1983, eighteen months after the onset of her having seizures. These were not the typical textbook seizures. She did not lose consciousness. No convulsions, eye rolls, or drooling. No biting her tongue. She was fully aware and awake each time. She would tell my Daddy she felt like she was having leg and body cramps, like having multiple Charlie horses over and over again until the seizure subsided. Her cries were not only of the painfulness, but fear. Complete exhaustion set in for a day or two after the devil of episodes finally subsided. My daddy was the only witness. Feeling completely helpless, watching the love of his life in distress, he did what he could to protect and comfort her until the bitter end. The seizures did not occur every day or week, even. Doctors passed them off as needing more potassium in her diet and to go home and drink some Gatorade every day. One Conway, South Carolina Hospital emergency department doctor diagnosed her as having problems at home. It was all confusing.
A second-year medical school student in our family, gravely concerned after hearing Mama’s symptoms, suggested she may have a neurological issue, and was actually experiencing seizures. After a series of calls, he was able to get her an appointment with a neurologist at the Medical University of South Carolina, in Charleston. A diagnosis of a meningioma, a tumor that rises from the meninges, the covering of the brain, was the culprit. Surgery was scheduled immediately, and after her several months of recovery and therapy, she resumed a somewhat normal retirement life, spending time sewing, traveling with Daddy, and meeting with her church friends. And cooking for whoever came to visit. Meningiomas are benign, and no further treatment was needed. Still, they are life altering and often life-threatening because of where they decide to randomly attack in the brain. The surgeon told Daddy and me they hoped they got all of the tumor.
Mama had been through her fair share of life altering events. As a young child in the 1930’s, she spent the better part of two years in the Shriners Children’s Hospital in Greenville, South Carolina, to heal her leg that fractured after a fall while climbing a streetlight pole with her brothers when she was nine-years old. Infection had settled in her bones. She had an open incision for months to allow the wound to drain. The doctors saved her leg from amputation, although her ankle bones were fused together, and she was never able to flex it or put her foot flat on the ground as she stood or walked. It didn’t slow her down. Two of her brothers wheeled her to school each day in a wagon until she was able to walk on her own without discomfort. She continued as a Shriners outpatient until she was fifteen years old. I never heard her complain and she was able to wear fancy wedge shoes to compensate for her shortened leg. I have often wondered if her exposure to excessive radiation from x-rays as a child patient may have contributed to her brain tumor.
Working fulltime after having three children, Mama birthed me ten years after her third child, and still managed to do all the things she loved: tending her flock, being a dedicated wife and partner, keeping a tidy house, dabbling in the dirt and fussing over her favorite pure white Shasta daisies and prized purple irises, and enjoying being a leader of my Girl Scout Troop, 191. Two of her greatest loves, sewing and cooking, topped her list. She sewed beautifully from a young age, making dresses for herself, sister, and working as an assistant to her neighbor who was also a seamstress. She had a good eye and could work without a pattern when necessary. As for me, I don’t remember wearing a storebought dress as a child, particularly for Easter or a piano recital.
And then, there was her cooking. Nothing was exceptionally fancy, but everything was meticulously prepared. (except for maybe the time she hand-rolled two hundred fancy eggrolls for my wedding reception) She loved to throw together a chuck roast beef stew on a cold day. There was always a pot of plain rice and homemade biscuits sitting on the stove. Occasionally she would fry up liver and onions, but fortunately only enough for herself and Daddy. Brown oven rice baked with Campbell’s soups and Sunbeam brown and serve rolls, the ones you could peel apart in layers and top with a pat of Parkway margarine before baking, and her chocolate cream cheese ribbon brownies with chocolate frosting were some of her easy go-to foods. I didn’t mind that they were all on repeat, along with curled elbow macaroni salad or macaroni and cheese made with lots of milk, eggs, and cheddar, usually hand grated by me because I could do it quickly. It was layered with vermicelli noodles instead of the traditional macaroni. I still make that occasionally. Oh, and potato salad. Always potato salad.
The kitchen and dining room in my house were separated by a swinging restaurant style door, one without a window to peer through, so it stayed open most of the time and we could spill into the dining room when needed. Mama’s folding Singer sewing machine cabinet sat in the corner. The dining table served as her fabric cutting board.
