Kaye Elizabeth Simons

Kaye was an addictive reader. It sounds like a pretend problem, until you see it. She spent hours and hours in bed. She missed work and classes. The real problem was depression, but her reading looked like the vortex that drug her under.

She surrounded herself with stories. She read them - biographies, mysteries, classics, literature, science, World War II, Christianity - and she told them. Some reinforced her depression (mainly of maltreatment at the hands of men) and some seemed self-aggrandizing, but she loved stories. I never asked Mom a question without getting a long answer. Woe betide if I forgot, and asked while I was on a schedule.

So, her strokes were a tragedy (though I wonder if I should write that, or if it will seem too much like overstatement, but that was how they felt to me). Her language was slaughtered, but she still wanted to give long answers. I (eldest daughter, Jeanne Elizabeth, number three of four) begged her to just tell me yes or no, but she rarely could, and I should not have hurt her feelings so.

The last new story she told the last Christmas she could speak clearly. A couple of rough-looking men found her father in Whitefish, and asked if he could ride a horse. He said he could, and they told him a man needed a doctor a ways back in the woods. Grandpa got his medical bag, and they all went - over hill and over dale, and over hill and over dale, again, and maybe again. I think the injured man was in a tent, and they moved him to a cabin. It sounds as though the leg had not been normally broken, but shattered. We had the impression of mafia, and a beating, but Grandpa did not ask, and they were polite to Grandpa, and deferential. When he said, “Boil water, and bring me towels,” they boiled water and found the closest thing they could. It may not have been a leg, because Grandpa felt that if he did not stay the night, he could not be sure the man would be stable, so he stayed the night, and the man was fine, or stable enough. Grandpa rode home, and I do not remember what Mom said the men did.

When Mom told the story, Rachel (Rachel Elizabeth, youngest daughter, number four of four) and her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Steve - both professional hikers, Steve stationed in the Glacier area - said, isn’t there a lot of casino-owned land up in Area X (I do not remember the name precisely, now, though I have wracked my brain) - Yeah, I think it’s Place Name Y - Yeah, I’ll bet that’s it, and they both knew where it was. And perhaps it is as well I do not remember the name they came up with, because maybe there was a reason we did not hear that story earlier.

What was amazing about Mom’s stories was how many of them were true.

We lived in poverty, but we hung Grandma’s damask tablecloths on the windows for curtains, and sometimes slept as a family on damask tablecloths as sheets under old wool blankets around the pilot light when the heat went out. When food ran low, I learned to lower my calories before we were out to make it stretch. I heard her lie to people on the phone, trying to cover something up to make ends meet or save face, and I did not believe a word she said. And then, I saw proof - not of the everyday lies, but of the stories.

The first time I remember seeing story-proof, I might have been in high school. We were living in Bozeman, and I found one of Grandma’s scrapbooks. It was giant - maybe more than two feet - and musty, even thirty years ago. I discovered dance cards from a boy named Forest (Grandpa’s name was John), and Mom said that he was Grandma’s true love, and Grandpa didn’t stand a chance, until Forest died in a car accident. I’d never heard that story.

But then, I saw a full page of a newspaper - a front-page from the sports section of the St. Paul paper - announcing John Simons had eloped with Jean Leitch*. I feel like my eyes may have popped out of my head, for real. That one was true. She hadn’t lied. But I didn’t believe her about most things, even then.

My dad (and Rachel’s) turned out to be another true tale - at least we got proof for parts of what Mom told us about his life. Ed Scott, of Scott ski products, went to France to find the best skier of all time. He asked one of the great French Olympians who the best skier he had ever known was, and with no hesitation or prompting, the Frenchman said “Lew Whitcher,” even though he had neither seen nor spoken to our dad in twenty years. Scott wrote the article in a Sun Valley paper. While this incident affected my opinion of my dad more than of my mom, it still made an inroad to improving my mom’s credibility. 

Mom grew up in an all-star family in a very small town. Her father was “the doctor” in Whitefish (recently, I have thought, but have not attempted to verify, that he was not the only one, but he may have been the best), and they lived in The Castle (as that home is known to this day), and her mother gardened in four-inch heels, kept a perfect house, volunteered, and made sure her father treated impoverished patients gratis, but could drink her male co-chaperones under the table when they traveled out of town with the ski team.

I want to tell you every story she ever told me. My heart aches for my mom. But, at some point, an obituary has to get written, if you do not want it to be another empty page with a picture of birds for a face, and I still have an apartment and a storage unit to get sorted, a job to find, paperwork to do, and a litany of actions to be completed, so I will tell you about my mother in a different way.

At the end, my mother wanted two people more than anybody: her mother and her brother, and it was impossible to bring her either, so sometimes she would see them, which sounds like she wasn’t in this world, anymore, but I think she mainly was - she just visited with them, sometimes. (And cats and kids made her happy. Even if she could not see him, it made her happier if kitty was there - but a cat cannot replace a missing brother or mother.)

