Loretta Mae Waite
My mother, Loretta M. Waite, a talented occupational therapist and wonderful human being, died of complications from a perforated bowel at the age of 72 on May 16, 2023 at her home in Towson Maryland. We spent a truly wonderful Mother’s Day together in Philadelphia just before she died. I will always cherish those incredible memories with my mom.
The 5th of 6 children, Loretta was born into a hard working immigrant family at the St. Joseph’s Hospital in Dickinson ND, on July 21, 1950 to Mike Olienyk and Josephine Olienyk. Loretta was the product of two Ukrainian immigrant families, the Olienyk’s and Basaraba’s (mother’s maiden name), who came over to America in 1907 and 1904 respectively. These families both took part in the twilight years of the Homestead Act. They found plots of land in North Dakota and set out to improve the land by building structures, planting crops, etc. and began to eke out a living. This was marginal land on the edge of the badlands or in them, as the best plots were already taken, but they were (and are) hardy people and they made a go of it. After living and working the land for five years, they filed the proper documents with the government and received the deed to 160 acres (320 for a couple if they played their cards right). Loretta’s grandmother, Baba, would tell them stories about going into town on a horse drawn wagon, picture Little House on the Prairie. The Basaraba’s lived in a dugout sod house, made of mud and straw bricks and a dirt floor. My mother was proud of her Ukrainian heritage and her ancestors’ grit and determination to make a life for themselves. Both of her parents spoke Ukrainian, but sadly they did not teach the children. At that time, the thing to do was to hide your immigrant status and try to be as American as possible.
My mom, “Reddie”, and her siblings, Michael, Mary Jane, John, Kathy, and Deborah, grew up in Belfield, ND, mercifully not a dugout sod house by this point (pictured below). The nickname Reddie came about because Kathy couldn’t pronounce Loretta when she was young and it stuck. So much so that my mom’s name in her own iPhone was Reddie. During the summers they would play in the “crick” that ran alongside and in the back of the family home. They’d play war games, hide and seek, catch tadpoles and frogs and build forts/trench systems on the island in the middle of the crick. The neighborhood kids would also come over to the house and they’d play badminton, croquet, baseball, capture the flag, red rover, football, etc. all together in the big front yard. In the savage North Dakota winter, the kids would make snowmen in the front yard and snow forts when it wasn’t -40F. They’d go sledding on North Hill and South Hill and take shovels out to the ol’ damn dam (the conservation dam) and go ice skating. Despite the shovels, they’d still hit buried and frozen cat tails and wipe out spectacularly. They didn’t have any modern winter gear with synthetic fibers during these adventures. Instead, they’d be in a pair of jeans, cotton clothes which would get wet, and some kind of cotton parka that would get even more wet. Wet. Everything was wet by the end of the day and the walk back was bitterly cold.
Deborah “Deb”, was the youngest sibling by several years, and she and my mom had a close bond because my mom would spend time with her and play with her. When Deb was six and my mom was twelve, their Dad brought home these massive rubber tires and set them up against the house in the back by the drying line. The two of them would climb them and pretend they were elephants. Much later in adulthood, Deb got my mom this gorgeous little elephant pendant to commemorate their time on the “elephants” when they were little.
It wasn’t all fun and games though, between butchering chickens as a family (and eating the heads and feat), going to church (Roman Catholic…), and working at their dad’s various businesses, there were certainly struggles. Missing mass on Sunday was a mortal sin and to be avoided at all cost. The children had to pray the rosary in the evenings at home, kneeling straight up (no settling back on your heels!), on the hard linoleum floor. Her parents had switched from their Eastern Orthodox and Ukrainian catholic churches to Roman catholic to blend into the community. The church played a large, but mostly negative role in my mom’s life. She never felt at home in the dogmatic and close minded Catholic Church and searched for something that fit her particularly loving and inclusive mindset all of her life. She purposefully did not raise me in any religious tradition and I am grateful everyday for this, for the ability to make up my own mind.
