Local woman puts heartbreak on paper

ONEONTA — As she let her mother's ashes fly at her ancestral home in France, as she spun with the thin dust swirling around her, Marie Hegeman felt something she didn't expect so soon after her mother's death.

She felt free.

It's a feeling the Oneonta woman has captured in "The Journey Home," a story included in "Chocolate For a Woman's Heart." The new book, a Fireside Book published by Simon & Schuster, is the follow-up to the best-selling collection "Chocolate For a Woman's Soul."

It's also a story Hegeman has written for a novel she hopes will be published — a novel that at first draft is 800 pages.

And it's a story about a woman's 78-year journey from childhood in France to death in Oneonta from cancer, and of a woman's journey in half that time to understand what her mother's life meant to her.

"I think I have something to tell," Hegeman said from her Dietz Street office, where she's a therapist with APC & Associates. "It's about courage, about humor, about the fact that I think she won. She beat cancer despite the fact she died."

Hegeman's mother, born in France as Giselle Collot, came to the United States as a war bride in 1946 at age 27. At a dance for Allied soldiers she met Valentine Sindoni, a native of Sicily who lived in Schenectady before going to France for World War II.

The couple returned to Schenectady two months after their March 1946 wedding. They raised two boys and two girls.

"She was just a mom and a housewife," Hegeman said, "and I took her for granted the whole time I was growing up."

She began to appreciate her around the time Hegeman turned 40, in 1994, 20 years after her father died and left her mother a widow.

"We finally got to the point where we liked each other," she said. "We liked the same movies and the same food and the same books."

Those common interests included old MGM movie musicals and French food. "She would say, `Of my four children the others turned out Italian, and you turned out French,"' Hegeman said.

Just as Hegeman drew closer to her mother, cancer would take Giselle Sindoni away.

The diagnosis came Jan. 19, 1996. The woman who didn't smoke, didn't drink and ate salt-free and fat-free foods had a tumor in her liver.

From the start, Hegeman was struck by her mother's attitude. She asked her mother if her diagnosis made her cry. In her strong French accent she said it did, briefly.

"`But what's the sense?"' her mother said. "`I stop crying and the tumor's still there. So I might as well live."'

Hegeman said that was when she decided to write a book about her mother's battle.

"She had a wonderful sense of humor," Hegeman said, noting that her mother thought "cancer" was too ugly a word. "She named her tumor. She called him `Oscar."'

She came to Oneonta and spent her final six months with her daughter and her daughter's husband, Tom Hegeman, a lawyer in Oneonta. Marie Hegeman tried to use her skills as a therapist to help her mother deal with her illness.

She suggested that her mother visualize the tumor breaking apart, something she couldn't do. She gave her mother a lacquered box and asked her to imagine "Oscar" moving into the box. That she could do.

Hegeman found herself dealing with her mother as a client, with a hint of caring detachment but without the emotional connection of family. "Sometimes," she said, "that was the only way I could survive."

Her mother wouldn't admit she was dying — Hegeman said she planned to survive to see the year 2000 — until she was taken to Fox Hospital in Oneonta the night of Jan. 4, 1997.

"She said, `Marie, I think I'm dying,"' Hegeman said. "She looked disappointed, but not surprised."

As her mother was in the emergency room, her eyes drifted and she said she saw her sister, Roberte, who died in France a few years earlier.

"So I knew she was crossing over," Hegeman said. "I said, `Go meet her."'

In the early-morning hours Jan. 5, Hegeman, who had been with her mother for hours, curled up next to her on her emergency-room bed for a 20-minute nap. By the time she woke up, her mother had died.

But her story wasn't over.

Last May, the Hegemans went to France with the remains of Giselle Sindoni, who was cremated according to her wishes. They were heading to her mother's hometown of Troyes, in the Champagne region 90 minutes from Paris. It was a trip Hegeman dreaded.

"It was so final," she said. "It just seemed so awful. I just thought I would stand there and cry and cry and cry and cry. And I would come back home and just be a sobbing mess."

Hegeman described her feelings in her story.

"On the train, I am edgy, short-tempered," she wrote. "I hold the box containing her ashes, wrapped in a silk scarf she brought from France fifty years ago. Next to me is a city map of Troyes, my camera and extra film, and Kleenex. Lots of Kleenex."

Once she got to her mother's childhood home, a stone cottage at the end of a narrow street, her feelings changed. It was a sunlit spring day and the vegetation at the now-abandoned home was in full bloom. Hegeman took that as a sign from her mother to enjoy the moment.

She poked a hole in the bag containing her mother's ashes and let them fly out, swirling around her as she spun before they landed on the ground around her.

"I know she's there," Hegeman said, thinking back to that moment. "I can picture that any time."

So can her husband. "It was more powerful for my wife, but it was still a very emotional experience," Tom Hegeman said. "Sort of liberating, actually, in a way. I think we both were sort of dreading it, but once we got there it was a very happy experience."

They went to Paris and sprinkled more of Giselle Sindoni's ashes in the River Seine, and off the Eiffel Tower. They returned to the neighborhood where they were staying and ate in a restaurant they stumbled upon that day — Chez Giselle.

"We figured that was a sign from on high," Tom Hegeman said.

From that exultant moment in Troyes, Marie Hegeman began turning the corner with her grief.

"When the ashes flew away, it was like I was flying, too, and I was OK," she said. "I don't feel that daily heavy sadness or that awful sense of heaviness."

Still, she said, she misses her mother. She misses her on days like today, Marie Hegeman's birthday, when her mother would call each year at 9:15 a.m. — the time of Marie's birth.

Soon after returning to Oneonta, Hegeman finished the story of their trip to France. She had read "Chocolate For a Woman's Soul" and enjoyed the collection of stories by women for women, and sent her story to the book's editor, Kay Allenbaugh.

Hegeman expected a polite rejection letter. Allenbaugh told her the story was too long and would have to be cut by half, but she loved it.

"That gave me a lot of confidence," Hegeman said.

With her first published work under her belt, Hegeman will try for a second. She hopes to finish the book about her mother's final six months of life by the end of this year, and get it published by the year 2000.

She wants the book published in 2000 because that was the year her mother wanted so badly to see. They talked about spending New Year's Eve 1999 together — Giselle Sindoni, Marie and Tom Hegeman — with a bottle of Dom Perignon champagne from her mother's native land.

"I think," Marie Hegeman said, "we'll have it that day, anyway."