Her father could not love her very well after she was five - he had had an affair that produced a disabled child that looked like her, and Grandma quit his bed, after that. Her mom, she said, was wiser, kinder, and had better taste (and was better with money) than her father. She trusted her mom more, and felt like she protected her from her father. After many years, I knew I would never live up to her mother, though Mom was never mean about it.

Mom followed her big brother, Johnny, everywhere - to the gravel pit, to the lake (where she tells the tale of watching her cast slowly disintegrate in the water, watching the little, white plaster-chunks float away like clouds when she was four - he got in trouble for that one), on adventures with his friends (She had a crush on a neighbor, Jerry, who was also John’s friend. I think her brother must have been mortified). In later life, I think, she asked him too many favors, but she loved him, and was proud of him (he was vice president of McDonnell-Douglas), and I remember riding, terrified, in the back seat, while he drove directly down the middle of winding I-95 in his red Cadillac, while he and Mom talked like everything was alright (apparently, the old driving instruction said the centerline being directly under the middle of the car allowed ample room to avoid deer).

When she was young, she was valedictorian of her class, an excellent skier (though she broke many bones becoming one: “I was a klutz, but persistent. Your dad was graceful, and a natural athlete.”), a near-concert-level pianist (second place broke her heart and caused her to quit), and she fell in love with really talented men who were not very nice (besides mine and Rachel’s dad, Charlie [child number two of four - Charles George Keshian, jr] and Tosch’s dad was apparently the best Oriental rug repairman this side of the Mississippi, though he would rather have been a writer).

But for most of my life that I can remember, Mom was a failure, if only objective facts are recounted. Rachel and I were raised on welfare, and when Mom did work (teaching, as much as she could), it seemed like she was not good at it, despite her encyclopedic knowledge of a variety of topics. I could go on in this vein, as well, but this is her obituary, and that would be disrespectful, and unkind. 

But Mom was good at weird things. When she bought gifts, if she missed, they were terrible, but when she got it right, you would fall in love with something you might not have known you needed. She had a few things she baked that were real treats: chiffon cake with a double batch of seven-minute (two-hours, in the real world) icing, and brownies with a layer of raspberry jam under chocolate frosting. We had a hand-crank ice-cream maker, and we used it (Charlie was the champion of both keeping that crank running, and whipping egg whites for the cake and its egg-white icing). She could tell us recipes - in detail - (among many other things) from memory for almost her whole life. I discovered that Mom had shockingly good color vision, even when her macular degeneration was fairly advanced. I was trying to match a print color to a fabric I hoped to cover a homemade book with, and I thought on a lark that I would ask Mom (who had told us that she was legally, if not literally, blind from childhood). Mom was able to tell me not only that it was slightly incorrect, but what I needed to shift to correct it (I checked it against the Pantone charts).

When I was in high school, and walking for miles at a time, she went on a six-mile walk around Bozeman (including hills) with me. She was over fifty, and I could not see that it phased her. Decades later, Mom was not enthusiastic about her exercise programs, but as long as her knees were stable, she walked, rather than rode her wheelchair, around her building. 

She tried to learn Hebrew, and that stumped her, but when I began translating French, and I was the highest-testing French student at my level, I brought one of my old, French books over, she read it more easily than I did (great-grandma Simons, who she thought was not very nice, had been given a good, classical education for women, and was very skilled in French, which she taught Mother). Mom had not read French in decades.

Mom adopted the cats that no one else wanted, and she adopted disabled cats (Amelia, in particular, was a handful, but she would let Mom hold her in the most undignified positions).

Almost always, Mom would listen. I could tell her the most appalling things, and she would try to be a good ear, and be helpful (Advice was rarely something she was good at - usually, her advice was terrible. It could be discouraging). 

More than anything, while I cannot speak for the boys, Rachel and I always knew Mom loved us. And I am grateful I believe in heaven (you are free to believe as you believe), because otherwise, that would be gone forever.

*I do not remember the exact phrase I googled, but you can still find John Simons’ football record. He was on a team that Tosch (Harold Kevork “Toschoum” Keshian, eldest of the four children) told me was a precursor to the Minnesota Vikings. 

Mom said that he was not only a football star, but an all-around athlete. She said he had been the model for the statue at the top of the Minnesota capitol, but even she wasn’t sure about that one.

Vigil/Remembrance:

7:30 p.m. on January 10, 2024

at Rachel Simons' apartment:

12951 US 93 #B

Missoula, MT 59808

 

Funeral Mass (with breakfast at a cafe, afterward):

10:30 a.m. on January 11, 2024 

at St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church

420 W. Pine Street

Missoula, MT 59802