Judy Bowman is driving to Elmwood Cemetery in Detroit to visit her mother’s grave when we first speak on the phone. Even after her mom’s death, the collage artist is still tending to her.
Back at Bowman’s Romulus home, fancy paper with varying textures and designs crowd a table in her basement studio where fliers of art exhibits past cover the walls. A portrait of her mother greets us, sitting cozy with a gentle smirk, twinkle in her eye, and hair fashioned into two braids, holding a bouquet of flowers against a warm mustard background.
It’s July 22, her mother Mae Matthews’ birthday.
“Ma, you still playing with me!” Bowman says realizing that she had, by chance, scheduled an interview about her being her mom’s caregiver on her birthday. “I still feel her presence,” she says matter of factly and with a laugh.
Bowman is a mixed-media collage artist whose work reflects her time growing up on Detroit’s east side and the richness of the Black culture. She uses paper cutouts to re-create childhood memories like her mom and other relatives playing cards while she and her sister play on the couch in “Mom on Seneca.”
Bowman was her mom’s caregiver for the final four years of her life until she was moved to hospice where she died on November 22, 2022. She was 92 years old.
While Bowman and her mother didn’t have a particularly strained relationship growing up, they weren’t exactly best friends either. She didn’t expect being her caretaker to bring them closer, but she now sees it as a blessing that allowed her to get to know her mother as a human being.
Even though she had trouble walking, Mae was still energetic when she first moved into the first floor room in Bowman’s home. She would take her to church concerts, to the Eastern Market, flower shopping and out for ice cream. Mae would also attend Bowman’s art openings and back at home they’d spend their days playing cards and Connect 4.
“It’s very, very hard work, but you have to keep them involved and engaged in the outside world, not just [in the house],” she says. “They don’t want to feel like they’re a burden. My mom still wanted to feel like she was contributing to the house… Sometimes I’d give her little things to do, like shuck this corn, or bring her a pot and let her stir it up. I made sure she did the activities that she wanted to do. So when there was COVID and she couldn’t get to church, I brought the church to her and she would look at it on TV or Zoom.”
Bowman made the portrait of her mother sitting with flowers, “I Kissed a Boy and His Name Was Fred” in 2019 when her mother was 90 — two years before her death.
“I was sitting on the back porch with her and somehow we started talking about kisses,” Bowman remembers about the moment the piece was inspired by. “And I said, ‘Ma, who was your first kiss?’” Bowman mimics her mother’s voice, saying innocently, “She said, ‘I kissed a boy and his name was Fred.’ And her eyes went away. She was in that moment. I thought man, my father could have been Fred.”
Though they had a lot of good times, caring for her dying mother was challenging for Bowman mentally and emotionally. Sometimes she would get up in the wee hours of the night because Mae’s back itched terribly or her feet felt like they were on fire. And though Bowman tried to ease her pain, some sleepless nights her efforts were in vain and she broke down not knowing how to help. She remembers putting ice on her mom’s feet and feeling defeated when even that couldn’t cool them down.
Often, there was tension between the mother and daughter but Mae’s entire demeanor would change when Bowman’s husband Stan came in the room.
“I would come down the stairs and she would say, ‘Hi Judy,’” Bowman says in a low voice colored gray with annoyance. “And then he’ll come, [and she’d say] ‘Hi Stan,’” she says, elongating the “hi” like a high school girl flirting with her crush with rainbows shining behind her.
“She’d be flirting with my husband! One day she had the nerve to say, ‘Stan might be your husband but he my man,’” she says with a laugh.
Stan chimes in, “That’s because I took care of her. I did the cooking.”
Bowman’s brother and sister also came by to help though Bowman was the primary caretaker. She stresses that it’s important to have a community of people for support as it’s a tough thing for one person to handle alone.
Bowman didn’t think her mother appreciated that she was a working artist until she became her caregiver. Before then, she would just consider it as Bowman doing her “art stuff.”
