Archive [April 2000]

Thanks to all of you. I have gotten literally tens of thousands of e-mail notes and letters of condolence after the passing of my mother on March 2.

Until her health took a turn, she was at one point a pretty popular fixture on my radio program and the TV program. Some of you — an indescribable number of you — actually drove to her home in Cape Girardeau, MO, and just dropped by to say hello. She welcomed you all in without any suspicion, without any fear, without any trepidation whatsoever — because she was Mildred Limbaugh, the eternal optimist. She never saw the bad side of anybody or any situation (which sometimes worried me).

On a trip home to see her over Mother’s Day, I noticed that she didn’t look well. My brother and I arranged a trip for her to the Mayo Clinic to find out exactly what was wrong. We thought she had some gastrointestinal problems which were causing her to lose weight. The last thing we expected was cancer.

They gave her two months to live, and were quite blunt about it. A young doctor at the clinic, looking at the results, said: “You’re terminal. You’ve got two months. Get things in order.”

She was given a number of options, as all cancer patients are. There was never an option for cure. There were just several approaches that might prolong the quality of her life. She took every occasion for treatment that she could, and never gave up on it. In fact, the early treatments of chemotherapy were amazingly successful. She had a great summer. She lived long beyond the prognosis of two months, and did so with tons of quality.

When my program became a success, she was as proud as I’ve ever seen her, and probably as happy. She immersed herself in the people in my audience who contacted her. It became her life to respond to them, to connect with them, and as such at times it was difficult to have a conversation with her about her. She wanted only to talk about those of you she had met and was corresponding with, people who had visited her. But during the last nine months, those conversations that I really wanted to have, son to mother, mother to son, apart from the trappings of my career, were able to take place.

My mother was born in Searcy, Arkansas on October 13, 1925, the exact day in the same year as Lady Margaret Thatcher — whom she eventually got to meet. She didn’t own a store-bought dress until she was 18. Her mother made all her clothes. In 1990 or ‘91, for her birthday, I brought her to New York and arranged a couple of days with a personal shopper at several New York department stores. She brought a friend with her, Mary Frances Kinder, who reported to me that my mother kept trying to find the “for sale” racks, which confounded the whole reason I had taken her to New York.

As a young girl growing up in the ‘20s and ‘30s through the Depression, my mother never dreamed she would live the life that she did. She never dreamed she’d get to know all the people she met. And it wasn’t the famous people she met that she focused on. It was you. She always credited me for making her life so fulfilling and memorable, but I always told her that was wrong, that had she not been who she was — and of course had my dad not been who he was — then I wouldn’t be who I am.

She was extremely brilliant, though she downplayed that. She had a tremendous sense of fun. She was a clown. She always had a saying, that I got my “sense” from my dad and my “nonsense” from her. But this notion was always in itself nonsense. She was a skilled bridge player, which means that she had mastered mathematics, especially in logic. She had a tremendous memory; once she heard your birthday she never forgot it. She was far more intelligent than she wanted to be perceived.

She never, ever saw a bad thing in people. She had no known enemies. She tried to live her life as close to sin-free as is humanly possible — though we all know that is humanly impossible. It was unstated, but I think she chose, as a way of living a sin-free life, the way she treated people. She never treated anybody with anything less than love, respect, and just plain old niceness.

During my life, my mother always told me that I was special. She really believed it, and went out of her way to make me feel that way — even during the seven times I was fired. I was always going to succeed, in her view. She went out of her way to instill in me this self-confidence, and it is because of her that I am imbued with it. So it is I who owe her, not the other way around.

My brother and I are who we are because of her and my father, and our lives have been enriched because of her devotion to us and the notions of family she had. She totally devoted her life to raising us. She totally devoted her life to making sure our lives were the best they could be, according to the influences and controls that she could muster. If you’re me and my brother, you simply thank God for having a quality person such as Mildred Limbaugh as your mother. You couldn’t do any better than that.