My mother’s father, Mike, my grandfather, was quite impressive. From nothing, he built several buildings and businesses, including the post office, a bar, and the movie theater in town. My mom and her siblings would be tasked with keeping the theater clean, serving concessions and the registers, and whatever else needed doing. The theater was open all the time, rain or shine, no matter the season. My grandfather may have been impressive, but he was also largely absent from my mom’s life. My grandmother, Josephine, or grandma Joe, was a force of nature and was always busy keeping up the home and taking care of the other children. My mom said to me that she felt like a lost child and she always had a particularly strong connection with her eldest sister Mary, who would babysit her and acted as mother to her in many respects since Josephine didn’t have time to give her the attention she needed.
My mom never stepped out of line during her childhood, out of fear of reprisals from her mother and generally, a shy, fade-into-the-background demeanor. However, she did get a job as a waitress at the local truck stop instead of working at the theater at some point, which really freaked out her mom. My mom was a hostess and server at various restaurants during her journey across the midwest in her 20s and 30s. She started this journey at Mary College (now University of Mary) in Bismarck because it was halfway between Belfield and Fargo, far enough from home but not so far that she couldn’t go home if she needed to. She only stayed at Mary College for a year before transferring to Wahpeton. She didn’t leave because of the religiosity at Mary College, but at this point she wasn’t going to church and wasn’t a practicing Catholic. She did a short 14-month program at Wahpeton and started working at Easterseals (link to their site) during this time. Easterseals is a national organization that helps people with disabilities, from children with developmental disabilities to veterans with brain trauma. Her boss during her internship at Easterseals was Rhoda P Earhart, a wonderful and impressive woman who my mom looked up to her entire life. My mom was one of Rhoda’s first students and her very first hire. The following is a statement from Rhoda about my mom.
I remember when Loretta and I first met. As director of the Easter Seal Mobile Therapy Unit in Fargo, North Dakota, I had been asked to provide internships for occupational therapy students from several states. Loretta was the first, a new graduate from the COTA program in Wahpeton.
When Loretta showed up at my office that first day, I was immediately impressed with her sweet smile, sparkling eyes, and ability to connect easily with others. As I observed her during the 2-month internship, I realized that she related intuitively to patients and families in an authentic, therapeutic way. That skill is not easily taught, rather learned from a role model or mentor.
After Loretta’s internship was completed, I hired her as my first staff member. By the time I closed the program after 11 years to enter private practice, we had added several more therapists and students, working in homes, schools, and other medical agencies.
I always think of Loretta when I see plants in someone’s home. She had green plants everywhere in her apartment. Loretta had so much empathy for others and learned to set boundaries with her patients by clearly delineating the roles of patient/professional/friend. She was committed to her work and a generous heart that knew the importance of love. She also bravely faced her struggles with clinical depression.
Rhoda P Earheart
There wasn’t much Occupational Therapy education out there at this time, but my mom wanted to soak up as much as she could by reading books and getting as much hands-on training as she could. She also started taking classes at North Dakota State University (NDSU) in Fargo ND through Easterseals. While learning how to be an occupational therapist in Fargo, she met another life-long friend, Steve Harris. Steve was 19 and my mom was 24 when they met and they maintained this friendship for the rest of her life. My mom was one of the first people Steve came out to and he never regretted trusting her with that. It wasn’t easy to be gay in North Dakota, and while it still isn’t, it was worse back then. She didn’t care, she cared about who you were and not what your sexual preferences were. Steve said my mom was mature for her age even at 24 and always seemed older than she was. They lived a block away from each other and they’d chat and hangout before Steve would go out on the town and then they’d hangout and debrief after. She liked to be a part of other people’s lives, but didn’t necessarily want to go get wild herself.
