Mom

All that was left of mom after 103 years was a slightly off white trail of lumpy ash floating in a lazy line just off the stern of the boat.  The sky was, as usual – cloudy! Beside her was my aunt and uncle in equally lazy and somewhat affectionate line next to hers.  My aunt, I thought was slightly more bluish while my uncle was a bit greyer, but each of them still fought to maintain some kind of order in their final excursion together before they each sank out of sight just off the south jetty. My mom’s sister was 16 year younger than her.  She had maintained the marriage to my uncle, a World War II veteran through thick and thin, as they say, for almost 60 years.  Mom had been less lucky in life and had been through a few loves -- and though she had given birth to my brother and me – I don’t really think my dad was one of them.   My uncle died first!  After the somewhat bleak ceremony under a cloudy sky in a church in Astoria Oregon with not enough windows, my uncle was set in the oven and reduced to about a quart and a half of material that was later secured in my cousin’s safe.  Then, about a year later – his wife, my aunt, joined him.   She had been understandably devastated when my uncle had died, and I recall her appearing perplexed when a folded flag was handed to her by some Navy people in exchange for ‘my uncle’s Service’ at the end of his funeral ceremony.   ‘Perplexed’ as if she had handed a clerk her credit card – but she wasn’t really sure about the value of the goods she received back.  She then died, was similarly processed and was placed in an urn on the shelf next to my uncle!  I imagined them there in the dark, side by side – but still kind of regal in their respective urns!

My mom at 103 had outlived her five siblings even though she was the oldest.  With the first death, she had been saddened.  With the subsequent deaths she seemed to grow increasingly uncomfortable as she had to return again and again to ‘celebrate’ the life of each of them.  After that, she kept saying, largely to herself – “why am I still here?”  An odd question since she had taken care of herself so fervently throughout her adult life; vegetables, jumping jacks, musicals, dozens of old Perry Como television specials videos, never an unkind word and so on.   She had been a tall woman and there are pictures of her that made her appear to be an early model or movie star.  In fact she had modeled once.  When I was a kid,  we  had two pages cut  from a Saturday Evening Post where she appeared in black and white adds, dressed in a frilly mid-length apron, standing in a ‘modern’ 40’s kitchen smiling and holding a very large potato triumphantly aloft in one hand.    The caption read: “Only Idaho potatoes will do in my kitchen!” Later unfortunately, those pages were lost to an unusually wet winter and a flooded basement.

At 103 and just a couple of months after my aunt died – mom was hospitalized with an infection that would be a fairly minor event in a younger person.  If fact, she could have been engorged with antibiotics as she had been several times in her last few years – but this time she said no.  She had already let us know that she wished to be cremated and her ashes released with her sister and brother in law.  I was secretly concerned there might be an overcrowding issue in my cousin’s safe – but she was accommodated and these couple of months later -- here I was watching the three of them drift  just off the boat’s stern in the presence of numerous barking sea lions while slipping silently and unceremoniously beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean.  The woman who had decorated our house every Christmas, caught my snakes when they escaped in the basement, traveled thousands of miles in her later years, kept her chin up and her mind strong in her old age, was now reduced to a thin white streak.  And, I knew even If I was given a comb and a thousand years to try – I would never be able to sift up enough of her from the ocean floor to resemble herself again. On the ride back I listened to Country Joe and the Fish through my I-pod. The sun broke through briefly and the bark of the sea lions gave way to the sound of gulls near the dock.

 Amen, I thought!