“You Can Change Your Story”: How I Coped With the Loss of My Mother

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Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show, including yours. Send them to OurAmericanStories.com. They’re some of our favorites. And up next, a story from California about love, loss, and coming to terms with grief. Here’s David Leabelle with his story.

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Speaker 2: My name is David Lebelle. I’m primarily a teacher and a photographer, and have been for the last fifty years. I started in high school when I was a junior. In high school, I was probably the kid most likely to end up in prison. In fact, I think some kids probably wrote that in a yearbook for me because I came from a difficult family, and I wasn’t a good student, and I hated school. And so, I, I stayed away from school. I did school as much as I could, and then eventually they caught me. A truant officer caught me, I think, as a junior, and then I had to, I had to go to school, had to go to night school in order to, to even graduate from high school. When I, I used to walk to the halls of the high school when I was a junior, and I would see these photographs on the walls, and I thought, ‘Boy, that’s what I’d like to do.’ And then eventually, when they asked—when they took me to the truant officer, took me to school—and they asked me, ‘You know, how do we keep you in school?’ I said, ‘Well, I’d like to take photography.’ I think that would really be something that would center me. And he said, ‘You can’t do it.’ Basically, he said, ‘You know, there’s a, there’s a waiting list of three hundred kids. You have to be a good student, and you’re not. And, uh, so we’re not gonna let you in.’ And then what I’d learned forty years later, when I was talking to my high school photography, to keep my high school photo teacher one night, he said, ‘You know, had it not been for your mother, you know, you would have never been in that photo class.’ And I said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He said, ‘Your mother came to me by night and begged me to let you in the photography class because she was so worried about you, worried that you were really going down the wrong path and that you were going to be in trouble.’ So, I, you know, I mean, that’s very humbling when you realize that, because it did change my life, and I ended up being pretty good in photography. And so she’s the one that believed in me. She’s the one that certainly was my advocate many times, had it not been for her. And I’ll give one quick, one quick example. When I was a senior. You know, we didn’t have any money. I was a senior. You had to have a ten-dollar craft card to be able to take the photo class, and I didn’t have ten dollars. My mother went to my dad, and she asked him, you know, said that she needed the ten dollars, and he kind of reacted badly, like, ‘What do you need ten dollars for? What are you gonna—I mean, what’s he gonna do with photograph, anyway? What’s that going to do in his life?’ And so she advocated for me and said, ‘You know, I think that he is going to do something. I think this is something that, that was going to be a lot of potential.’ So, she was—again, she stood up for me. She—I mean, basically, she was my matrix. I mean, people need that in their life. You know, in every family there’s usually, there’s usually one pillar, and sometimes it’s the mother, sometimes it’s the father. If you’re really blessed, it could be both of them. My father, bless his heart, tried to do well, but he wasn’t. He wasn’t a great father. He struggled with a lot of things. My mother was—when she was in high school, she met my father, and my father was a handsome guy, rode a motorcycle, and, I get, whatever it was, there was an attraction. And so she got married and then she had five children. That became her life. And it was a burden. I mean, it was, it was a financial burden, it was an emotional burden. My mother was, I think, always sad, always a dreamer, wishing that we had a better house, that she had a better kitchen, that we had more money, that we, that there was more stability in the family. She always, she always dreamed that, and I think she just pretty much lived her life in pain, which always was painful to me. You know, she went through high school; she could type very fast, probably had a great career in something; and then married the dreamer, my dad, who is, so it kind of came to a screeching halt. But she was always, all the thing I remember about her, or anything, is she would read to me a lot growing up, even when I was fifteen. I would—we would drive, and she would read, read books to me. You know, read ‘The Wind in the Willows,’ read, you know, ‘Whether the Red Fern Grows.’ She’s the only one that really played baseball with me. I mean, she would pitch to me out there in the, on the rocky field, and I wanted to be a baseball player, so she would get out there and pitch to me. And, you know, I mean, we did a lot of things together, but I wish I was kinder to her. I’m trying to think. I was seventeen. A friend of mine named Randy Miller. He dared me one day to run away to go to Missouri. I took the dare, so I took my mother’s car, which was a Primus station wagon, and we had it out. I had two dollars with me. We had it out from Missouri on a Saturday, and we made it. It was iceife and gas. We had people help us. And it’s that, isn’t south as a credible story. Well, the long story short is, it broke my mother’s heart. And I didn’t even realize until really in the last year or two. How devastating that must have been for her, because I was closer to it than probably anybody else. Not that she wasn’t close to my brothers and sister. She was. She was loving, and she caring, but we had a special relationship. I just—the one person that I felt like I could talk to and trust. And so, when I still basically stole her car, she’s afraid from my life. She doesn’t know what’s happened to me, and we’re driving across in the window of winter, and then I remember when we finally got home. We were gone about two weeks; we finally got home. The look on her face haunts me to this day. It was a combination of relief, of contempt for what I did, of anger, but above all, there was just disappointment. I disappointed her, and that—I wish they just would have beat me with a stick rather than it was so disappointing to look at her eyes. But she—one thing about her is that she saw, ‘Yeah, I was pretty reckless and wild,’ but she knew that I had a good heart. And so she—I mean, I mean, she was my comfort, and so losing her as a high school senior was pretty tough. And it’s not something that you ever forget, and it’s something that forever shapes who you are and how you interact with others.

