The living-room wall phone rang. I picked up and heard Mom’s voice on the other end. I think she said she had something to ask me. I remember being momentarily concerned.

But what she said next made me smile. She announced that she and Ray Falgout planned to marry, and she wanted my blessing. I chuckled and said she didn’t need my permission.

She described Ray as “a Cajun, just like us,” which made me guffaw out loud. That struck me as truly hilarious, since our family almost never mentioned our French roots while I was growing up, and our parents intentionally didn’t teach us to speak the language.

This was 2001, about three years after my dad’s passing. Ray’s wife had passed a year or so before, as I recall. Mom and Ray had become acquainted through mutual friends, and they’d become friends over a mutual love of dancing at regular “old folks” dances at a Thibodaux dancehall.

Ray got on the phone next to pledge how he would take care of Mom and love her. I told him I was happy for him and Mom.

Both continued dancing long after they married, until infirmity stopped them.

We laid Mom to rest on Aug. 18, 2026, two months after celebrating her 96th birthday at my sister’s house in Labadieville, La.

At the time of her birthday, Mom had been living at my sister Angela’s house for more than a year because she’d become mostly incapable of caring for herself. But she still managed to shuffle, with the aid of her walker, from her bedroom to Angela’s kitchen and her living-room rocking chair, where she’d sit most of the time.

Mom was my first teacher. I remember her guiding me through workbooks that helped me learn the alphabet, numbers, words and writing. I could read when I was four and was prepared for first grade without the benefit of kindergarten. She encouraged my reading by supplying books of all kinds. I developed my love of newspapers and distrust of politicians from her.

She always supported me and rarely questioned my decisions and choices in life, though I’m certain she had doubts and concerns.

Mom had made a valiant effort to remain independent, staying in her house in Thibodaux for years after Ray’s death in 2020. But her worsening macular degeneration, growing inability to remember to take her medications and increased physical frailty from not eating more than a bite or two made moving her in with Angela the best course. Finally, in July, Angela, my brother Keith and I made the decision to put Mom on home hospice. I’m truly thankful for Angela’s love and caring during Mom’s last weeks of life.

I last saw Mom in early August, after the hospice care nurses recommended she be transferred to a hospital bed, start using oxygen and prescribed morphine to ease her pain. Her appearance – emaciated, struggling to breathe and zoning in and out – alarmed me. I couldn’t align the person who barely recognized me with my image of the vibrant, sharp-witted woman I called a human Timex, because she “took a licking and kept on ticking.”

In truth, I expected her to outlive me, her oldest child.

She was a survivor. Mom had a double mastectomy while in her 50s and survived colon cancer in her 80s. She sustained a concussion and fractured orbital in the mid-2010s when her Ray fell while climbing the steps to Angela’s front porch. Mom had been holding on to him from behind to stabilize him because his balance had diminished. Ray died in 2020 after an extended stay in a nursing home, during which Mom visited him almost every day.

Pauline Shirley Boudreaux was born in 1930, the second youngest of nine siblings. Her father, Luke, worked on Cedar Grove Plantation just north of Labadieville. Her mother, Julie, kept the family fed with the chickens and vegetable garden in the little house next to the railroad tracks.

Mom and my dad, Lawrence Albarado Sr., married the same year she graduated high school, 1947. A Navy veteran of World War II, Dad was seven years older. I came along in 1950. Dad worked as an electrician at the Caldwell Sugars mill on Laurel Grove plantation just north of Thibodaux. After an industrial accident left him unable to work for months in the mid-1960s, Mom got a job at what was then Nicholls State College, as a cafeteria line worker at first then as a cashier in the cafeteria. She retired in 2001.

I remember her telling stories – sometimes funny, sometimes amazing – about students who ate in the cafeteria, especially about the antics of student athletes who dined in a separate area.

Mom also served as an election poll worker for years. I like to think she did it out of a sense of civic duty, but I’m sure the little pay she received helped the family finances after Dad was laid off from the shipyard where he’d worked since I was in college.

Mom could be mean, but she loved her children. She possessed a bright wit, a wicked sense of humor and a keen knowledge of the world.

What I cherish most is the holiday family get-togethers – crawfish boils on Good Friday or Easter, gumbo and tarte a bouille at Thanksgiving, and a feast at Christmas along with presents for everyone – where we three children, our spouses and the grandchildren would tell stories and laugh so hard we’d cry.

I miss my Mom.