Fargo was the moment in her life where she began to learn how to trust herself. She was on her own, across the state from her parents, siblings in different places so she had to build self-reliance. She was in Fargo for six or seven years and a lot happened during this time. She was doing well with Easterseals and dove in head first with all her will and focus. She wanted to learn as much as she could about it and this drive ended up producing one of the best OTs you could ever ask for. Outside of work, she experienced her first and short-lived marriage. He was the single father of one of the kids she was treating and was reportedly quite charming, so much so that he convinced her to become a Mormon. She quickly realized this marriage was a mistake and got out of it, but it took serious courage for her to do so. Her mother saw divorce as a sin and thought this meant Loretta was in trouble with God. She accepted responsibility for it though and never tried to shy away from the consequences or place blame elsewhere. Steve Harris remembered my mom holding the phone away from her ear while her mother yelled at her. She avoided her mother for a while after the divorce. She realized she needed to understand more about who she was before she got into another relationship and this period was a very insightful time for her. Steve said she was always a work in progress and had to work very hard to get to be the wonderful person she eventually became. She blossomed a little bit at a time, not all at once.
Her next love was a man named Terry, who she met in Fargo through one of Steve’s sisters. This was about four years after her divorce and the two of them had a very close relationship. Loretta prioritized her career at this point though, and she moved to Colorado for a series of OT-internships, each about 6 months, and eventually ended up in Denver where she worked for the National Jewish Hospital as an OT. There still wasn’t much OT related training out there in the 70s and 80s, so she had to go abroad to find training opportunities. She also worked as a waitress at several restaurants to help pay her way. Steve also moved to Denver and they had wonderful summers together. They’d go on trips to Steve’s family lakehouse and trips to places like Fort Ransom and little festivals around them. The pair were thick as thieves, drinking wine and sunning in the local parks with baby oil and water. They’d lay out for hours and get baked, which was the thing to do at the time according to Steve. They had a blast in Denver, it was the biggest city either of them had ever lived in and they took full advantage by going to concerts (including Red Rocks), clubs, and theaters. She learned a lot more about what she liked here in Denver, she loved drag shows, dancing at discos, and smoking pot (to my great surprise!). Terry also ended up moving to Denever and they picked up their relationship. Ultimately, Loretta and Terry didn’t last, he wanted to marry and start a family and she wasn’t ready for that. They really cared for each other, but she didn’t want to hold him back any longer and set him free. After this relationship ended, my mom pursued some more casual relationships and even ended up living with a guy in his van for a while and road tripping in said van down to Florida to hangout with other van people! I loved hearing about her experiments and early adulthood, it’s a side of my mother I didn’t and couldn’t see.
Loretta’s next move saw her moving to Davenport, Iowa. She moved out there for a promotion, not really in a monetary sense, but she was now a supervisor. She wasn’t prepared for what being a supervisor meant, and hated the experience. She never wanted to be a supervisor again, she just wanted to be an OT and not manage people. Steve went out to visit her over New Years one year and she was miserable in Iowa, Steve said he could see it immediately on her face. She was in Iowa for just about two years. During this time, she flew out to Maryland for her sister Deb’s 1st wedding. Her brother, Michael, was also living in Maryland while he enjoyed Navy retirement and worked for the NSA. She knew she needed a change so she decided to move from Iowa to Maryland and never left.
After deciding to stay in Maryland to be close to two of her siblings, my mom enrolled in an Occupational Therapy (OT) program at Towson University. When she graduated from Towson, she took a job at Rosewood, a now closed state-run institution for individuals with developmental disabilities, where she met my dad, Steve Waite. As I wrote in my Dad’s Life Story (link), he fell for her quickly (no surprise there!) but it took him a year to convince her to go out with him. She was a rule-follower and didn’t want to date a coworker, but she left Rosewood after a year and my dad managed to charm her into marrying him three years later. I’ve scanned and attached a love letter he wrote to her below (scan letter and upload letter). I have dozens of similar letters he wrote to her during their time dating. I may be biased, but I think she made the right decision in finally going out with my dad. Steve Harris said the same thing, he said there was no doubt my dad was the right guy for her. She knew so much more about herself by the time they met and she was now ready to settle down and start a family.