Mama’s real domain, the kitchen, was where we all spent a lot of happy times. Double windows over the sink allowed her to gaze out through the glassed-in back porch, viewing the yard and anyone strolling up the sidewalk to visit. Honey colored knotty pine cabinets flanked the walls on two sides. The refrigerator sat on the opposite wall all to itself. A tiny pantry and broom closet occupied the spaces in each corner. Avocado green and old gold were fashionable colors, and in vogue in the 70’s, and we followed suit with sheer curtains embroidered with tiny flowers of green and yellow. A tin filled with strained bacon grease sat beside the stove. A cast iron skillet, always at the ready, covered one eye. Warm aromas lingered from the previous meal she made for us.
One of my favorite photos of Mama is one where she’s wearing her green and white flowered apron, taken on a Sunday in her kitchen, a big smile on her sweet face. To this day, it sits framed in my own kitchen as a reminder of happy times and how we are connected by food we share with loved ones.
On a typical Sunday, she would rise up early before church and finish cooking the Sunday dinner she had started prepping the day before. I say dinner, because we ate dinner for lunch and supper for dinner. Lunch was what you had at school or work. It may be a roast, or a side of pork, or fried chicken. Said chicken, a yardbird chicken, she plucked out of our backyard on Saturday and prepped out for cooking on Sunday. She always chose the back and neck of the chicken to eat herself. She said they were her favorite pieces, but we all knew she nibbled on them so others could have the choice pieces to eat.
In summer, fresh corn and tomatoes often flanked our plates. A sweet, such as butter pound cake or a tangy lemon meringue pie, sat on the buffet, and there was potato salad. Always potato salad. The best. Here is where I insert an old cliché: No one makes potato salad like my Mama.The making usually started the day before, particularly if it was for Sunday dinner. That allowed time for all the ingredients to meld together. Five pounds or so of white potatoes were first scrubbed as clean as a shiny nickel. Dropped into a large pot of cold water, she brought them to a gentle, rolling boil until ice pick tender, drained them, and left them to cool for a few hours before hand peeling them with a paring knife. Sometimes we would pull one out and eat it warm with butter or margarine for supper. Meticulous for sure. Eggs were boiled in a separate pot and mashed with a fork. Celery, onion, spices, and dressings were added when everything was cooled. If you mixed it all together when the potatoes were warm, it ended up being mashed potato salad. Not perfect little bite sized pieces. This made an abundance of potato salad to fill her white Pyrex bowl. The white one with the turquoise Amish Butterprint pattern. I didn’t do much cooking growing up, but I watched everything she did. That’s how I learned. The kitchen was a happy space for Mama and our family.
There were many days going forward the doctors and staff told us we would all have to wait and see. As therapy and healing began, the dead tissue on her tongue began to slough off. Mama had a feeding tube to keep her nourished, but she could not form words well enough to be understood. Her tongue was now less than half the size of normal. She lay in bed most days for therapy because her legs just didn’t work as before. Beads of sweat would roll out from underneath the helmet she wore to protect the brain where the piece of her skull was missing. She had use of her arms and hands. Enough so to wipe her own face and neck with a washcloth. And she could write. One of the therapists purchased a blue spiral bound classroom notebook with MUSC printed on the cover for her to write in so she could communicate her needs with staff and have brief conversations with family. I still have this notebook.
The notebook was soon filled with sweet notes to the nurses who took care of her, asking for backrubs or ice chips or sips of water or some lotion for her delicate skin. A sponge bath was a luxury. She and Daddy exchanged questions about things back home, the children, grandchildren, and the weather outside. The notebook read more like a personal journal or diary because her thoughts and questions were perceived and answered verbally, not written in the notebook. Whenever I visited, we just shared moments of silence and tender space. She didn’t need to ask me much, and I would tend to personal needs she was too proud to ask the staff to do and tell her what she wanted to hear about life and her granddaughter, my daughter, Marybeth, her namesake. My mama’s name is Mary Alice.
As the days and weeks moved on with Mama growing weaker, there was little to no talk of Mama returning to surgery to replace the portion of her missing skull. It all went by the wayside. According to her neurologist, she was not strong enough to undergo another surgical procedure under lengthy anesthesia, and there was still a small amount of swelling in the brain. It was just the facts. The most we hoped for was that she could get strong enough to go home to be cared for. Thanksgiving Day came around and we spent as much time with her as she could tolerate. She was essentially living her day-to-day life in a private room in the hospital. They had given her one of the spacious “suites” on the upper floors at MUSC Hospital. Family and visitors were allowed to come and go at will. The staff was gracious, as they loved her as much as she loved them.
