for Betty Lou Kibbe, nee Kidwell, 20 July, 1929 to 16 October, 2009

As I flew west towards Omaha with my wife on 15 October, my brother and I still had a mother. Only a little over a day later, we wouldn’t; in fact, within 5 hours of landing we’d lose all of her but the waning rhythm of breath and pulse as she slipped into a coma that evening, lingering for about 21 hours before her improbably able heart finally failed. It is perhaps too melodramatic to say it was broken after the death of her husband of almost 50 years just over 4 months ago; but perhaps not.

There was little left of the woman who’d raised us when I walked into her room and kissed her forehead hello at the rehab center where she’d been on and off since falling 6 weeks before. But she was alert and fully there, and we shared an afternoon of voluble companionship before our role shifted to sitting vigil and talking in unnecessarily hushed tones as she ebbed. In the days that followed her death, two brothers who see rather less of each other than many would reminisce and go through pictures and work on rebuilding our image of our mother. Like putting flesh back on her by-then sub-80-pound frame, we set about redefining the twinkle in her eye and putting a spring back in her imagined step.

More in images and less in prose than for my father, here are snippets of her expansive life.

Born in Saint Louis in the Great Depression, upper-middle of six siblings (4 still living), she posed for this picture at age 2 before the family headed for some possibilities in California, ultimately resettling for good back in Saint Louis.

A slight but natural beauty, she had a career at Purina as a nationally-noted feed microscopist, which is an optically-armed industrial spy of sorts, divining the makeup of competitors’ feeds, mostly from gross examination by microscope (in those days before mass spectrometers and gas chromatographs).

While taking one of her sisters to visit that sister’s boyfriend in a mining operation in Colorado in 1957, she was fixed up by said boyfriend with his friend, the temporarily wayward engineer-to-be Jack Kibbe, and they were married the day after Christmas in 1959, seen dancing here at their reception in the house of her sister Peggy and husband John.

Family legend has my father off on a compulsory engineering-school graduation fishing trip when I was born — my mother caught a cab to the hospital when her waters broke, and I narrowly missed being born in the back seat. Jack had taken a job in the iron ore industry in Venezuela, went on ahead after I was born, and Betty traveled unaccompanied to Venezuela with 5-month-old me to join him there. She later bore a second son, Douglas, and raised her two boys in an expatriate community of Americans given to the living-large lifestyle of the 60’s; easily recognizable to their stateside counterparts but with the exotic tinge of the latin locale, forging a new city in a fledgling country of boundless natural beauty.

While in Venezuela Betty traveled extensively about the country with us, including on Jeep expeditions into the mostly-uncharted Gran Sabana jungles. She learned to golf, and even learned to fly, piloting a single engine, low-wing Piper Cherokee my parents co-owned with another couple. Here she’s on the Auyan Tepuy above Angel Falls with her mother, and more or less cheerfully enduring the ritual ablution in used engine oil after soloing in the Cessna behind her.

After leaving Venezuela (the second time and for good), they settled in Albuquerque, where their second house was nestled in the scenic foothills of the Sandia mountains.

From there they traveled to many places, including here for Tricia’s & my wedding

and Fiji, amongst many other fascinating and remote places (she and my dad are to the far right).

This last was taken shortly after my dad died as we were cleaning out their house for sale. We’d gotten her the roses, which here, I guess, served as a sort of stand-in for my dad in this family photo (that’s Suzanne with Charlie and Doug with Sam). She bravely left that house and the life they’d known and went to live in Omaha with Doug & Suzanne, but her roots were done growing and she never settled in. Near the end she told us to make sure to enjoy life.

We are who she raised us to be. We dearly love and miss you – ‘bye, Mom …