My parents got married on X date in Y place and soon after bought their first home together, where I spent the first half of my childhood. This house was in Baltimore City proper, in a neighborhood called Hamilton (below is a painting done by my paternal grandfather, Charley Waite). My parents had me X time later, when my mom was nearly 42 years old. When she had me, my mom wanted me to experience grandparents. Consequently, many of my early family vacations were to the small North Dakota town of Belfield to see her parents. She put all the resentment and stuff she was harboring against her mother, Josephine, away during this time and grandma Joe was thrilled to have grand babies. Loretta and Josephine never really had any kind of confrontation after I was born. Both seemed happy to bury the hatchet. Steve says that Loretta was calm in those years, very in control of herself, and knew what she was doing. She was very worried about being a good mother, because in her mind her mother was not a good mother and she didn’t want to repeat the mistakes that alienated her from her parents. Being the subject of such mothering, I can report that she absolutely succeeded in not alienating me or repressing/restricting me. She was a wonderful mother.
As a family, we always loved the Hamilton house. My mom brought her beloved cat, Chaz, with her from Iowa and later adopted two more cats, Ubu and Hamilton. My dad was severely allergic to cats when he met my mom, but received experimental allergy shots from Johns Hopkins so that he could live with them. My mom’s love of cats is where I get mine from and I remember my mom taking me down the block to our neighbors house to pick out a kitten of my own when I was four years old. I remember picking out little Joey (named after my best friend at the time) and riding on my mom’s back while she carried the kitten in front of her because I was scared of a dog on our walk back.
I remember playing make-believe games with my mom during this time. We’d play Joey and Eric. I’d be Joey and she’d play Eric, which is absurd looking back at it, but she always let me play out my creative ideas, even the weird ones! I played a lot of games with my dad, but it was my mom who planted and nurtured my love of reading. I’ll never forget going to a local library with her and picking out a book that I wanted her to read to me. I don’t remember the book itself, but I can picture us inside of the bookstore. At some point, we discovered the Drizzt Do’Urdan books, written by R.A. Salvatore. These books were part of the larger Forgotten Realms universe, which is the lore behind Dungeons and Dragons. My mom read a dozen plus Drizzt books to me during my early childhood. I’d play Age of Empires on the computer, draw, paint Warhammer miniatures, or just sit and listen. I loved it when my mom read to me and I will always cherish those memories with her. I still have the Drizzt books and hope to be able to read them to my children someday. On her own she’d never have read books like this, but she loved that I loved them so much and was almost always willing to read to me when I asked.
My mom enrolled me in a private school early in my childhood, as early as two in fact. I remember snippets of day-care at two or three at the Waldorf School of Baltimore. The Waldorf School was a big part of both my life and my mom’s life and I am grateful to her for this. This school was all about nurturing young minds and had an eclectic philosophy that combined the major world religions and paganism with modern spirituality. Very hippy-dippy. I truly believe that this school and education system was instrumental in shaping me into the person I am today. I learned how to knit, crochet, wood work, went on nature walks, drew, painted, played outside, read books, and celebrated Christian holidays, Jewish holidays, pagan rituals (dancing around the MayPole), and Kwanza.
After 4th grade, it became too expensive to keep me in Waldorf, and I remember my mom telling me I would have to visit some new schools and pick one of them for 5th grade. I was shy and honestly a bit sheltered at Waldorf, so I was terrified at this prospect. The first and only school I visited was a Catholic school (I know…) called Sacred Heart of Mary and I said yes, I’ll go here because I didn’t want to have to visit another one. My mom was worried about how I would adjust academically to a more traditional curriculum after hearing some traumatic stories from other post-Waldorf parents, so I started off the school year in the Pride Program, which was a remedial program for kids who struggled with math and English. About halfway through the year I graduated from Pride and started doing the regular lessons with most of my fellow classmates. My mom was so happy and proud of me when I graduated from that program. I only lasted a year in that school, Catholicism wasn’t for my mother or for me. My mom came to the rescue again though, it’s a theme we’ll see again later in my life. I was able to transfer to the Baltimore County school system because she was now an OT in that school system. I met lifelong friends at that school, Dumbarton Middle School, and learned many important lessons about life, friendship, and who I was. It altered the course of my life for the better.