Daddy received a call from the hospital a few days after that Thanksgiving visit, telling him Mama had experienced a cardiac arrest. Resuscitation was successful in getting her heart started again, but her brain had taken a beating and sustained more damage from lack of oxygen for a minimum of twenty minutes, maybe longer. They were not sure how long she had been unconscious because she was not on a cardiac monitor. She was now intubated again and on life support. There had been no “Do not resuscitate” order because we never expected her not to recover enough to leave the hospital. While her body experienced involuntary movement at times, it was doubtful she could hear, and brain activity was really nonexistent. Doctors were just prolonging the inevitable until we could all visit. One of her very last entries she wrote in her notebook before this episode was, “I’ve had love, gave all that I could, and don’t feel I have left anything undone.” Mama was tired and she was letting us know she would be okay in her next life.
Five days before Christmas, Mama died. She was sixty-seven. I was twenty-nine. Daddy and mama’s brother drove down to Charleston to see her, and while there, agreed to a palliative extubation, a gentle way of saying “pull the plug.” Two hours after Daddy arrived home and told me what had occurred, Mama took her last breath, around midnight. She was never a night owl, but perhaps got her bird wings that night. She died alone. I didn’t get a chance to be with her, touch her, tell her I loved her, and that it was okay to let go of this life, but I had twenty-nine years of memories and that would have to do.
Mama loved her church, First United Methodist, the big white one on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Main Street in Conway, as some townsfolk would refer to it, and it was where she was funeralized on December 22, 1989. She had been a member since she was a little girl. The sanctuary was all decked out for the season of Advent. Advent, the four weeks Christians observe leading up to Christmas Day. Traditional potted red poinsettias wrapped in gold paper, lined up in rows like soldiers, took space behind the alter. Two massively tall, sticky, cedar Christmas trees from Booth’s Christmas Tree Farm hugged each corner on either side of the alter railing. You needed a ten-foot-tall step ladder to reach the top. One tree was dressed in traditional red bows and white doves, descending, wings spread wide. The other, adorned with gold and white Chrismon ornaments, (the word Christ and monogram combined) symbols that visually tell the story of Jesus: stars, crosses, fish, Greek symbols, etc. A visual reminder of faith. Mama had faith and it was always good.
We buried her fragile body in Hillcrest Cemetery in a plot Daddy purchased years before in the veteran’s section for the two of them to rest side-by-side one day, hopefully in peace. The sky, a glorious Carolina clear blue that day and not a cloud in sight. The air, blustery and cold. I rode in the front seat of the funeral car, my Granny’s handkerchief waded up in the palm of my tight fist. I don’t remember much after that. I guess we went home and ate some more funeral food. There was probably potato salad and fried chicken that day lovingly prepared by a church lady friend.
In the midst of all the glitter and trappings of the Christmas season, I felt alone. Sadly alone. I feel I was never allowed the time and space to grieve properly. That period in my life was overshadowed by the holidays and a flurry of activities around motherhood in general. My daughter Marybeth was two. Suddenly, I was that motherless child in my circle of friends with excited children and parents. But I wasn’t one of those parents. It was Christmas and children needed Christmas everything, I suppose. But having a very young child eased that burden for me: one of surprise and Santa and a perfect day because Marybeth most likely wouldn’t understand what the fuss over Christmas was all about anyway. There were cookie parties and drop-ins, and life didn’t miss a beat. For others, that is. There was no time for grieving anymore.
Years later, not taking time to properly grieve caught up with me and I finally processed most of the grief over a period of ten years, but sometimes I was not a happy, pleasant person to be around. I would save my tears for the shower. Pound out my anger on the tile walls. People would tell me over and over again that Mama was in a better place. Better than what, I don’t know. I only know she was gone from me. I grieved over loss, time I never had with her, my hate for Mother’s Day because I had no mother, but most of all, grief over the fact my daughters (the second born four years later) never knew this wonderful woman who gave thought to all the ingredients of life, simple as they were, and mashed them all up together, fixin’ a life that was simply beautiful. How would I keep the memory of her alive in my daughter and any future children? I owed it to them to be in the present as their mother. Not just my Mama’s grieving daughter. Older now, and a grandmother, I have often heard that grief is the price you pay for loving someone and I would never choose to not love. But grief is hard, very hard. Now, I take solace in those precious memories and create new ones as often as I can with my little family.
