“What’s that you have in your ear?”
We were on our way home from a family event in New York City in March, 2009. Larry was driving, and my sister Laura was in the passenger seat, and I was sitting in the back with my mom. “This is my iPod. I can listen to music on it.”
“Can I try?”
“Of course!”
I removed the earbuds from my ears and put them in my mother’s. Then I scrolled through my playlist. Nearly 90% were Broadway musicals. I knew my mom would love them.
For the next two hours, my mom was in Broadway heaven. She zoned out on the music, sometimes singing along tunelessly.
I knew I had to get my mother a similar device. We had lost our father in November 2008, and my mother was now alone in her independent living apartment. She was doing amazingly well. “Life is about change, and you have to move on,” she told us. But the evening hours were long, and she missed “MY Bill”. That week, I ordered an iPod Shuffle from the Apple website. The device was very simple. It could store 100’s on songs in its small flash drive, which resembled a Bic lighter. Placing the one earbud into one’s ear was also easy to use. I loaded it with Mom’s favorites: Dozens of my Broadway musicals, Judy Garland, and, of course, Frank Sinatra.
Ah, Ol’ Blue Eyes! Mom was married with a toddler when the skinny Italian from Hoboken, New Jersey first came crashing onto the scene. She may have not been a “Bobby Socker,” the name given adolescent girls in the 1040’s. But she loved his choice of songs, his voice, and especially his sense of timing. “Just listen to him, Marilyn,” she would tell me. “No one can sing as well as him!”
My mother was thrilled with her new toy. She used the Shuffle for the next two years. Thankfully, it took little work on my part. I left a charger at her apartment to use as needed. Outside of that, she could listen to music to her heart’s content. I would often walk into her apartment and find her sitting in her favorite lazy boy, singing along to Frank.
On December 22, 2010, four days after I had retired, Mom had a heart attack. At the hospital, the emergency room doctor cautioned my husband Larry and me that she may not make it home. If she did, she had three to six months at best. Her 92-year-old body was failing.
You couldn’t tell a day after her heart attack. She sat up in her hospital bed, catching up with family and friends on the phone and endearing herself to the nurses who tended to her. I brought the Shuffle to the hospital, and she spent time in between phone calls listening to her favourites.
She also used the Shuffle over the next few months. In late February, she read her last book, did her last Word Search, and balanced her cheque book. Then she had a stroke. As all her children and her wonderful hospice nurse watched over her, she slipped into unconsciousness. I placed the Shuffle on her ear as she slept.
Mom passed away early morning on March 2, 2011. My three siblings and I worked quickly to clear the apartment, knowing we would be responsible for the full month’s rent if we weren’t out by March 5th.
I remember taking home the Shuffle, but a week later, it was nowhere to be found. I searched everywhere with no luck. It was gone. It was just “stuff”, but somehow that little device was important to me. I grieved for its loss.
Fast forward to Late May, 2015. Larry and I had made the decision to move to Florida, and we were packing up the house. I was cleaning out the three drawer oak chest that was in our foyer. When finished, I pulled it out from the wall to make sure I didn’t miss anything behind it. Stuck in one of the slats was what looked like a Bic cigarette lighter. “How did that get there?” I thought.
It was Mom’s Shuffle. Obviously, I had brought it home, placed it on the top of the dresser, and it had slipped off and “adhered” itself to the back of the oak chest.
I charged it up and… voila! Frankie crooned in my ear.
June 1st will make ten years since we made our move. I still have Mom’s Shuffle. It has been replaced for the most part with my iPhone and my Alexa. But there are days when I miss my mom and want to feel close to her. So I pull it out of my electronics box, charge it up, stick it in my ear, and sing along with Frank. “I’ve got you under my skin,” he croons.” You make me feel so young!” And of course, “I did it myyyyy way!” “I shed some tears, think of Francis Albert Sinatra and Frances Evelyn Cohen, and I feel my mother’s love all over again.
