My mother's greatest fear in life was that she would not be remembered after her passing, that her voyage through this sphere would go unnoticed. After all, there are no grandchildren to pass along the genetic code, and this indeed is for most of us our claim to immortality. Our chance through some future progeny to have made a difference, to have changed the world and left our indelible mark upon the human race. The daily facts of living, of doing her part to hold up her little corner of the universe, seemed somehow less than what she hoped that life could be. She could never understand that this is exactly what the human bargain is. We each fill our niche in this world and fulfill our contract with the human race by being exactly who we are and taking our place in the pantheon of personhood, each of us fulfilling our destiny holding together our personal corner of the universe.

Thank you for visiting this page. It is dedicated to one person’s life, but in a greater sense, it is dedicated to us all. It is intended to say that even though we are all voyagers passing through this realm of consciousness, each one of us makes a difference merely by fact of having been here.

I am sad to report that on September 4th [1994] my mother, Cecilia, passed away. Mercifully, she died peacefully in her sleep in her own bed at home.

On June 15th of this year, she suffered a severe heart attack and was not expected to survive, but amazingly, she rallied and pulled through. After a month's stay in the hospital and another month to convalesce in a nursing home, she regained enough strength to return home. Her heart was badly damaged though, and the prognosis was grave. It was not likely that she could survive another year.

Still, she did make it back home, and as she had told me on numerous occasions, she did NOT want to die in a hospital. She wanted to live her final days within the comfort of her homestead which she had struggled so hard in life to maintain.

Her hospital stay was difficult. Her heart was so wholly damaged that it limited the blood supply to her brain, and this caused her to be confused and very upset. She often could not comprehend where she was and what had happened to her. However, as she recovered her strength, her sense of reality returned. By the time she was able to return home, it seemed that her thinking had cleared up considerably.

She remained physically weak, though, and it was beginning to look like, even with her visiting nurse and the help of her friends, she would not be able to cope with the difficulties of living at home. Yet, in those last three weeks of her life, she was very happy. She felt at peace in her cozy, familiar surroundings, and she also had the time to make a final contact with many of her friends.

It seems strange to be going into the holidays without her. In years past I remember her always (in her own words) "trying to struggle" to cook a holiday meal which always included a huge vat of her mashed potatoes. I think that is the image I will always have of her--plowing into a huge mixing bowl of potatoes with her eggbeater!

In recent years, she was always fretting about how and if she was going to be able to buy her holiday gifts, and if they'd be good enough! In essence, she was still "trying to struggle". That's mom! She will be missed.

My mother’s own words, not mine. That phrase seems to sum up ebb and flow of her life force.

Cecilia was born in Twining, Michigan on November 13, 1913. Her mother, born Katherine Cico in Trencin, Czechoslovakia [Slovakia], came to America alone when she was 14 years old, not able to speak a single word of English. Here she met and married Peter Jandrasits, himself a recent immigrant from Austria's Burgenland province. In their life together Katherine and Peter bore three children, Pauline, Catherine, and Cecilia. However, their time together would be short. Peter was taken in a flu epidemic when my mother was 3 years old.

After Peter’s death, the family moved to Chicago, Illinois were my grandmother, Katherine, opened a small fruit and grocery market in the center of Chicago’s Slovak community. This is where my mother and her sisters grew up.

Times were rough and they were dirt poor, not benefiting much from the booming economy of the 1920’s. For months, the family would survive eating nothing but peanut butter (the 1920’s version of Government Cheese). The three children would do odd jobs to earn extra pennies. My mother would carry buckets of coal upstairs for the other tenants in their apartment building.

One of the tenants was a local vaudevillian named Effie Barry. Young Cecilia would spend many afternoons with her listening to stories of the stage and her travels. She seemed to develop a special bond with this woman, and no doubt a little of Miss Barry’s talent rubbed off on her as evidenced by the fact that my mother made an appearance on the stage herself. This happened when her sisters goaded her, at the age of four, into going on stage in a vaudeville theater amateur contest. She sang a tune called My Rubber Dolly and was rewarded for her performance with a dime. Her sisters promptly relieved her of her new found wealth.

Later that same year, tragedy once again visited the family when the oldest sister, Pauline, was stricken with infantile paralysis, polio. She wasn’t as severely afflicted many, but the disease did cripple her legs and cause her a lifelong disability.

