I have roots in steel.
I have steel roots.

The Reuthers and the Foleys found their way to Lackawanna County, PA — Scranton, PA to be specific — to work at the steel plant. Lackawanna Steel branched out, picked up stakes as it were, and relocated to a large parcel of land nestled south of Buffalo, NY, on the eastern banks of Lake Erie, in a burg called West Seneca.

The factory community (the plant and the housing that sprouted alongside it) voted to incorporate into the city of Lackawanna, NY, named for Lackawanna Steel from Lackawanna County, PA.

At some point Bethlehem Steel purchased Lackawanna Steel, and the massive plant nestled on the eastern bank of Lake Erie, just south of the city of Buffalo, NY, contained caldrons and foundries that birthed galaxies, universes, dimensions…. I get carried away.

Mom loves when I get carried away.

Sometimes when I’m off on some erudite spiel about Marxist communications theory, she’ll just get this whimsical look of admiration… it used to embarrass me. But I learned to hold past the embarrassment and see it for what it was: pride in watching someone you love blossom. That’s all Mom has ever wanted.

My mother’s maternal lineage — a migration from Germany and Ireland through a gateway port like New York City, into Scranton, PA, to Buffalo, girdered by rails of steel.

The Reuthers and the Foleys found their way to Lackawanna, and Lackawanna moved with them, and in Western NY, underneath the steely gleam of Bethlehem, a love was born.

One could say it slouched away from the sulfurous soot and coke smoke of Bethlehem, and a spunky little Rosie girl giggled her way outside The Coffee Pot on South Park Avenue, Lackawanna, NY, 1944? ’45? She and her girlfriends had rain slickers that the boys signed. The girls embroidered the boys’ names. It’s a thing they did.

Rosie is a bubbly love.

The Coffee Pot mixed more than Colombian beans and Lake Erie tap water… a strange alchemy was brewing wherein Reuthers and Foleys met Osbornes and Bakers, and Rinaldos and Quirks, and something galvanized into a tempered helix of loving foundation. And that is my mother.

But I get ahead of myself. And I don’t want to get ahead. I want to catch it before I lose it. But I don’t want to get ahead.

This bubbly Rosie girl, to watch my grandfather’s face light up, was just love. He would see her at The Coffee Pot with her giggling friends, signing their slickers, eyeing the little Rosie girl. He was 14, she was 16 (going on 17), but she would look back wistfully and say, “he was wise beyond his years.” And Daniel Baker was wise beyond his years. He had to be. His dad died suddenly when he was ten; his older brother went off to fight in the Battle of the Bulge…. Dan Baker was a pensive, wise 14-year-old going to study in South Buffalo, changing buses on South Park and Ridge Road, Lackawanna, across the street from Our Lady of Victory Basilica, next to the hospital where little Rosie was born in 1927, next to Father Baker’s Home for Children. I like to think they joked about Danny being named Baker too… even if it was a common name, I bet knowing the two of them it was a thing they laughed about over Cokes and roast beef sandwiches waiting for the bus.

One of Rosie’s friends had her eyes on Danny Baker, but he only had eyes for his Rosie. It is part of family lore that this former friend of Rosie Foley’s never spoke to her again. But you have to understand, Danny was a catch. Handsome, whip smart, caring, and resourceful…. he lost his dad and became everyone’s.

When you look at the universe from a systems perspective, you realize it’s all nets and connections. You can grab any piece of the Mandelbrotian mesh of spacetime and find how it connects to every other drop on Indra’s web.

I think the self is an emergent function of this. Circumstances and influences, through acts of what some call divine providence, intervention, grace, tao, zen, prana, or my preferred word — love — lead to a patchwork greater than the sum of its particles, one that unwittingly acts as a quasar of lifeforce. Of love.

Two years after that shared pot of coffee, Dan and Rose had a quick wedding to make way for their firstborn, Denise. My Mommy.

Dan and Rosie were kids. Responsible, for the most part…. but kids! Even in 1946, Dan worked at Bethlehem Steel as a mechanic on the trucks and locomotives; Rosie raised the kids — eight of ’em — with a lot of help from Denny, the firstborn.

And she became everyone’s caretaker. A role she never relinquished. A role she never will relinquish, no matter how hard I try to get her to just rest. Enjoy what’s left.

But that never was Mom, and that never will be Mom.

She left us this morning.

It kills me. It’s the hardest sentence I can write. But I think… I think she knows I did the best I could. I think she knows I am her love.

