Just so it doesn't happen before I die.

-- My mom, regularly.

Mum had this thing about suffering, whether physical, financial, psychic or spiritual. Though Catholic to the core and faithful as a nun to the Stations of the Cross and the Rosary, she preferred not to reflect further upon suffering.

She loved life -- especially the dancing part -- and concluded that life is lived best by denying the reality of bad things. Her capacity for avoiding the emotional fallout from a family member's cancer diagnosis, divorce, pet death or speeding ticket took on mythic proportion.

Mum never, ever watched movies about war, violence or the devastation of the rain forest.

During the 1960s, she had no sympathy for women who carried banners demanding equality. She believed the entire world would be better off if women just cherished their God-given roles as housekeepers, cooks and mothers.

She refused to think about the unpleasantness of oppression or injustice.

If, God forbid, there were to be natural disasters, economic collapse, social unrest or political corruption, she hoped and prayed they would occur only "after I'm dead."

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Mum didn't prepare me for the world I live in. I am, instead, conditioned.

I really, really want to paint the basement bathroom rather than write; to shop for coordinating linens and draperies for the bedroom, troll the Internet for advice columns and overstock bargains, sort my photos. Like Mum, I'd rather not reflect. But then I ask myself: What was it really that Mum did not wish to reflect upon?

The letters that Mum saved and that I stored away after she died include one written during the Depression by a brother who'd hit the road looking for work in apple and peach orchards and who expressed the hope that he could "clear up fifty or seventy-five dollars in the next three or four months; then I'd come home for the winter."

There was another from a sister who ran away from the devastation at home only to find another sort in the big city. She wrote: "It wouldn't take a girl long to turn wrong here. Almost every night we get an offer to get picked up, but we never take the chance. ... I haven't turned wild."

Before she was 21, Mum lost her own young mother to disease. The sister who ran away was killed in a biking accident; a brother died in the war. Mum bore five children, and before these children were grown, she'd buried two husbands.

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Mum's church, ethnicity, poverty and social and cultural mores instilled in her a severely limited sense of self and gave her a work load that technology hadn't lightened. By herself, she laid a huge Belgian block driveway in front of the house she built with her second husband. She plucked chickens and canned tomatoes, corn, beets, pears, applesauce and beans. She ironed pillow cases and hauled laundry to the back yard to hang in the breeze.

When, at 69, she'd buried a third husband and was tiring of all the chores, she moved from Western Pennsylvania to a senior citizen community in Arizona -- one that held dances three afternoons a week -- and found another husband.

Mum rarely allowed herself the stillness to read the biographies she liked -- no doubt her window on the larger world. But if she found in them any parallels to her own impoverishment and survival, she never spoke of it. How could she? Mum denied her own capacity for suffering -- doesn't everybody at some point? -- and poured her energy into living.

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Mum's legacy encompasses a code by which she lived, a code that seemed to come from nowhere but her own soul, a code that was impervious to alteration.

She would not abide incivility in the family or in any company she kept. She never, ever spoke critically of family members, distant relatives, neighbors, friends or countries we'd bombed. She cherished friends, tolerated their idiosyncrasies, listened to their woes, delivered homemade soup when they were ill and celebrated their joys. In her 80s, she still beat her grandchildren at Scrabble and enjoyed a good martini.

If Mum could comment on contemporary corruption and conflict, she no doubt would say, "Glad I'm gone."

Me? I've more anger about domestic and global conditions than I ever saw in Mum -- even toward that blankety-blank third husband.

I'm aghast at the numbers of human beings that today face destitution, unemployment and lack of access to health care. I feel compelled to seek ways to take action.

But in facing what could well be a bleak future, I can perhaps refrain from reflecting overlong upon my own suffering, cultivate a higher standard of civility and turn up the music and dance every chance I get. Mum taught some things worth passing on.

Cartoonist Rob Rogers does "Rob's Rough," an early look at his work and his creative process, exclusively at PG+, a members-only web site of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.