Remembering My Special Mother-In-Law
Thursday, May 08, 2008 - 12:00 AM
BY Joe Tennis Features Writer Send e-mailBiography |
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Printer FriendlyAt home, in a file called “Family Tree,” I keep an old newspaper clipping of my mother-in-law.
It’s from 1960, announcing her engagement to my father-in-law, and her picture, published in this newspaper, ran about as big as a picture could be.
My mother-in-law, Louise Chew Wolfe, grew up in Bristol. She attended Virginia High School in the 1950s, and later graduated from the nursing school at Virginia Intermont College.
She loved Bristol and would consistently tell me stories of State Street’s heyday of the 1950s. Often, she talked about Trayer’s Restaurant and told me how her father, Dr. John Chew, would make house calls all over Hickory Tree, Bluff City and Bristol.
But this lady not only loved Bristol. She also just seemed to love everybody. Especially her children. Including me.
“Weezy,” as many people called her, never made distinctions. I might have been a son-in-law, but to her, I simply became another son. She helped with problems, like that one Sunday afternoon when I called her, panicking, because my infant daughter – her granddaughter – would not stop crying.
Weezy gave advice on cooking. We talked about religion and music and the Barter Theatre.
She was a great mom in every great way.
Weezy did have plenty of practice. From 1960 to 1978, she gave birth to 10 children. And, never losing her motherly instinct, she helped care for her 15 grandchildren.
And then? We lost her.
At age 63, Weezy simply passed away, two days after a happy family gathering in Abingdon.
This woman’s life stopped like a book with a blunt ending. And we were all left to wonder, “Is this really it?”
Now, as the calendar approaches Mother’s Day, I’ve been having dreams of that special woman – that lady who became so much like a mother to me. Twice, in the past month, I’ve had dreams so vivid that I felt like I have actually been talking to her again.
Even so, consider me lucky. Where some may have a “monster-in-law,” I simply had another “mother.” It has been six-and-a-half years since we lost her. Weezy has now been gone for as long as I knew her.
But I still feel her spirit – in her children, in her grandchildren.
And, yes, even in myself.
Happy Mother’s Day.
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