My mom loved that I formed my own opinions about things quite early in my life. She just had to go along with whatever she was told to do so much during her childhood that she found it difficult to form her own opinions and become her own person. She’d question me, and if my reasoning was sound, she’d accept my opinion. She trusted me, trusted my mind, from an early age and while I did things she wouldn’t have liked or been proud of (thinking about drinking and partying in high school), I think her trust was well founded. This trust couldn’t have been easy for her, it required her to let me spread my wings and fly from the proverbial nest, with all the anxiety that entails. However, she never stifled me or smothered me and let me discover who I really was. I think this trust is what made our transition to an adult-child/parent relationship so smooth.
My mom worked at least one job the entirety of my life. Usually, she had more than one. She’d have her main, full-time position at a school and then would work weekends or summers elsewhere, sometimes at hospitals, like Johns Hopkins Bayview. When she started going back to work after I was born she found child care in our neighborhood and would drop me off at Elise Corso’s house when I was about one. Elise had four boys, the youngest of which was Joey (now Joe), who was four years older than me, but in spite of that age difference we became great friends and he was my best friend for many of those young years. My mom worked at Battle Monument, a school within the Baltimore County Public School (BCPS) system for children with developmental disabilities. I remember visiting Battle Monument with my mom and being really affected by the students, many of which had severe disabilities. Her career was one of service, as was my father’s, and it’s something I don’t think I’d be strong enough to handle. Many of the children my mom worked with would never “graduate” from these schools or programs and many would never be independent. She spent her days helping these children learn how to tie their shoes, hold pencils, write, etc. and then dealt with the parent’s, who sometimes had unrealistic expectations for their child’s progress. She also went back to school in-between all these jobs and earned enough graduate credits to jump a couple pay brackets. She was a hard worker and a great role model for me. She also generally brought in more than my dad annually, a great lesson in gender equality. I always thought, of course women should work and who cares who makes more, look at my mom.
Throughout her journey around the country and her career, Loretta made numerous friends and touched many lives along the way. She was an introvert and shy by nature, but had so many girlfriends in the area that even after my dad’s death, she didn’t want to move to be closer to her sister Deb in California or brother John in Colorado because she had such a robust network of people here in Maryland. After she died, my uncle John and I found a library book she was reading, titled “How to make adult friends”, which we both found ironic given her deep network of friends. She always doubted herself and her impact on other people, but the outpouring of sympathy and support I received from her friends after she died is testament to her connections. My mom was part of two book clubs, went on bike rides with friends and attended concerts and parties with yet more friends. She befriended people on our block of Joppa road, including one of her best friends, Helen and her husband Gani (insert last names and check spelling). She also befriended Jane, who worked at the local safeway and the two became quite close. They had plans to go to DC to see the cherry blossoms a couple of days after her untimely death. I cannot make an exhaustive list of her friendships, but they were many and my mom approached each one with authenticity and genuine care and affection.
Loretta eventually transferred from Battle Monument, which was located in the questionable area of Dundalk MD, to the Ridge Ruxton school when we moved out to Towson MD in 2007. Ridge Ruxton was about a mile from our new house on Joppa road and she loved the shorter commute. She’d bike, walk, or drive depending on the weather and how she was feeling. This was the school she ultimately retired at in June of 2018 at the age of 67. She kept working the next several years as a long-term substitute but when the COVID pandemic started she really struggled taking her lessons online. This struggle came from both her technologic ineptitude and the hands-on nature of occupational therapy. I encouraged her to retire fully in June of 2020, when the pandemic lockdowns were in full effect and just after the death of her husband and my father, Steve.
