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Mother's birthday was today. Or maybe yesterday. I'm not sure. I have never forgotten the date of my father's birthday--January 13. But I'm confused about my mother's birthday except I recall it as an even number. I don't think it is March 26. I'm torn between March 24 and March 28.

For many years my siblings and I never knew the exact year of her birth. She would refuse to tell us. We knew that my father was born in 1925, but my mother would only intimate that it might have been 1932. There were aunts on both sides of the family who dismissed that year as untrue. She was older they would insist.

It wasn't until late in life that she confessed the truth. She was born in 1930, which means she is 90 as she begins her tenth decade, her health steady. She lives immured in a small house that resembles a cottage in the country embellished by the same flowers whose ancestors bloomed when I was a child.

I am the oldest of the eight siblings. I was born December 29, 1950, which means she was 20-years-old at my birth. Between my birthday and March 18, 1956, she would have five children. My parents were Irish, my dad a Murphy, my mom a Sullivan. Besides eating lots of potatoes, they were part of a tradition that had lots of children.

The confusion over her age represents the pride she possesses. We never left the house for mass or other events unless we were properly attired. My father, a salesman who worked for various companies, never stepped outside unless he was attired in a suit and tie. My mother, because her husband and the children came first, would not go to mass. She had an image of herself that her clothes in those tougher years economically couldn't finance.

There was a time during a rough period when my father was unemployed. In our three-bedroom rented home we had a picnic table in the front room and mattresses in the bedrooms, but there were crisply ironed curtains in the front windows and both the front and back yards were perfectly manicured.

My mother taught us that appearances were never deceiving; they were essential.

I suppose my mother reveled in appearing younger than she was when Jacqueline Kennedy was her role model. With the First Lady as her guiding star, it is not hard to deduce the reason she believed that she didn't have the proper raiment to go to church.

As she aged her perspective changed. She admitted her age. Nobody would accept that she could be that old. If there were a 90-and-over world beauty contest, I have no doubts that she would win, not only for her comeliness highlighted by the blond steaks in her brown hair, but for her intelligence as well. She would delight in answering questions with her charm and wit. Nobody has loved playing Password or watching Jeopardy more than she.

But that is only the surface of her unyielding pride. All her children graduated from college and have done well. She graduated from college when she was 50 after taking classes on a part-time basis for years. She accepted a teaching position at the parochial school that graduated all her children. She became the finest educator in California--if you don't believe me, ask her--with outfits to match. Nobody dressed more fashionably at St. Stanislaus Catholic School than my mother.

My father's passing devastated her. They had been married 62 years. They experienced a second spring in their marriage that bordered on eternal. But her love for life and the flowers blooming each spring have been her salvation. My youngest brother and two sisters reside near her in Modesto, the city--70 miles south of Sacramento and 90 miles east of San Francisco--where we settled when I was 14 and enrolled at St. Stanislaus as an eighth-grader.

My brother checks on her every day and walks her Pomeranian Ruthie, my mother's dearest companion and a pet she shared with my father. She doesn't interact with anyone except select family members. Coronavirus is a ravenous monster whose shadow stalks her every day with evil designs on her existence.

Despite the loss of my father, there is a pride that refuses to yield to the inevitable. She has never  mentioned that she is counting the days until she rejoins him on the other side. On the contrary, she says, "If you hear that I have died, it's not because I wanted to."