Cleo’s Story
Dear Strong Woman,
I am the strong woman I am because of the strong women who raised me.
While they will each, at one point or another, serve as my muse for upcoming entries, it is only fitting that I start with the strongest among them. After all, it is her birthday.
Before I start, I have to make it known that no arrangement of words will do my grandmother's story justice. In fact, I've avoided attempting to type the words until just a few hours ago because I was afraid I wouldn't get it right.
But the strong women in my life didn't get that way because they weren't afraid of anything. Hell, the things they went through, if you weren't afraid you were just...stupid. They acknowledged that fear and told it to sit down, shut up, and enjoy the ride.
And for my Cleo, her ride was full of times where fear was quite present.
Raised in western Pennsylvania, Cleo Joan McClure escaped small town living by joining the Marine Corps. She found herself, for the first time, away from anything she had ever known, at a time when our country was still grappling with the idea of women in the armed forces. She found herself living in different parts of the country, and she found a man who could keep up with her dance moves. Once married, she found herself having babies. Lots of them.
Cleo wasn’t defined by the common domestic and strictly maternal roles most women carried at that time. Though undoubtedly a star in that department, she worked, too. Relying on others to take care of her just wasn’t her style, a trait that was passed on to her children, and later her children’s children. And thank goodness for that, because one day Cleo woke up to find herself alone…with four children…and a fifth on the way. Out of necessity, she packed up all that she had and traveled back to that small town from which she escaped not long ago. She had no choice but to move back into her parents’ cramped home and face their disappointment and sadness.
Though reluctant, she did what she needed to do for her children to have a sense of home. Cleo soldiered on, her spirit and spunk always intact, and she eventually found someone who was brave enough to take on not just her, but her whole army. Six became seven, and a few years later, seven became eight.
I can’t speak from experience just yet, but I imagine there’s nothing quite like the experience of raising children - especially that many children - to test just how strong you are. With grit and grace, Cleo stood by her kids through every cut, scrape, sporting event, final exam, and missed curfew. She celebrated their marriages and held their hands through divorces. She showered their children with love only a grandmother can give, and she disciplined them just as she did her own when they had too many toes out of line. (Thank you, Grandma.)
But it seemed as though God wasn’t done with her yet, and that, perhaps, her sudden breast cancer diagnosis in 2012 was meant to set off a chain reaction of events in our lives, not just hers.
It certainly did for me.
I won’t say much about the hard road she traveled in those final years, as that’s not where she’d want us to focus on now. What I remember most fondly of her last moments with us was that, even as she began to slip away, she remained herself through and through. By the time I made the 300 mile drive to the hospital after getting that “You better come home” phone call from my mother, her doctor was bracing us for that fact that she likely wouldn’t make it through the night. She heard him and decided she’d leave whenever she damn well pleased, which was a full eleven days later.
Even at the very end, our Cleo wasn’t going to let anyone tell her what she was going to do.
My intention is to stay true to myself in this journey jus as she was in the ultimate journey. I don’t know where Dear Strong Woman will lead, but I do know that as I take it one word at a time, I will do my best to write with courage as I navigate this world that broke open for me upon Cleo’s passing.
I can’t promise it’ll be pretty, but I can promise it’ll be real.
Thanks for being here.
