Losing Mom

Bryan J. Rollins
6 min readDec 14, 2024

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On November 6th, 2024, my mom, Marianne Colvert Rollins, passed away at 92 years of age. She had suffered from dementia for years and finally succumbed to an infection that her body could not fight.

Mom’s Obituary

Mom wrote her own obituary several years ago, and we simply updated it and had it published. It conveys the facts of Mom’s life, but doesn’t reveal much about her personality. But this format was Mom’s wish — and honouring Mom’s wishes was the goal that helped focus me over the last few weeks.

Side note: I learned that it’s $500–600 to publish a medium-sized obituary these days, which somehow feels wrong. The company (obituaries.com) that handles this for hundreds of papers across the country doesn’t give flexible options (like online-only) and keeps the packages so expensive. This has prevented other family members of mine from posting an obit for their loved one.

Mom

Mom was born on the fourth of July. Most of my childhood memories of mom are her looking after me, or me hanging on to her coattails. I can still picture sitting next to Mom on our couch in the house that Dad had built in King Salmon, Alaska, with Mom and I taking turns reading chapters of Lassie Come Home.

Mom in Ft. Yukon, Alaska (before I was born)

Mom was a pioneer!

When it came time to tell Mom that I was moving to Australia, I worried that Mom’s response would be heartbreak. But Mom said, “I’d be a hypocrite if I told you not to do this, since I left the country when I was 22.” My jaw dropped. Of course, Alaska had only been a territory and not a US state when Mom moved there in the 1950s. She and her friend Mary Jo from Blue Mountain College both moved and shared a room there. Mom’s physical exterior always hid the incredible strength of my mother, her pain tolerance, and her determination.

Visiting Mom and my sister’s family in Stafford, Virginia, where Mom lived for the last 10+ years of her life.
We arranged a surprise 4th of July concert for my mom’s birthday with patriotic songs the summer (2019) I lived in Stafford, Virginia during my post-Atlassian sabbatical.
My nephew Braden’s wedding; Mom loved family events, loved her family, and loved her grandchildren (and great-grandchild) with all of her heart.

A lesson from Mom

When I was in high school, I left all kinds of things in my jeans’ pockets when tossing them in the laundry. Mom had reminded me to check them but I hadn’t picked up the habit. So for six months, Mom dutifully removed all the money I had left in my jeans and kept it. After six months, she sat me down on the couch, and told me what she had been doing, and had me calculate the amount of interest I had lost from not having this money.

The amount came out to something less than ten cents, and Mom and I both laughed and laughed. She said, “Well, I guess that wasn’t the lesson I had intended!” We shared the laughter, and that lesson brought us closer together, and taught me that it’s okay to care, but also okay to laugh at your mistakes.

When I would visit Mom, I would always replace one of the family photos on her wall with a picture of my dog, Bear. This time Braden has been replaced. Mom appreciated that her son Bryan had a weird sense of humour.

A painful relief

Helping Mom get on her shoes. Mom could still walk with a walker at this point.

I would not want Mom to have lived another day. On my last four visits, I had told Mom goodbye, desperately hoping that it would be the last time I saw Mom in person. I’ve chronicled Mom’s journey with aging and dementia in six different blogs (Dec 2020, Oct 2021, July 2022, Apr 2023, Aug 2023, July 2024). If I had found a way to end Mom’s life earlier that my family could have accepted and that would have kept me out of prison, I would have done it.

You can see the change in Mom was dementia sets in. This is Mom’s 90th birthday.

We grieved a loss that has been slowly occurring over the past four to five years. At times it feels like Mom has had dementia for much much longer.

Mom next to the clock I had bought her, so she knew the date and time without having to remember it.

Grieving Mom

My father’s death wrecked havoc on me. It was too early (he was just 70 and I was just 30), and Dad shaped so much of who I am (both as a replica of him and as a reaction to him). With Mom’s condition, I had accepted that Mom would pass away and hoped that day would come soon. Yet losing a parent is still a loss that leaves a hole inside you.

Wednesday night, one week after Mom’s death, I lay In bed, numb. I felt shaky all day, but the needs of her memorial service gave me a focus and a feeling of productivity. The rain fell outside and I wanted to just disappear. I was a husk.

Her memorial service, in Ft. Walton Beach, Florida, gave me a place to mark her passing. I did not need closure of the unresolved issues from childhood, or to release years of internalised pain, but I did need a marker, to delineate the before and the after, to let go. The burden of Mom’s suffering is gone; the guilt of my inability to end her pain is no longer of use.

Mom’s memorial service reflected her beliefs. It would be hypocrisy on my part to pretend that I share those views. I chose to read one of Mom’s humorous autobiographical pieces that showed what a great writer and storyteller she was. Mom had again left clear instructions for her service, and while we couldn’t make all of them happen, it was a service Mom would have loved — and that felt good, that we had honoured Mom in the way she would have wanted, rather than using her service as a pulpit for expressing my beliefs.

The confines of a Southern Baptist upbringing do not leave much room for grey; there is simply heaven and hell and nothing in-between. If any of my religious family are still alive when I die, my memorial service will be much harder on them, because they will assume I’m off to hell. I won’t allow any religious content at my memorial service, which will also be hard for them.

And now, what?

I took Mom to see a musical adaptation of “The Color Purple” at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. It was one of the last times I got to take Mom to something like this, as her mobility decreased sharply after this.

The English language needs a word for an adult orphan. An untethered adult child. My dad’s death was hard, but freed me from the feeling of his judgement and black and white view of the world. Mom’s death removed the one person that I had a hard time disappointing, so there is a strange freedom, but not one for which I had wished.

I wrote a letter to Mom a couple of weeks after she died, that of course she will never receive. It’s amazing what comes out; writing “letters I will never send” unearth so much that helps me articulate what had been stuck inside. The thoughts around Mom flowed through the keyboard onto the blank page. Any of the negative feelings or frustrations take nothing away from who Mom was or what she did for me. Not every child will bond with every parent as deeply. My parents were Southern Baptist Missionaries, and that built a wall between us that prevented me from feeling like I could be honest or be myself around them, but that was never their intention.

Mom loved me and I never doubted it for a second, and she showed me how she loved me in every aspect of her life.

Goodbye, Mom. I love you.

Marianne Rollins, 1932–2024

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Bryan J. Rollins
Bryan J. Rollins

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