When I last saw her, I held her hand and I said, “Ma, what are you thinking?”
I don’t know…. what do you mean?
I don’t know… what do you want? What are your… wishes?
Oh… [scrunches her eyes a bit]… I can’t really get my head around that right now.
That’s okay, Ma. You don’t have to. I just want you to know I have you. I have Dad, I have Ace, I have Dee, I have Cat, I have Mikey, I have Calvin, I have Grace, and I have you. In my hands. Whatever you want, or need, I am here. I love you. I know I’ve been a pain in the ass….
…oh, that’s normal…
… I know, but I’m making up for it. I gotcha, Ma. You wanna fight, we fight. You wanna rest, we rest. I just hope I’m a good son [I know, insecure much?].
[She smiles — a real, appreciated and appreciative smile, like when she would watch me wax philosophical, when she looked at me at age four saying the cloud looked like a piece of thread, and she said you have the soul of a poet.] The best. She said. She said I’m the best son. (My sisters would be quick to point out the only son — but she also has the best son-in-law in my big bro-in-law…)…

She smiles and says the best.

My heart is in pieces right now. Powdered and ground and stamped into the finest dust…. but my tears are congealing into something from this mud and agony.

I have an inheritance.

Denise Mary Carmella Baker Stroh is Jedi-level powerful. I would see images of Vietnamese monks calmly sitting in flames and have no idea how a human could withstand pain with such grace…. and then I realized what Denise Mary Carmella Baker Stroh has carried for almost 80 earthly years.

She developed a ninja-like ability to disassociate from physical pain, all while looking after the needs of others. Seeing someone else in distress was how Mom related to pain. Her own didn’t take a back seat. It went by snail mail and rarely caught up. She would know she was uncomfortable, but she never went beyond, “well, this is what life is now, let me help this one….”

Why can I say this so confidently, as if from inside her head? Because I inherited a good part of my nervous system from my mom. The more I learned about my own neurodivergence, the more I realized that my mother lived almost 80 years with a lot of the same traits I have and never had a word for any of it. She just thought there was something wrong with her. So she compensated by becoming one of the most compassionately driven human beings I have ever known. It pained her to see others uncomfortable. (Ironic, isn’t it?) I don’t even like the term people pleaser in Mom’s case. It wasn’t manipulative — it was a defense against having to see others uncomfortable.

Because as a very young child, Denise Mary Baker (not yet confirmed Carmella, not yet married Stroh) learned she had a healer’s gift. An empathic grit that would have led armies of peaceful warriors in a less patriarchal society. This made her such an asset to those around her that she took this gift for granted. Never the type to flaunt it, she figured it was just her role. She became a nurse. A mother.

When I say to her, “Ma, you always worry about us more than yourself!”
That’s what a mother does.
No, that’s what you do. I’ve seen other families. Not every mother is like you.

A few weeks later she says, “how are you doing, handling all this?” [this meaning her care, my dad’s care, etc.]
I’m a little stressed, Ma, but I’ll be alright.
I hate that you’re going through this!
Ma! I told you I don’t want to hear that. It is a privilege to be able to help you…. It’s what a son does.
I hear that touché chuckle on the other end of the messenger chat.

So, is this an obituary? A eulogy?

It’s more about me than her. I guess that’s what obits and eulogies are. They’re for us poor saps who are left behind trying to make sense of the senseless.

I come from a long line of healers through the country of steelers.

Here’s the best I can do to at least make it… less about me… more about… us:

My mother has loved me, unconditionally, for 49 years and counting. I have not always been the easiest bloke to love. That alone illustrates incredible strength. I have not always had the strongest self-esteem. I grew up neurodivergent in a time when that wasn’t understood. I felt profoundly broken (spoiler alert: still often do. Old habits…).

But you know who always made me feel like there might be a flaw in the broken narrative? Of course you know.
My mother.

In our society we downplay the strength it takes to love. My mother loved.

And it makes sense. Neurodivergents resonate together. They know how to co-regulate. Mom has memories she loves to share about her doing laundry in the basement while I tooled around in my little fire engine, singing songs in my own little world. (No, that wasn’t last month — I was a toddler, but don’t put it past me…)

Mom knew instinctively, even when the world was saying otherwise, we’re not broken. We just see the world through a different lens. So she was the original protector of that flame in me.

Fierce sense of social justice? Check. Mom hates unfairness. Hates it in her bones. So do I.

Alexithymia — the neurodivergent tendency to have a sensation, an emotion, but be rendered unable to articulate or locate it. I see it in Mom because I’ve lived it.

A few months ago she shook her head. “I just can’t forgive myself. You suffered and I didn’t stop it.”

