13 Nov 1924 – 8 Aug 2010
2nd-Great-Granddaughter of Philip Cardon and Martha Marie Tourn
Great-Granddaughter of Louis Philippe Cardon and Susette Stalé
Granddaughter of Louis Paul Cardon and Ellen Clymena Sanders
Daughter of Lucille Cardon and Ether Matthews
Whenever I meet any of Mama’s friends, they usually start by telling me that she was a wonderful lady and then they often add that she changed their lives. Mama just did that without even thinking about it. Usually she wouldn’t even remember whatever life-changing thing she had said or done. She just did what she did because it was in her heart to reach out to people and animals when they hurt.
Mama changed my life too. Years ago, my mother gave me an award for “Willingness to try“. It was just a Xerox copy of an award that she signed and dated but I always hang it near my desk. I am one of those people who doesn’t back down from trying something new… and I’m not always successful at my new things. As long as I have my award though, I remember that my Mama is proud of me just for having the courage to try and then I can pick up and go forward again.
Mama had lots of courage and she tried new things too. She was among the first adults to go back to college in the 60s. While working her way through college to become a nurse, she met and married a quadriplegic (a man who couldn’t move from the neck down). Lee was the love of her life. I remember going to visit her and seeing her come home from work to take a nap before brushing his teeth etc. and getting him ready for bed. I was amazed that she found the strength to do all that at her age. If I had known then what I know now about the arthritis in her back, I would have been even more amazed!
Lee taught Mama to use tools and to build things around the house. Together they started a resource center for quadriplegics and they demonstrated in Long Beach, California, to get handicapped access to public buildings because Lee had been annoyed when he couldn‘t get his wheelchair up some stairs to see a play (two strong men ended up carrying him and his chair up the stairs). Once Lee had come into our lives, everyone in the family became ashamed to ever say, “I can’t”. When he died, people gathered outside the crematorium and talked about all the things that this paralyzed man had done to help them. He was an amazing man who had been well-suited to my amazing mother.
One of the jobs that Mama had while living in California was as a nurse in a clinic in Watts. It made an impression on me when she told me that after the Watts riots, when that area was so very dangerous to white people, social workers and nurses were safe because the people needed them. When I moved to Dallas and became a hospice nurse, my agency loved me because there wasn’t any area that scared me. Mama was right! Any time that I was in an area that the family considered dangerous, they would walk me to my car to make sure that I would come back the next day! That, and my uniform, and God, always kept me safe.
Mama was very skilled at needlepoint and sculpturing. She liked to travel and to go to the Elderhostel programs. One winter she dusted dinosaur bones, another time she learned basket weaving, another time she participated in a group that repaired an abandoned cemetery. She traveled to other countries whenever she got the chance but she also traveled around the U.S. a lot.
Mama was always annoyed by how much time and money Grandma had spent on genealogy work but, after Grandma died, Mama decided to spruce up Grandma’s grammar in the genealogy stories (Grandma only went to the 6th grade). As she did so, Mama became hooked on genealogy just like Grandma. It turned into a major passion for her.
Mama was never boring. She liked everything from bluegrass to classical music and she was well-read on a variety of topics. She came from a long line of peasant farmers. I was the first in her line to get a college education, at Mama’s insistence, but Mama was the first to get a Masters Degree.
Mama really had other things to do besides grow old, so she fought it tooth and nail. For her, old age was mostly about a crippling arthritis that caused her to lose about 6 inches – and some hearing problems. A healthy lifestyle had left her with a strong heart and lungs, so her hospice diagnosis was only a “failure to thrive“ over the last few months – and she fought that for all she was worth!
It seems appropriate to me that my mother wanted to be cremated and her ashes thrown off the coast of California. The reason for that is that the ocean floor is sublimating under California and Mama wants to come back some day as a volcano! That’s her plan! Even in death, she’s not boring! It’s a big coast but, personally, I expect her ashes to go looking for Lee’s ashes because he is out there too.
-by Ginger, a daughter