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Speaker 1: And you’re listening to David LaBelle tell the story of his mom. And my goodness, how he must have felt bringing that car home! And we’ve all been there—disappointed our parents or loved ones. And you don’t need to get yelled at. You’ve already beaten yourself up enough. But what a feeling that is! When we come back, more of the story of David Leabelle and his mom, here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the great American stories we tell and love America like we do, we’re asking you to become a part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly gift of seventeen dollars and seventy-six cents is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters.

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Speaker 2: Go to Our

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Speaker 1: AmericanStories.com now and go to the donate button and help us keep the great American stories coming. That’s OurAmericanStories.com. And we’re back with Our American Stories and David Labelle’s story. When we last left off, David was telling us about his mother—a woman with a lot of sadness in her life, but whom he truly loved. He also mentioned how he wished he was kinder to her because she passed away young when David was a mere senior in high school in a terrible flood. Let’s continue with the story.

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Speaker 2: It had been raining a lot. Ventre County had a lot of rain, and so much so that my mother and I had a conversation. We read in the newspaper about eight Boy Scouts who died while trying to cross the river on a giant caterpillar, and we said, ‘Guy, what, what if got that bad here? What would we do, you know?’ And within five days, the same that happened to us. In five days, the creeks kept swelling, swelling, and on this particular night, it was, it was Friday night. The creek was, it was so deep and so fast, and it was tearing up houses and tearing up all kinds of stuff. Well, that, that night, about, you know, ten or eleven o’clock, my dad came in, and they went to bed. And then about five in the morning, my brother wakes us up, and he says, ‘Look outside!’ It was just getting daylight, and the cars were moving, and there was water all around the house. Everything was starting to move. He couldn’t stop, and my dad had a Power Wagon, and all said, ‘It’s going down the river.’ And eventually we were able to get everybody on top of the roof of the house. And I was still inside trying to call flood control, trying to call anybody to get us help. And actually, I was on the phone with a friend, and she said, ‘Ah, you are right,’ and I said, ‘I don’t, I don’t know.’ I said, ‘We’re a really desperate situation here.’ And right then, the back door broke open, and all the water came through, and I went out with it, and was able to get pulled on the roof, and we were on that roof for, I don’t know, four or five hours. It’s a freezing rain. I mean, it’s probably thirty-three degrees. It’s just rain is beating you in its eyes, and we’re frozen, and it’s cold, and all you—you have five hours to think about what the end of your life’s going to be. It’s not like, ‘Wow, I almost hit the curb, and boy, while I saw my life.’ No, I hadn’t. I saw my life flies for me in over hours, and pray to God that I would be saved, that we’d all be saved. You know, bargaining and doing anything to try it, because you know you’re gonna die. And it’s like that: you get this terrible cottony feeding in your mouth because you know this is the end. I mean, there’s just was not a way out of it. And I’m pretty good at looking for ways out of things. There wasn’t a way out of it. So we waited and waited, and then eventually we knew the house was going to break up, and we’re all going to get chucked in the river. And there’s no way you could swim in that. There’s nobody could swim in that. So I kept pacing the roof and tell him, trying to tell my family. I said, ‘You know, when this thing, when this roof breaks, it’s going to go toward the main current, and it’s going to bounce off, and it’s going to go to shallower water for a couple of minutes here.’ And when that happens, we have to jump as far towards the heels as we can. That’s the only chance we’re going to have. So eventually we heard the walls crash, and everybody was like, ‘Oh my gosh, here we go!’ The roof starts down the river, and it did just as I had predicted, because I watched sticks in the creek all my life. I jumped as far out as I could, and I actually—you couldn’t see it—but there was gravel under the water. I hit gravel and I was able to stand up. And I look back, and nobody else had jumped, and here goes the roof down the river. I mean, there’s no way they’re going to survive this, and so I’m helpless to watch this. And then a big sycamore tree comes rolling down and crashes into the thing and knocks everybody off, and people are hanging under the tree. Part of the roof pins my sister against the tree. My mother tries to get to her. She’s like, hanging onto the tree. Tries to get to my sister. My brother tries to get to my sister to freeer. They eventually pulled a piece of the, of the wall away from her enough, and she bump passed out, basically, and my brother grabbed her. My mother lost her hold, and so my last image was watching my mother, you know, sitting backwards, slapping the water and screaming, and that’s where she disappeared. That’s a really hard last image, you know, for anybody, particularly somebody who was, who, you know, who you loved that much. We never found her. We looked, and then about—it might have been five or six years, or eight years after the fact—a car rolled over the side of the hill up the Arna’s Grade, which was about two or three miles from our house. And, well, when it rolled over, it unearthed a skeleton, and the skeleton was, you know, only a few feet from the highway, which means even someone was thrown out of a car, somebody—they don’t know what—but why that skeleton was there. And so for a while it was presumed that that skeleton was the skeleton of my mother. And if that was the case, which was really troubling… It meant that she survived the water and somehow had climbed that seventy-five or one hundred feet up the side of this hill and almost made it to the highway before she died. That could have happened. So I got to thinking about that over and over and think, ‘Oh, my, what if that’s her? What if that’s what happened? What if she did climb up to that hill? What if she was so beaten and stripped and disoriented that she didn’t know what she was doing?’ And what if somebody, you know—she could have amnesia. ‘What if somebody picked her up and helped her?’ She didn’t know she was at this point. And so that became a very remote possibility. And I know it’s remote. As remote as that is, that possibility gives you something to kind of build on it. And so from that point on, after I was given the news, I started putting a story together. And I realized, through the course of writing it—over twenty-five years, writing it off and on—that something really incredible happens: is that when you’re working on a story, particularly when you get into the fiction part of it, as long as you’re working on the story, those characters are real, and they’re alive. And it was when I finished the story that it really got me. I finished the story on Christmas Day, and I was working out of Starbucks on this upper—they had this kind of a balcony I was working out of—it is there a lot. And can’t, can’t knowhow when I finished writing. Then on Christmas Day, I sat there and just wept because it’s, it… Really, it really struck me then that this is fiction. She’s not alive. This is—I made this up. But until then, I see you sort of—you’re kind of living on false hope. And I know it’s like, mentally, you know that, you know, that the chances of her being gone are, are great, and that she’s not alive. But that’s the, uh, that’s the miracle of fiction when you write it: is that those people can live forever, you know. I worked in a program in Ohio. It’s called the Athens Photo Project, and what we do is to use photography in the arts to really, to kind of help stabilize people, you know, to help them get over their, their stories. And one of the things you learn about that, you know, and when you work with these groups—this group—is that you would tell them, ‘You know, you can change your story.’ Just because you’re a drug audict doesn’t mean you have to be a drug anymore. Just because you were abused as a child, it doesn’t mean you have to live that abuse. You can change your story. And you think about: that’s what I’m doing, is I’m changing my story. I’m changing the ending of what I think happened to what I wish could happen—an ending that I can live with, that I can have peace with, you know, instead of always having to live in the past. I don’t always have to be the suffering child. I don’t always have to be the, you know, as my wife says, ‘the kid with no lunch money.’ I don’t always have to be those things. So, just as those, you know, in mental health recovery—how we use photography in the arts for them to change their story and to kind of stabilize them and balance their lives. And I’ve been able to do the same thing: self-therapy. You know, I didn’t go to a therapist. You know, writing in my photography was therapy. All that is what makes me who I am today.

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Speaker 1: And a special thanks to Monty on the production of that piece, and his special thanks to David Leabelle—his book, ‘Bridges and Angels: The Story of Ruth.’ Get it on Amazon.com or the usual suspects. And there’s so much in this story that most of us can relate to. And my goodness, that last image—being his mother slapping and screaming in the raging flood and never seeing her again—well, that’s not something that happens to most of us. ‘You can change your story.’ That’s what David Leabelle closed with. ‘I don’t have to always be the suffering child.’ ‘I don’t have to always be the kid without money.’ David Labelle’s story, his grief story, and how he rebounded, here on Our American Stories.