My mother's daughter

   Mom was 64 when Dad died. 
   I am 63 and Michael has died.
   She married Dad when she was 30, after knowing him less than a year. They were together 34 years.
   I married Michael when I was 25, and I knew him for three years before we married. 
   Dad was a handsome, ambitious, dynamic war hero and 20 years older than Mom.
   Michael was the funnest person in our office, tall and sweet and kind, but sad, and he had beautiful hands and a big vocabulary. He was seven years older.
   Mom had been married once before and had two children. Dad had been married twice before and had three children, but they lived with his first wife. Mom could not drive or had only driven a car once in a while.
   I was never married before Michael. He had been married once. I had no children, no pets. He had no children but four pets. I had a car, a VW Super Beetle with a moon roof.
   Mom and Dad moved often as he lost faith in employers or grants ran out. After they were married she changed homes 10 times.        
   Michael and I lived together in his house forever. We used to sing Nanci Griffith's “Gulf Coast Highway” about that — “this old house here by the road.”

And when we die, we say, 

we’ll catch some blackbird’s wing

And we will fly away together

To some sweet bluebonnet spring.

   Mom sang “Blueberry Hill” and “If You Were the Only Boy in the World.” I don’t remember Dad singing with her. He liked music, though.
   Michael and I sang together a lot, especially before Ben was a teenager. Sometime when Ben was in college, Michael told me he did not like my voice, that it was pompous and squeaky, and I stopped singing altogether. Singing made me cry. Mom had taught me that I had a pretty voice, and I dreaded being that person who can’t sing but thinks they can and people humor her. 
   He didn’t mean it, he said later. He was trying to pay me back for calling him stupid and an idiot. I didn’t mean that either. He was not stupid. I only called him an idiot because the wife called Raymond an idiot on Everybody Loves Raymond, and it was funny. But Michael did not receive it as funny. It was mean, and it hurt his feelings. It's miraculous that he stayed with me.
   Mom tried to warn me that I should work on listening. “I read somewhere that listening is a pure expression of love,” she said.
   Dad never stopped talking. Mom taught herself to listen, to really listen. But she had a head start: She was a naturally quiet individual, unburdened by the need to be right. 
   Unlike her daughter. 
   Mom seemed to thrive after Dad died. She said she missed him, but I never saw her break down weeping. Sometimes she was misty, but she was a private person. She spared her children.
   I never, for instance, saw her crawling on the floor howling. John E says she was a trouper.
   Not much like her daughter at all.