My mom’s retirement came at a good time for the family. My dad had injured his back a couple months before her retirement party in June of 2018 and when he went into GBMC to seek relief for this back pain he uncovered a titanic iceberg of health issues, all stemming from his alcoholism (see my memorial website for my dad for that story – link to). He was in and out of the hospital frequently during this time and going to and from appointments constantly. He also had trouble driving due to the intense back pain, caused by fractured vertebrae, so my mom took him to these appointments. They were an inseparable team for the rest of his life. She expressed to me how grateful she was that she had the time to take care of Steve, but at the same time, it wasn’t easy for her. She was his primary caregiver from 2018 to his death in April 2020. I remember talking to her about how the chronic stress from waiting on him, giving him sponge baths, and putting him first constantly for years weighed on her. I vividly remember a conversation we had towards the end of my dad’s life where she vented about these difficulties and then felt guilt about venting. We talked through it and validated her feelings and came to the conclusion that feeling this way didn’t diminish her love for Steve or her willingness to keep caring for him, but it was really cathartic to get these feelings out in the open and acknowledge them.
I’ll never forget my mom calling me at 12:35pm on Thursday April 30th, 2020 to tearfully tell me that my dad had been transferred to hospice care and only had hours to live. She was devastated and so was I. I left Philadelphia immediately and drove down to Baltimore to be with her and visit Steve in the hospital. I will always be extremely grateful to the University of Maryland’s hospital for letting us be in the room with him as the COVID pandemic had prevented many other families in other states from being with their loved ones as they died. My mom and I stayed by his bedside in that ICU room from 3pm until he breathed his last breath at approximately 9:18 pm that night. We took turns sobbing, holding each other, and caring for my father. He couldn’t communicate anymore by the time we arrived and we were grateful he didn’t know what was happening at the end. We took turns dipping a popsicle-like sponge in juice and putting it in his mouth where he’d reflexively suck on them. I couldn’t have survived that day without my mom and her loving presence. When he died, we felt lost together, but I knew we had to get home and took the lead finding the car and driving us home, which she was grateful for. She trusted me to get us home after this crushing loss. We became immeasurably closer after this experience and we both made a serious effort to talk more and see each other more. In the end, I was able to accept my mom’s death as quickly as I did because we conducted our relationship without regrets. There was no, I wish we talked more… or I wish I told her this… because we talked often, about everything, and told each other we loved one another all the time. I even let her kiss me on the lips whenever she went in for it. The time to fix your relationships isn’t tomorrow, it is today.
My mom was a kind, loving, and caring person. She was a splendid mother and I couldn’t have asked for more or better. I will miss her Loretta-isms dearly, ‘ope’, ‘yah yah yah’, and the rare but welcome ‘ohhh shit!’ that she always felt a little guilty about. Her kindness and thoughtfulness made a big impression on me early and either through nature or nurture, I am proud to continue these traditions. She knew that kindness cost you nothing and wanted those around her to be happy, even if it was a transient interaction. She was always willing to change her mind if presented with new evidence, an admirable trait more of us need to cultivate. The world is dimmer without her light, but her memory lives on in those of us that loved her and were touched by her. She was proud of my academic success and journey and when I graduate with my PhD I will dedicate it to both her and my father, my two biggest supporters and cheerleaders. I remember waking up on May 18, 2023 at my friends house in Baltimore with the crystal clear feeling that I would live a life both her and my dad would be proud of, that I will be happy and successful because that is what they would have wanted for me. I won’t let them or myself down because I have their memories with me at all times, guiding and buoying me. I love and miss you mom, and I always will. She is survived by me, her son, her brother John, sister Deborah, brother-in-law Marvin, nephews Max, Mike, Patrick, Jim, Jason, and Josh, and niece Donna. Along with numerous cousins and beyond in the extended Olienyk and Basaraba family trees (Glory to Ukraine!).
Remembering Loretta Waite 