“When she started living with us, she would see people coming in the house and walking out with art pieces,” Bowman says. “It really crystallized for her when one of my clients paid me in this big stack of crispy dollars, like two big blocks of money. So I showed her these two blocks of money and I said, ‘See Ma, I get paid for this!’ Then she started seeing different articles about me in the paper and it made complete sense. It was like I learned her and she learned me.”
Mae started to appear in more of Bowman’s work around 2019. Her piece “Mom’s Birthday Party” shows her family members gathered in the backyard of her Eastside childhood home for a celebration. In “Mom on Belle Isle,” Mae sits under a parasol in a dainty blue dress as her children play on the beach.
As Mae began to understand and appreciate her daughter’s career path as an artist, Bowman began to understand her mother as a human being. Bowman talks fast, excitedly reliving her time with her mom. She pulls out a book called, “Grandmother’s Journal,” which has interview questions to ask your loved one about their life to get to know them better, and another with photos of Facebook posts she made during her final years of life. It also has QR codes she can scan to hear her mother’s voice in videos of them singing and laughing together.
Bowman learned things she didn’t know about Mae, including that she was a cheerleader in high school and that she spent time in Harlem.
“When she came to live with me, that role of you’re my mama and I’m the child and I do everything you say, that kind of melted away,” Bowman says. “And I started seeing her as just another human being, who happened to be my mom. And I learned, oh you’re kinda cool. You’re alright. And if she had never come to live with me, I would have never thought of her that way. So it was truly a blessing.”
In the later stage of Mae’s life, Bowman had hospice nurses come by occasionally to help walk her through the stages of dying. When someone’s condition is not going to get better they are considered actively dying and imminent dying is when they are getting ready to pass away in the next few days or hours.
“I didn’t know that there were different stages of dying,” Bowman says. “I advise all caregivers to have hospice to help you through that transition because they explain things to you and they explain it in such a way that you’re not afraid. It’s just part of it. People die… At one point they said they were gonna start giving her morphine because she’s not gonna get better. It’s to help her relax and make her comfortable. It’s like comfort care and it allows you to come to terms with it.”
When death was drawing in closer, hospice nurses came to move Mae into a facility because she didn’t want to die in Bowman’s home.
“She felt that it would be too painful [for me] to look in that room knowing that she had passed away there,” Bowman says. “I didn’t mind if she died in the house. But after she did die, I’m glad that she didn’t die in the house… When I look in the room now, I see her in the bed or I see her looking at ‘Gunsmoke,’ or looking at ‘Andy Griffith.’ I don’t think I would want to look in there and say, that’s where Ma left earth.”
Some people believe that our loved ones who are actively dying choose when they want to leave their physical bodies and ascend to the spirit realm. Mae told Bowman when she was ready to go. She remembers because she wrote it down in her book.
“It was on Nov. 9,” Bowman says, flipping through the pages full of her mother’s memories, which also serves as a diary of caring for her. Finding the page she’s looking for, she reads, “‘Today, mom said in 10 days she is going to have a new name… And she said her old name will be gone.’ And then mom passed away on Nov. 22, at 3:38 a.m. — 12 days later.”
Her favorite memory of her mother, and the only one that makes her tear up, is one of her final moments in the house.
“It was late at night and I came down to scratch her back, and I was laying my head down on the bed while I was scratching her back,” Bowman remembers. “She had been moaning and in pain, then in a very clear voice, she said, ‘Judy, I know you’re tired.’ And I looked up at her and it was like her face was so smooth, it didn’t have any wrinkles on it… She was looking at me and I was looking at her, and it was like she was saying, thank you. That was the last thing she really said to me and the next day they came to take her to hospice.”
Till this day Bowman says she hasn’t cried about her mom passing away, because she feels that she is still in the house with her. And Mae is, both energetically and physically, as a large photo of her taken by local photographer Jeff Cancelosi at one of Bowman’s exhibit openings hangs over a mantle in the living room.
“I just wanted to show you this last thing before you go. Here’s Mom,” she says before we part ways. She gazes up at the photo with a gentle smile, the same twinkle in her eye that Mae has in “I Kissed a Boy and His Name was Fred.”
“I feel so blessed that I had that opportunity to spend that time with her and for her to know me,” she says. “It was truly her gift to me.”
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