15 Years Later

Mom died 15 years ago today.  A few days later, a good friend placed his hand on my shoulder and told me, “You just lost the best friend you’ll ever have.”  Truer words have rarely been spoken.

We knew it was coming. She had COPD – Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. Like many of her generation, Pauline smoked. For years, make that decades, she tried to quit, and for the most part did, limiting herself to just a few smokes a day. In fact, for the longest time, even I didn’t know she still smoked. She hid it that well.

In her last year, grandchildren from far away came to visit. Thanksgiving weekend 2010, Mom wished to take a ride around Enumclaw and point out her old family homes.  And that of her grandfather, Joshua Morris, whom she never really knew, as he died before she was two years old.  She packed her oxygen tank, and though experiencing discomfort, we completed the several-hour trip around town and out to Osceola.  A few weeks later, she called me at work first thing in the morning. For thirty minutes, she shared her Christian faith journey and how proud she was to have passed it down to her children, in different iterations.

A week before Christmas, she fell. How many times have falls lead to death in older adults? First stop was Enumclaw Hospital, then a Federal Way rehab center, where we visited her on Christmas Day. She seemed to be getting better, but a setback landed her in Swedish Hospital.  On New Year’s Day, many of the family visited. Mom convinced the doctors to pump her up on steroids, then put on makeup, so that when we visited, she was sparkling and appeared to be years younger. I was amazed by her remarkable recovery – right before my eyes. She was vibrant, almost perky. She held a great-grandchild in her arms, looking angelic. I imagined she’d somehow been cured. Foolish me, for I didn’t know of the doctor’s trick.

Pauline left Swedish for the Kline Galland nursing home near Seward Park. It’s a lovely place in a forested setting.  And for the next three weeks, she slowly proceeded to die, under the gentle care of hospice personnel who calibrated the precise dose of morphine to keep her both conscious and free of pain. On the last few nights, we rotated sleeping beside her.

The fateful call came Monday afternoon, January 24, 2011. We were in Auburn at the Celebration of Life for Jill Alverson, Cal Bashaw’s daughter.  Mom and Cal had joined their lives in partnership a decade earlier. Cal and his family became a part of our family. Were two daggers purposely thrown that day?

The following week was a whirlwind. We organized the funeral at Sacred Heart Catholic Church and coordinated with Enumclaw Funeral Home, just like we did for Dad, 32 years earlier.  Father Bill Hausmann, one of Mom’s best friends and the priest who married Jennifer and me, came to perform the service. Mom wanted to be buried, so I chose a coffin, the simplest, bare pine box available, like those of earlier generations. Mom was never showy; she always practiced modesty but never pretension.

Our job was made easy as Mom had written down most of what she wanted after life. Father Hausmann graciously guided us through assembling the funeral service. Old family friends filled the pews. “How Great Thou Art” and “Amazing Grace” were sung. The 23rd Psalm was read, as were Corinthians 15:51-57 and Luke 12:48-49. Each of her four children delivered remembrances, as did two grandchildren. Following the Celebration of Life in the Parish Hall, the immediate family journeyed to the cemetery where Pauline was buried next to her husband, Jack. Flowers were tossed on her pinewood coffin. Her gravestone read, ‘Morte in Vitam,’ Latin for ‘death into life.’

Thirty-two years earlier, Dad’s end came fast, dying a little over three weeks after his pancreatic cancer diagnosis. One night before he died, he called me to his bedside and set forth a task: “I want you to take care of your mother.”  Both daughters lived far away, while Barry and Cathy had three toddlers and a fourth on the way next year.

That was the easiest job I ever had.  There was one simple way to take care of Mom – I let her take care of me.  I was single, unattached, and living in their Lake Sawyer summer cabin, a mere 10 miles away. I came frequently for dinner. She hemmed my pants and sewed buttons on my shirts.  And always sent me home with food: casseroles, lentil soup, scones, and blackberry pie.

We became pals, going to concerts and plays. With Danica, we drove to Pasadena and attended the 1981 Rose Bowl. I encouraged her to purchase a condo in downtown Seattle and joined as a 20% partner. We jointly managed Dad’s affairs, sharing the bookwork and undertaking investments. Each summer, she joined me at her lake house until I moved out after purchasing a Maple Valley condo. Even then, we accomplished a remodel that doubled the size of her lake home while maintaining its chalet character and style.

Together, we undertook projects. We sorted through piles of family photos, identifying faces whose names I wrote on the back.  She guided me through family genealogies, from which I published several Morris and Kombol family histories. Those endeavors inspired me and led to a second-act writing hobby. Mom remained an essential part of my life until the end.

Knowing she was gone, I conjured ways to keep her alive. During the first nine months of my life, in utero, I shared everything with her. After leaving the womb, a baby carries maternal cells for decades, possibly for life.  It’s called maternal micro-chimerism. There was my hook, my hold – deep down in the cavity of my soul, a few of Mom’s cells may still reside in me. On a molecular level, she was still with me. Just as during her life, I was still part of her, as mothers continue to carry cells of their infants for years, even decades after birth.  Maybe I was grasping at straws, a drowning man trying to save a sense of self by clutching the DNA of flimsy reeds. But it worked.

Memory is a curious sort of history. The past in your head becomes the present. You step through its walls to the days and months of yesteryear – the way it used to be. We conjure snippets of recall from faraway events, hoping to make them real again. And then we’ll see each other and speak as we did before.  There’s an element of magic at work. Like the alchemists, trying to change one element into another, we hope against hope that our leaden memories might somehow be turned to gold.

Some questions remain long after their owners have died, lingering like ghosts searching for answers never found in life.  On this side of heaven, all we possess is the present.  But the present endlessly dissolves into the past.  There I am, a little boy of three or four.  One of my earliest memories, in Elk Coal, with Barry.  We’ve planned a performance to show off our skills to an audience of one – Mom.

On the edge of the yard where the tall trees grow, there’s a vine maple tree with a branch growing horizontally from the ground.  Barry, two and one-half years older than me, flips upside down, hanging by his knees, grinning broadly.  I jump and grab the branch and hang by my arms.  Mom claps wildly, as if it’s the most incredible show she’s ever seen.  Barry continues to hang. I drop from the branch and run into her outstretched arms as she squeezes me tightly.  I’d never felt so proud.

That’s what Gary Habenicht meant when he advised, I just lost the best friend I’ve ever had.