April 6, 2018 at 1:53 p.m.
REFLECTION
Inspired by the Red Sox
My siblings, Tom, Jim and Ann, delivered eulogies at Mom's funeral Mass at Mater Christi parish in Albany. Jim touched on Mom's love of reading and devotion to her family. Ann and Tom spoke of how Mom's devout Catholic faith sustained her. Jim and Tom mentioned Mom's love of all things Irish and her sharp sense of humor.
What bonded her with me, her youngest child, was baseball and the Boston Red Sox.
Next to my own strong Catholic faith, baseball has served as a form of therapy and an escape - not only since Mom's death, but especially through the rocky times Mom and I endured following my father's untimely death in 1976.
Mom understood and appreciated my devotion to our national pastime. She also appreciated my devotion to Red Sox greats Carl "Yaz" Yastrzemski and Dwight "Dewey" Evans, who share the title of my all-time favorite Red Sox player.
Mom took me to my first baseball game at Fenway Park in 1978. She took me on my first trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown in 1990.
Mom admired how Carl Yastrzemski inspired me to "play in pain and produce in pain." She also appreciated how Yaz - unlike fellow Red Sox Hall of Famer Ted Williams, who was blessed with the God-given talent to hit a 95-mph fastball into the right-field seats at Fenway - had to work twice as hard and twice as long to become a Hall of Famer.
Mom related to how Yaz struggled with the loss of his son, Carl Michael Yastrzemski Jr., who died in 2004 at the age of 43 following complications from hip surgery.
In Dwight Evans, Mom appreciated how he and his wife, Susan, faced the challenges of caring for two sons with special needs. Tim and Justin Evans have neurofibromatosis (NF), a genetic disorder of the nervous system which causes tumors on the nerves.
As the parent of a child born with osteogenesis imperfecta brittle bone disease, Mom could relate all too well to the Evans' emotional roller-coaster of trips to hospitals - or, in my case, trips to the emergency room at St. Peter's Hospital, as well as hours of surgery. From 1975-83, I underwent a series of rodding operations at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York to reduce the severity of the fractures in my legs.
In contrast to Tim and Justin Evans, who have undergone surgeries only a short fly ball from where their father played at Fenway Park for 19 seasons, Mom and I were 150 miles from home. After Dad's death, we didn't have many visitors. I hated it. I was homesick, not to mention being a Red Sox fan in the heart of the Yankee universe.
However, through our combined faith and my devotion to our national pastime and two iconic Red Sox players, Mom and I managed to get through the surgeries and recovery.
Twenty-nine years after my last operation, family members took me to Fenway to see the Red Sox play the Yankees. I wanted to go in honor of its 100th anniversary season. Mom was too frail by this point to make the trip.
The real surprise came before the game: Jim popped out of a VIP area and said, "I just want to warn you: You are going to meet a former Red Sox player."
Shock is the best way to describe my reaction when I saw Dwight Evans. After I pulled myself together, I told Dewey what a surprise and honor it was to finally meet him. He spent about 15 minutes with us and was absolutely wonderful, signing several items, including an autographed baseball for Mom that I gave her on July 16, her last birthday.
I requested that Dewey sign the ball because on July 16, 1988, Mom and I, along with my aunt and uncle, had been at Fenway to see the Red Sox play the Kansas City Royals. Dewey hit a game-tying home run in the eighth inning, and the Red Sox went on to win. Each year after 1988, when Mom would gripe about her birthday, I would say, "No, today is the such-and-such anniversary of when Dewey gave you a birthday gift."
Mom was as thrilled to receive the ball as she was when Dewey hit his home run 24 years earlier.
At Mom's wake at Mater Christi parish, I put a photo of Dwight Evans signing her baseball in her casket, along with a birthday card I made for her with a picture on it of Dewey, circa 1988. I think of the picture and card as a demonstration of the bond that connected Mom with me: our shared love of baseball and the Red Sox.
Former Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti put it best when he wrote about baseball, "You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops." For those who knew Mom and for those of us who loved her, may the "memory of sunshine and high skies" be with us always.
(Ms. Hedderman was an intern at The Evangelist in 1993.)[[In-content Ad]]
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