My Mom, Sophie Ball

As I sat vigil by my Mom’s bedside over her last days, I often thought about her life and how she had live it.

My Mom as a young child

She was born in the Philippines in 1920. Her mother was Filipino. Her father was an American soldier who fall in love with my grandmother and the islands. Mom was one of six children.

I wasn’t told much about her childhood but I do know she graduated from Far Eastern University.

Mom lived her entire life as it came at her and beat tremendous odds that were thrown in her way.

By the time, World War II arrived on the shores of the Philippines Island, she was a divorcee with a baby. Bill, my brother, was just about nine months old. In that time and in a land that was and is still predominately Catholic, she had to have faced some type of pressure to stay in a marriage that wasn’t right for her and the discrimination of being a divorced Catholic. But I know that those weren’t the pressing hurtles that had to be overcome.

With her mother and her sisters, they managed to hide from the Japanese during the beginnings of the war until finally going into Manila. There she and her sister, Eleanor, crossed checkpoints with bags of rice that hid American dollars to help earn money for the rest of family.

After the war, she met my father. He was British by birth but had become an American naturalized citizen. My Dad had come to the Philippines 1944 with the military before joining the War Damaged Commission which helped rebuild the islands.

Our family, Dad, Mom, Bill, Sue and I

After a few years of marriage, my sister, Sue, was born. Dad re-joined the military and my parents started moving. They lived in Guam for a couple of years before returning to the Philippines. During that time, I was born. But it wasn’t long before they were making their home in Japan. Then it was on to Thailand, Egypt, India, and back to Thailand. Our second time in Thailand, Dad was actually stationed in Vietnam as it was the 60’s. After his tour was over, they moved to Laos before finally settling down in Palm Springs, California for retirement in the early 70s.

Each time we moved, there were different cultures to learn and different historic places to see, different people to get to know, different protocols within each office and what was require of the “wife”. It was never the same but in all that moving, I never heard my Mom complained. Instead she embraced the change, made new friends, dealt with whatever protocol, went to see whatever historical places near-by and enjoyed herself–always the “lady” in her very mannerisms.

I remember big parties they went to and threw…Shriner’s dinners in Japan, Texas BBQs in our backyard in Thailand, summer dancing on our roof in Cairo that in the distance you could hear the Nile River with the Pyramids visible on the horizon and duck shoots with Prince Phillip of England at a Maharaja’s palace just passed the Taj Mahal.

Besides being the lady, Mom also learned to adapt to Dad’s love of the outdoors and adventure. They were camping trips along the Red Sea as well as deep sea fishing, hunting and fishing trips in India, and more hunting trips in Thailand. Two of the hunting trips in Thailand resulted in my Dad finding an abandon baby bear and a gibbon. We did bottle feed the bear until it got too big and had to be placed in a zoo. The gibbon we kept until it passed away in Cairo.  And we mustn’t forget the 45 day “cruise” on a freighter from Penang to Genoa or the simple fishing trip in Kashmir.

Once they retired to Palm Springs, the parties and socializing didn’t stop. My Mom loved to entertain. They were sit down dinners for 20+ people with her fine china laid out, most with some form of different cultural food theme on them. She would serve Japanese, Indian, Filipino and British fare.

But being retired didn’t stop the traveling, Mom did a dozen or more cruises around the world, many to places she hadn’t visited when they lived overseas. In fact, she has seen all but one of the seven wonders of the world as well as all the continents except for Antarctica.

Over the course of her life, she first learnt to to drive in a military Jeep (no automatic then), ride a horse, ride a bicycle, bait a hook, and field dress a deer.

Mom at her 90th birthday party

Mom definitely lived her life by the rules of her time as well as by her own. She died on February  7, 2011 just shy of her 91st birthday. Though I am sad to have lost her, I know she had a life few people can even imagine to have lived!