My name is Roger Lindell. I'm 47 years old, I sell farm equipment parts for a living in Denver, and I have never made a web page before. My daughter Kari set this up for me and showed me how to type it in. If something looks wrong, it's my fault, not hers.

My mother died in February. I wrote this in the spring, mostly at night, because I found out there were a lot of things I wanted to say to her and I'd waited too long to say them. I'm putting it here so it's somewhere.

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Who she was

She was born on a farm near St. Paul, Nebraska, the second of six. She married my father, Arne Lindell, in 1948. He worked at the grain elevator in Grand Island. On a Friday in October of 1961 there was an accident at the elevator and he was killed. I was nine. My sister Janet was five. My mother was thirty-five years old, with no car, no job, and a house that wasn't paid for.

She got a job as a telephone operator on the night shift, and my grandma came to stay with us. Later she worked in the cafeteria at the junior high for twenty-six years, which means she fed about half of Grand Island at one time or another, and people still stop Janet at the grocery store to tell her so. She paid off that house in 1974. She never remarried. When I asked her why, one time when I was grown, she said she'd already had the good one.

She sang alto in the choir at First Lutheran for forty years. She kept a bird feeder outside the kitchen window and knew every bird that came to it, but the cardinals were her favorites. She said a cardinal in the snow was the prettiest thing God ever made. She made pancakes on Saturday mornings and tried to make them in the shape of Nebraska, which they never were. She did the crossword in ink.

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The last six months

Last summer her heart started to fail. The doctors called it congestive heart failure, and they were honest with us that it wasn't going to get better. I live about five hundred miles away. For those six months I drove home to Grand Island every other weekend on I-80, and I'm glad I did, and I wish I had done it every weekend. I wish I had done it for twenty years.

The hospice people came to the house at the end, so she could stay home like she wanted, in her own bed where she could see the feeder. I will never be able to thank them enough. If you are going through this with your own mother or father, call your local hospice and ask. They helped us more than I can say.

She died on a Thursday afternoon, with Janet and me there. It was snowing. There was a cardinal on the feeder. I am not making that up.

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Things I should have said, Mom

Thank you for working nights so we could eat.
Thank you for coming to every single one of my wrestling meets, even the ones where I got pinned in eleven seconds.
I'm sorry about the car in 1969. You knew it was me. You always knew.
I'm sorry I moved so far away. It wasn't about you. It was about a job, and I should have come home more.
You were right about Sheila. I married her anyway, and you were right, and you never once said you told me so.
You were a better parent alone than most people are in pairs.
I still can't do the crossword in ink.
I love you. I said it at the end. I should have said it all along.

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About all the letters

In May, a lady who volunteers for a hospice in Ohio found this page and put the address in her newsletter, and since then I have gotten more than four hundred e-mails, from people I don't know, about their own mothers. Some are two lines long. Some are ten pages. Some of you lost your mom last week and some of you lost her forty years ago and it's still right there. I've answered every one. It might take me a while. Please be patient with me.

What I've learned from your letters is that almost everybody wishes they had called more. So if your mother is still living, I'm going to ask you to do something. Close this page. Go call her. It doesn't need to be about anything.

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This page has been visited

times. Thank you.

If you want to write to me about your mother, I'll read it:
[email protected]

Last updated July 25, 1999
Roger Lindell, Denver, Colorado