Irene Flinn 1934 – 2024

My beautiful and amazing mother, Irene, has died. She had turned 90 on the 4^th of July this year. She passed away just after midnight on the first day of autumn.

If you read my third book, Burnt Toast Makes You Sing Good, you know all about my mother. She was the lead character, in part because she’s the one who fed me the family history while drinking wine in our backyard gazebo for months. It followed her life growing up as a child in the Great Depression to meeting my dad at a roller rink in Lansing, Mich. and their life together afterward.

Their story was a blend of adventure and a more traditional Midwest existence. They once sold everything and drove Route 66 from the Midwest to San Francisco so my dad could work in his brother’s pizza restaurant. Later, they returned to Michigan to raise their young family on a small farm. The book details my mom’s experiences killing chickens, putting up hundreds of cans of produce every year and their financial struggles after a failed business. They impulsively bought a house on Anna Maria Island while on a week-long vacation in 1976. Two years later, they moved there after my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He died a couple years afterward at age 50.

I’m sharing this news a bit late for a complex set of reasons. To start, four days after she passed, Hurricane Helene hit and flooded Anna Maria Island. Almost everything inside our home of 22 years was destroyed. Two weeks later, a second hurricane named Milton – my father’s name – ripped through the island again, wiping out my dad’s favorite place on the island – the Rod N Reel Pier.

I suppose that I have been so stung by the loss of my mom and the overwhelming task overhauling our house that I just haven’t had time, or the emotional strength to put in writing that she’s actually gone. Mike and I are staying at the last home she lived in, just over the bridge from the island. We both expect her to be up, sitting in her chair, ready for her coffee every single morning.

Right up until the end, my mom was happy, sharp as a tack and in good spirits. After being in and out of the hospital, she settled into a big, lovely room in serene, well-run rehab. She could see trees and birds and the occasional rabbit from her two big windows. Her beloved grand dog, our little Maddy, could stay with her all day. She adored the staffers plus the food was good. She was seemingly on the mend, and we expected her to go home in mid-October. Then, we got a call she passed away in her sleep.

In retrospect, I think she knew her time was coming. A couple days before she passed, she told me, “Listen, I’m 90 years old, I had a great life and I’m not afraid. I talked to your dad last night, and we’re going to be together.” We had a private burial service for her, on a sunny day between the hurricanes.

These photos are from mom’s 90th Birthday Party on July 4th — which also happened to be our 20th anniversary because Mike and I were married on her 70th birthday. Mike’s 60th birthday was the next day. They both got cakes.

Mom loved Mike right from the beginning, and not just because he was a fellow Cancerian. In 2003, we’d been dating in London and I asked him to come to the island to meet my family – a very big deal for a never married 36-year-old woman. I rented a house that looks like a small castle on Beach Avenue, and shortly after he arrived, I dropped Mike at the beach with mom and my then 11-year-old niece and left to pick up my close friends Cindy and Andy. I realized later how awkward that could have been. “Hey, meet my mom, here’s my niece, I’ll be back.”

I returned to see their dark silhouettes against the sunset, virtually alone on the beach, next to a large sandcastle. I could see a glow around the castle, and it turned out that it was luminescence, an odd bio phenomenon that makes seawater glow – the only time mom ever saw it, despite living on the island for 43 years. They’d pushed this shimmering water into the mote they dug around the castle, grabbed hands and were dancing around it.

It was my mom in her essence. Child-like, fun, loving the beach and so open and willing to embrace the moment without caring who was watching. Mike says he always heard that if you want to know what your wife will be like as she ages, meet her mother. Well, he was sold after that sunset.

When we got married on the same beach a year later, my mother stood next to me as my maid of honor, and Mike’s dad was his best man. She wore the cream dress she wore at my wedding to her 90^th birthday party this past July. Fittingly, she was buried in it.

Thorton Wilder wrote that the greatest tribute we can give to the dead is not grief but gratitude. I’m grateful for everything my mother taught me. She had endless optimism, she was kind, smart, pragmatic, strong and she had a great sense of humor.

Above all, she had a gift for always seeing things in a positive light. Maybe it was from being a child in the the Great Depression, but she often said she wasn’t a glass-is-half-full or a glass-as-half empty person – she was just happy to have a glass.

She was effusive with her praise. She made everyone feel good. “You are so beautiful!” “This is the BEST meal I’ve ever had!” “You have the most beautiful smile!” Whatever she told you, she meant it. When I told a friend she had passed, she mused, “I loved your mom. She always told me I had great upper body strength.”

This past year, I ended up as her primary caregiver along with Mike. For the first time, she needed 24/7 care, so we assembled a small crew that included Angie, her daytime caregiver, who became a close friend to her.

My father died when I was 13, and for years, it was just mom and I. Helen Reddy’s “Me and You Against the World” was our theme song. I didn’t marry until age 37 and never had children. Perhaps that’s why I developed such a tight bond with my mom as an adult. I spent virtually every Thanksgiving and Christmas with her, as my siblings got married and started spending those holidays with their own families and in-laws. We took vacations together. When I started teaching at Rancho La Puerta in 2009, I was allowed to bring a guest – she was my plus-one for more than a decade. She loved that place as much as I still do.

After I moved to London in 1999, I flew her and her second husband, Eddie, to visit me. When I learned Eddie was having surgery for a malignant brain tumor, I flew home from the UK. I was the only one with my mom during his six-hour surgery. Rather than sit in a drab waiting room, I took her to lunch at The Olive Garden, and then to a bakery to get him a big slice of cake so he’d have something to look forward to the next day.

Not long before Mike and I married, I bought the house on Anna Maria Island – just five blocks from her – to assure I’d always have a physical link to her, too. Mike had been incredibly close to his own mother, but like my dad, she died too young in 1995. He and mom became genuinely close, especially after his father died four years after we married. That their birthdays were a day apart didn’t feel like a coincidence.

Anyone who has cared for an elderly parent knows it’s a tough gig, but in the end, I’m grateful for all the time we got to spend with her. Whenever she was in the hospital or rehab, I always made sure she had a big slice of chocolate cake. Taking care of her at the end was the privilege of my life.

When my father died, my mom believed he could come visit us in the form of a white egret. Mom did have some offbeat beliefs, but on this one, she had the ancients to back her up. White egrets have long been considered a type of spiritual messenger. At seemingly well-timed moments in my life, a white egret has shown up in my yard or in my path – even in places where they aren’t usually found.

The first day we were allowed back on the island after Hurricane Helene, and learned our house had flooded with everyone else’s, Mike was outside in the debris-strewn yard. He was thinking of my mother when he saw two white egrets, a large one and smaller one. They both walked right up to him. He said he felt the larger one represented my dad, and the other, my mother. It was squawking, almost trying to talk.

A day or two later, a similar or perhaps the same pair came up to me and did the same thing – they both got so close, I could have touched them. This is uncommon behavior for egrets; they tend to be standoffish. We stood there, staring at each other, for minutes. Then, they turned, walked off together and flew off into the red sky of sunset.

Maybe I am crazy, but somehow, I knew it was my parents’ way of letting us know they were together, just as mom said they would be, and that everything will be fine.

I’ll never stop missing her. Rest in peace, mama.

Note: Mom and her husband, Eddie, were longtime supporters of the Anna Maria Island Turtle Watch program; they volunteered with the organization for years. If you’d like to make a memorial donation in her name, she would be thrilled.