The conversation followed mass a few years ago on the steps of Old St. Patrick’s Church in the West Loop. My wife, Mary, and I were telling Rev. John Cusick how much we appreciated his homily that day.
“How’s your mother? Mary asked.
We found out she was in the hospital.
“The worst part is I can’t get any of the doctors to see her as anybody but an old person,” Cusick said. “She might be in her 90s, but she is still going strong.”
Florence Cusick improved and left the hospital. One of her rehabilitation doctors concluded in a conference meeting that Florence should not drive a car anymore.
“This guy didn’t have a clue,” Cusick recalled the other day. “He just didn’t know my mother.”
But lots of other people knew better.
I met her a few times through the years, always delighting in her energy. So it didn’t surprise anyone, Mary or myself included, to know that Florence drove right by that doctor’s office in the following week. Her son John the Catholic priest was tempted to have her stop and look the guy up.
Instead, Florence Cusick kept right on driving. She didn’t stop much before Jan. 22, when she died comfortably of respiratory illness at her Northwest Side home.
“She only drove two places in her final year,” Cusick said during his mother’s funeral two days later. “She went to the local Jewel and here to this church [Our Lady, Mother of the Church, on West Lawrence Avenue]. This was her table.”
What a thing, to say mass at your mom’s funeral. Most of us would find it difficult enough to stand long enough to say a few words.
“I wish you could have been there,” Cusick said to begin the homily, referring to a quiet meal some 30 years ago.
Then he took us there. It was late 1971. Cusick’s father had died weeks earlier. The son was having dinner with his mother, 67, which “was a lot of miles back then.”
Florence made a simple announcement, one from the heart.
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“John, he’s not coming back,” Florence said. “I have to get on with my life.”
The declaration resounded during a “great ride” for 30 years, Cusick said.
About six to eight months after her husband’s death, Florence phoned her son with another announcement.
“Dad always dreamed about going to Europe,” she said. “We’re going. Let’s sell the house and take some of the money for the trip.”
The mother and son “covered 11 countries in 22 days.”
“It began a sense of adventure and excitement about life that never stopped for my mother,” Cusick said. “She had an unbelievable ability to keep moving forward. She never once said to me, `I can’t do things anymore.'”
For her 97th birthday, Cusick picked up his mom, then proposed driving to a local medical-supplies store to buy a “special chair.”
“It was actually a wheelchair, but I just couldn’t say the word,” Cusick said. “She could, but I couldn’t.”
When they arrived at the store, Florence told her son to go inside for the chair.
She would wait in the car.
Cusick bought the wheelchair, folding it up in the trunk.
“Then, instead of a long drive, we went shopping,” Cusick said. “We went to Woodfield [the original huge shopping mall, in Schaumburg].
“John, this is wonderful,” Florence Cusick said on her 97th birthday. “I can go to all of the stores again.”
“So many of us would say, `Look at me now, in a wheelchair, see what I have lost now,'” Cusick said.
Last summer Florence spent some time in the hospital with respiratory problems.
A few days after her discharge, Cusick stopped by her Northwest Side home to check on her.
He found her digging up dirt in the garden with an oxygen tank by her side.
“The lesson is don’t wallow in the past,” Cusick said. “Get rid of it. Keep your eye on where you are going.”
No matter your age or condition, Cusick urges all of us to keep moving forward, just like his mother and mentor.
“If your body begins to break down, keep going,” he said near the end of his homily. “If you need someone to push you, let them. People cooked for my mom, took her to the beauty parlor and the track. She loved it all.”
Like mother, like son, it turns out.
Two days after Florence Cusick’s funeral, her son the priest talked to interns at Loyola Medical Center in Maywood.
It’s not hard to imagine the stories he told about adult children and their aging parents or what he said about how old is too old for proper medical care.