As I write this, it is the year 2025 and I am in graduate school. Occasionally, I visit one particular dining hall for lunch while on campus. Making my way through the line to the salad bar one day, I spotted a lovely tray of potato salad, obviously not poured out of a giant tub from a deli or institutional food service. It was perfect, if potato salad can be perfect. Perfect in its presentation sitting in the cold stainless-steel rectangular tub. Was it homemade? I wondered to myself. There it sat, perfectly rounded amongst the bulk of mixed lettuces and salad fixings, and it beckoned to me to taste it. I relented. Meticulously, delicately, I scooped a small amount — a tad really — onto a plate because my recent bloodwork told me I should not eat large amounts of potatoes at one sitting. With the first bite I knew it was homemade. I thought to myself: who is the precious soul who made this potato salad. It’s just like my mama’s.
Finishing my lunch, I went back for more, and there stood Diane, tending the salad bar. At the time, I didn’t know her name, but I knew her. Her. As in, she was that precious soul. The potato salad maker. I had a sense. We exchanged greetings and I told her I came back for another helping that it was so, so good. So super good. “I made it,” she said. But I already knew she did. I told her how much it tasted like my mama’s. It was at that moment I knew she had been making it long before she made it for all these athletes and students. I knew, that in her own kitchen at home, she added all the ingredients of love and cups of care, adding dashes and sprinkles of joy as she did so.
I touched her arm when I thanked her. It was soft. Brown. I wanted to hug her. To grab her and hold her as if she was my own mama. To feel her arms around me and feel her soft body pressing into mine, holding me tight like a mama would. I wanted time to stop. I wanted to go home with her and watch her make potato salad. I wanted her to be my mama if only for a moment. I wanted to breathe in the lingering aromas of past meals in her kitchen. I wanted to sit at her table and talk about old times.
Back to center, I decided to throw caution to the wind and filled a small melamine white plate with as much potato salad as my eyes-bigger-than-my-stomach could fill. I didn’t at all experience gluttony guilt. My blood sugar would spike, I would feel euphoric, and all would be right in the world for those few brief moments. I didn’t care about my blood sugar. I needed affirmation.
Refilling my water glass, plate in hand, I walked back to the café table, sat, and sighed deeply. Lifting my fork, I took in the first bite as if it were my last. I savored each one. Every seasoning of life. Every ingredient: The Irish potatoes from my mother’s childhood. The eggs plucked from under the fickle hens in our chicken coop. Crisp, green celery, purchased at the Piggly Wiggly, perfectly and evenly chopped into the tiniest of blocks. Sweet onions, grated for their depth of flavor and all the layers. The perfect shake of Worcestershire sauce and Texas Pete and just the right size squeeze of French’s yellow mustard. Relish ground from homemade bread and butter pickles. Peppercorns finely crushed. The turn of the wrist by the salt of the earth, Mama, as dollops of Duke’s mayonnaise and Miracle Whip salad dressings swirled it all together.
Sitting in the midst of noisy, chatty college students, close to my age when my mother had her first surgery, I began to weep, tears rolling down my cheeks into the plate of potato salad. I wept for my mama. I wept for myself and my children who never knew my mama, the saint she was. I wept for those with no mama. Most of all, I wept for Diane and all the mamas who tend their flock and feed them potato salad, have had love, gave all that they could, and feel they have left nothing undone in this life. I wept for the joyous fact my mama lives on in the spirit of women, like Diane, who labor for those they love, because no one can make potato salad like my mama.
Amy Alexandra Singleton is a writer of nonfiction, middle grade/young adult fiction, and poetry. Raised in rural South Carolina, she embraces her sense of place by sharing personal stories, with the promise and hope of inspiring others to value their own storytelling as a vehicle for preserving history and leaving a legacy.
Amy holds a BA and a Master of Arts in Writing from Coastal Carolina University, where she was nonfiction editor of Waccamaw literary journal. Her photography has appeared in Archarios, a literary and art publication on campus. Locally, she facilitated workshops in Duke University’s “Transform Your Health: Write to Heal,” and aspires to teach composition and writing in higher academia.