Today would have been my mother’s 80th birthday. She was born February 3, 1936 in New York City, which often surprises people because she was so much a Southerner. Her parents, Dr. James Elliott Scarborough (1906-1966) and Isabelle Wisell Scarborough (1909-1992), moved to Atlanta when Mom was very young. My grandfather was a doctor at what was then the Memorial Hospital for the Treatment of Cancer and Allied Diseases and is now Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. My grandmother was a nurse but left the hospital when my mother came along. The story in the family is that they were so sure that my mother would be a boy, they hadn’t come up with any girl names. Her birth certificate says “Baby Girl Scarborough”. Eventually one of the nurses started calling her Nancy and it stuck.
Dr. Scarborough, originally a farm boy from Hayneville, Alabama but a graduate of Harvard Medical School, was recruited by Coca Cola CEO Robert Winship Woodruff in 1937 to head up the Winship Cancer Institute in Atlanta. Thus my mother became a Southerner and my Vermont-born and raised grandmother embraced Atlanta society.
I don’t have a lot of pictures of my mother. In 1990, the house she was living in with her second husband in Sacramento, California, burned down and many photos were lost to the fire. Here is a short photo tribute to my mother, Nancy Scarborough Cottraux Dilbeck (February 3, 1936-August 23, 2009).
I get the impression from the look on her face that Mom might have a little attitude going. The story she told is that her mother told her she couldn’t wear the ring she has on her finger for the photo because her hands were too dirty, but Mom slipped the ring on anyway.
Mom’s high school senior photo, Henry W. Grady High School, Atlanta, circa 1952-1953.
Mom with baby Genevieve in 1961. I am the youngest of 4; our father, Stephen Pierre Cottraux Jr., was killed in an automobile accident in 1962.
Mom loved red dresses. This is at my grandmother’s house. I’m in the blue sweater. Sister Ellen is behind me, my brother Steve next to me and sister Cathy behind him.
In 1969, my mother took a trip to Europe. I spent what seemed like a really long time with my grandmother. My brother went to summer camp, and my sisters went on a trip to San Diego to visit our Cottraux grandparents. This is in the Swiss Alps.Circa 1972.In 1972, Mom married her second husband, Van Dilbeck. This is on the farm in Georgia where his mother had relocated with her second marriage the same year. My mother is in the back in the dark blue shirt. I am up front, upside down face. My brother Steve is showing off how much fresh corn on the cob he can eat. At 14, it was a lot! Later that summer, we moved to California.
There is a huge gap in the photos after that. Many were lost in the fire, and others I’ve never had scanned. Jumping to 2003, this is in my then backyard in Napa when Mom came from Sacramento to go to a tea party with me.
Mom helping a much thinner me with home decor, 2003. I did eventually learn how to turn the date stamp off on that camera!
Mom was a very talented seamstress. She made most of our clothes when we were growing up. This is at her house in Sacramento in 2004, cutting fabric for an evening dress I decided to make out of a satin tablecloth. I’ve never finished the dress.
Mom with her beloved cat Bob, a stray who took up residence in her yard and hit the jackpot. Here he is getting his Christmas treats.
Mom’s 70th birthday party in 2006.
This is one of the last photos I have of her. In late 2008 she was diagnosed with untreatable Stage 4 lung cancer. She spent her last months in hospice care. Always an animal lover, she was so happy to have hospice pup Violet to cuddle with.
I like to think she would be proud of me for the path I’ve taken over the last few years. She always let me make my own decisions, whether she approved or not (like when I dropped out of college in 1981 to follow a boy halfway around the world). I didn’t always like her decisions either (like moving us to California in 1972), but I’ve come to appreciate the hurdles she faced and the choices she had to make.
le monde de geneviève 
One thought on “Happy Birthday, Mom”