Mom, stop. First of all, I never — ever, ever, ever, ever, ever — felt unloved or devalued in your eyes. You protected me. You even bonded with me as we conspired our evil fantasies against my fourth grade teacher, The Dragon Lady, you called her. We would lob imaginary hand grenades at the “yuppies” in our way, lining up to drop off their kids, as you walked me (on back roads — don’t wanna be the mama’s boy) to Almost There…. not because I was afraid to walk alone, but more because I just liked being with you, and I live in a world that makes a sensitive young boy feel odd or broken for valuing the strength of love over the rough and tumble… and by 5th grade they called it “separation anxiety.” And yes. Hell yes. How can a sensitive young boy who loves his Mommy and his sisters and his Daddy reconcile that desire to be with these people with a world that tosses him into a sensory hell of strangers and posturing archetypes who seize on his sensitivity as weakness and treat him like an alien? You did the best you could, Ma. You knew in your heart, you knew with every ounce of healer’s wisdom, that the world was wrong, and you never let me feel broken because of it.

Oh.

And from that point on I decided that if I did nothing else for my mother for the rest of her days but remind her what a rock star she is, then so be it, I would do it.

Because she is.

If you know her, you know this.

The tragedy of it all: she doesn’t believe it.

I hope these last few months have changed that.

I held her hand every time I visited. Rubbed her hand (I love the sensation of having my hand rubbed. When my wife does it, I feel cared for…).

I hear Mom purr… that feels nice…

A twinge of guilt crosses me…. why haven’t I always been this son? Why did it take me so long? But I realized Mom’s superpower — to her, I always was this son. She never held my imperfections against me. And in doing that, she gave me a clearer map of my soul than a Jungian existential midlife dark night of the soul ever will. Although I’m still spelunking in my platonic cave. (Mom is smiling at me wryly.)

So how to manage this grief? How to manage this Mom-shaped hole? Not gonna lie (as the kids say), this is the one I’ve dreaded since they would tear me out of her arms to send me into nursery school. My Mommy’s….

….no. I refuse to let her go like that. The tragedy of Denise Mary Carmella Baker Stroh isn’t that she was powerless. It’s that she was a rock star and she never got to trash a hotel room. She never got to rest on her laurels and enjoy the fact that she was Denise Stroh, a woman remembered for never forgetting people.

As her breathing became more and more labored, as it became clearer and clearer that she would not likely return to what had become her comfortable and normal life (and for a home-cat like my Mom, this is devastating — I relate), she handled it with grace, aplomb. Nurses, orderlies, aides, doctors — all commented on her kindness, her glow, her pleasantness.

Do you know the strength it requires to project that in this world? Under the physical and emotional strain she carried?

I held her hand the other day and told her this. What a badass she is. She’s like, what else can I do? If she’s anything like me, she shrugged it off as the glowing reviews of the biased eyes of love.

But that doesn’t make it less true.

My mother loves us. She always has, she always will.

She taught me to be strong in love.

The only thing that will get me through this loss is her love.

I’ll carry it with me.

I’ll share it.

I’ll watch it amplify.

I told Mom’s nurse from the last two nights — her nurse, who called me today just to see how I am doing — I told her, “You… take this from an old South Bronx high school teacher… you have a gift. You made me and my mother feel held, valued, seen, in the darkest moments of our lives together. When I teach my students in the Bronx, many of whom want to become nurses, I will tell them how you made the worst days of my life bearable.”

She said she could just tell how special a woman Denise is.

I don’t want to end this essay.

I don’t want these to be the last words I write on this.

And I know they won’t.

Her love will guide every act as I keep her remarkably strong love alive in me.

It’s the only way I’ll survive this.

I come from people of steel.

Not the kind who put it in their name, flaunt it.

No. I come from steelworkers who worked downwind from the Bessemer process.

Plain old iron, heated until it liquifies… temperatures unfathomable….
Air is violently bellowed through, blowing out impurities — carbon, silicon, detritus….
Some of the carbon is processed back in, and under intense and loving human ingenuity, an element is alloyed into a synthetic wonder — man-made, yet of nature.
The intense heat blows out impurities, alchemizes the raw material into something elegant. Something that shines and holds, suspends and shelters…

In 2000, U2 released All That You Can’t Leave Behind. During much of the production of that album, lead singer and lyricist Bono was spending his father’s last days with him.
I understand that title now. All That You Can’t Leave Behind.
When you watch someone withstand the furnace of this physical and emotional toil so acutely, you realize what matters. And what doesn’t.
Petty grievances I felt a week ago don’t even compute.
Maybe when the amplitude of this wave of grief decreases, I’ll get back to my more quotidian pursuits, pet peeves, and proclivities.

But I suspect this will be a lasting lesson. I may be the teacher, but Mom gets the last assessment.

My goodness. She loves me.
I’m her Sweet Boy.
I must be doing something right.

Everybody loves my mom, because she is the quiet foundation that holds us all together and aloft.

I will spend the rest of my days carrying that energy forward.