One Summer my grandmother hired out little Cecilia as a housekeeper to a wealthy suburban family. She was very young, and the couple to whom she was attached were without children. She was to stay with them during the week and do chores, then return home on the weekends. After a time, her employers began to form an affection for her and she for them. One weekend my mother innocently told my grandmother that she’d like to live with the folks she worked for. That did it! That was the end of her career as a live in servant. My grandmother never allowed her to return to the couple’s home.

Another childhood incident comes to mind. My mother related once that she befriended a large German Shepherd dog when she was little and enticed it to follow her home. However, once the animal was in their apartment, it commenced to terrorize the children with it’s barking and growling until their mother returned home and vanquished the animal expelling it from their dwelling.

Somehow the family survived the economic hardships of the era, the tragedies of daily living and even an apartment fire in which crippled Pauline almost lost her life as she, on her crutches, tried to rescue the family’s pet parakeet.

Cecilia grew up and attended a Chicago area business college. She used her newly acquired skills to land a job in the accounting department at Montgomery Wards as a comptomotor operator. A comptomotor is a nightmarish mechanical version of a pocket calculator which weights about a half a ton and consists of about a half million cogs, wheels, levers, and gears that spin and slide under an incomprehensible panel of numeric keys--be very glad that these are no longer with us.

At some point during this time period she met and married her first husband, Norman LeRoy, a local band leader who I am told gave Lawrence Welk a run for the money in the local ballroom market.

After a respectable period of time she became pregnant with what would have been her first child had complications not set in. Most of the details of the event have escaped me, but the misfortune culminated in the bowels of a Catholic hospital where doctors were forced to abort the fetus to save my mother’s life. The event is memorable, because of the misguided nuns whom staffed the facility at the time. They seemed to consider it their mission to point out to Cecilia what an evil person she was for having caused their God-fearing facility to perform an abortion. Their point was that her Catholic duty was to die with the remains of her stillborn child still inside her.

Ah, the blessings that religion can bring during the trials of life.

Her marriage to LeRoy faltered after this tragedy and before long, she was on her own again. After a while, she returned to school to study commercial art. It was at this juncture that she was pursued and her heart was captured by my father, Louis Langhi, a machinist and engineer in the coil spring manufacturing business.

Being Catholic she had intended to live her life alone since the church forbade a second marriage, but the ardor of my father’s advances eventually won her over. They were wed in a civil ceremony and their union was blessed by an enlightened Catholic priest who assured them that God would understand. About a year later on February 23rd, 1946, their first son was born, Louis Thomas Langhi.

During their union, my mother supported my father in his endeavor to build his own business. He started with a few used pieces of equipment and built upon this until he had a thriving concern. It was during this startup period that I was born. Although I no longer use my given name, it was Lawrence Jerome, born September 7, 1951.

The sad truth about my father was that as he became successful, his affections began to wander. The two of them stayed together for thirteen years as my mother weathered the insults of their stormy relationship, but in the end her perseverance and trust were misplaced. My father wanted a new life untethered from the responsibilities of wife and family.

Here is where success in the material world pays off. If you are a successful business man and a fixture in the local community, you might find yourself on good terms with the local judiciary. There’s no doubt about it. If you want to divorce yourself from your family, it helps if the local judge is your golfing buddy.

In 1960, this Captain of Industry was "burdened" with a paltry $75 per month child support payment, as my mother was once again faced with life on her own, this time saddled with the responsibility of raising two children.

And somehow she managed.

You have to admire her buoyancy! Once again she pulled through. After a series of dead-end jobs while trying to fend off the wolves, her skills on the good old comptomotor eventually lead her to a position with the Los Angeles School Board, the last bastion of comptometry in a rapidly modernizing world. With a few well-placed lies about her age on the application form, she was able to procure not only employment, but her retirement at age sixty-eight. Beyond that, she wrested a dozen good years out for herself before her passing at the grand old age of eighty, two months before her eight-first birthday.

Thank you again for visiting My Dead Mother’s Homepage and participating in her immortality. To celebrate one person’s life, enriches us all. I hope in your life and in the lives of those close to you that you find much to celebrate.