Mother's last wish

Mother’s Last Wish

If it hadn’t been for my mother and her wild, crazy ways, I never would have discovered the place I love the most of all the places I’ve been in the world - San Diego, California, specifically Mission Beach (North).  I went to visit her there in 1968 with my first child, 1 year old at the time, in tow, after my husband had just returned from Thailand and 100 missions flown over North Vietnam.  He came back to the states for training in a new plane.  He was a fighter pilot flying F105s in Vietnam and now training on F4s.  We were stationed in Japan at the time, and he’d been gone for a year to the war, while I was in a strange country, at the ripe old age of 19, trying to raise a child alone.  So, when he got orders to the States to cross train in a new plane, I put my foot down and insisted on coming too. 

I ended up at my mom’s in San Diego.  I, like my mother before me, fell in love with the place, the people, but most especially the beach.  I found a special affinity with the Pacific Ocean.  My best friend Deb says that when I stand at the shore and just look out, a light shines down all around me.  I personally never saw that light but I felt it.  I could be anywhere in California and always tell which direction was west by closing my eyes and “feeling” the pull of the Pacific.  My mom also loved the beach.  She lived and worked there as a bartender, running a biker/beach-bum bar, right on Mission Blvd – The Beach Hut – a dive among dives…  But I digress.  This story is not about me but my mother’s last wishes.

My mom physically left San Diego in 1983.  She left against her will, as the bar she always thought was hers wasn’t and her “boyfriend” sold it out from under her.  Not much work for a 60+ year old alcoholic bartender, who had (as the saying goes) been rode hard and put away wet a few times, so she skulked home to Philly.  My mother disliked Philadelphia and she disliked her mother even more, but now was dependent upon her for a place to live. 

My mother, the women I knew and alternately hated and, well loved was too strong a word, but cared for (another story), died that day when she stepped on that plane.  The woman who stepped off that plane was not in any way recognizable as my mother, but some bad caricature of her. 

In her will my mom had put that when she died, she wanted her ashes put in the Pacific, down the street from where she’d lived and played for so long.  We used to tease her and tell her we’d UPS her ashes to my friend Deb (who lives in Central California outside of San Francisco) and Deb could flush her and she’d be in the Pacific in no time if she didn’t clog the toilet.  My grandmother was horrified by that thought, but mom said “it works for me.”  Of course we wouldn’t do that but it was worth it just to see the look on my grandmother’s face at the thought of it.

Her mom, my grandmother, died at the age of 92 in 1995 and my mom moved to West Virginia to be near my daughter and me.  She lived on her own until 1999 when she announced she no longer could, according to her doctor, and so she moved in with us.  Once gain, the woman who lost her independence and moved in with my husband and me, was NOT the woman she had been the day before, but had morphed into a silent, loner who stayed in her room and only came out for meals – her choice.  My mom was an alcoholic – but she immediately stopped drinking completely when she moved into my home.  She didn’t have to; I even stocked her favorite beer for her that she never touched.  Other than the not drinking I never really noticed anything different about her mental state.  She read voraciously, smoked like a chimney, but pretty much kept to herself.  A year later, she developed some severe back pain and she had to be hospitalized a couple times.  After one such hospitalization, she had been home a day when, in the morning, and to this day I do not know what made me ask, when she came out of her room, looking totally normal, I said “Mom, did you take your medicine?”  She smiled and replied yes, but for some reason, as I said I have no idea why, I went to check.  We kept her pills in one of those daily/weekly dosage containers, and I had just put a week’s worth in it the night before for the following week.  When I opened the container that morning, every pill was gone.  I went out and asked “Mom, how much medicine did you take?”

She smiled and said, “Why all of it of course.”  I asked why and she said “Because you told me too.”  I immediately called 911.  She appeared fine when they arrived, but on the way to the hospital crashed, was brought back to life but she never was the same.  I don’t know if she did it on purpose or was just so confused from the pain meds she was on.  She ended up in a nursing home, supposedly for 2 weeks, so she could get some physical therapy for her back.  She never came home. 

About 2 weeks into her nursing home stay I noticed that she was still reading a book she had been reading the week before.  Usually she read 2 or 3 books a day.  I asked her if she was still reading it and she said no she didn’t read anymore.  I thought that strange and mentioned it to the staff.  They said they had noticed but thought nothing of it.  A week later, she was in a wheelchair.  I asked why and they said she could not walk, I asked if it was because of pain and they said they didn’t know, only that when she tried to take a step she fell.  With in 2 weeks, she could not get out of that chair and never would again; she had forgotten how to walk.  She was finally diagnosed with alcoholic dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. 

She stopped recognizing me after about 4 months.  My daughter who was 9 month’s pregnant went to visit with me one day and mom looked at her and said “Jo Ann, you are getting fat!”  I said “Mom that’s Shannon Not Jo Ann,” she gave me her infamous tightlipped “mother look” and said, “and just who are you again?”  I told her I was Jo Ann and she huffed at me, and never spoke to me again. 

Two years later, my father (who has been divorced from my mom since I was 8 years old) got sick, and was found to have brain cancer, and given 12 weeks to live.  I went to visit with him, and when I got back, my mom looked at me and said, very lucidly “Please, take me out of this life! Please!  I don’t want to live like this.”  I told her I couldn’t.  That if she were still at home, I probably could have helped her but at the nursing home I couldn’t.  And after that she never spoke to anyone again, until my husband died in 2004.  I went to tell her that my husband had died and she looked at me and said “I’m sorry, you are going to be very sad.”  Then slipped back into her shell. 

Three months later she was gone peacefully in her sleep.  First my dad, then my husband, and now my mother, all within 15 months.  Luckily death is not a bad thing to me and mine; to us it is the next step in the grand adventure.  But, again I digress.  Mom had no funeral, no viewing – her choice.  She was shipped to the funeral home, toasted to ashes, and given to me in a box all within a matter of days.

I told my sister that my girls and I were taking mom to San Diego to carry out her last wish and my sister said “Why?  She’s dead.  She won’t know.  Why spend that money?”  and I said, “Ok, then I’ll bring her ashes to you and she can haunt you!“  Whereupon my big sister (who DOES, in fact, see dead people) said “Have a nice trip, send me a postcard!” 

So we flew out to where my girls had grown up – San Diego.  We’d left when they were in high school and this was their first trip back as adults.  We took “mom” to her favorite hang out, The Nite Owl, and put her bag of ashes on the bar.  The bartender asked “What’s that?”  I said “That’s my mom, she used to live in this place, and she’ll have a vodka martini, up with 2 olives.”  The bartender didn’t bat an eye (only in California), and fixed the drink and watched us pour it, olives and all, in with mom. 

We then took mom and her olives to the beach at the foot of Queenstown Court, jumped over the seawall and, at sunset, committed her ashes to the sea.  It felt good, honestly good, to know that for once I got something my mother wanted from me right.

I turned to my girls and asked, “So where do you want to go that you’ve never been?”  They asked why and I told them “Well, I’ll put it in MY will and you will have to take my ashes there, get me a tequila shooter, and send me on my way.”  They looked at each other, smiled and said in unison “Jamaica.”  So, it is in my will, and they have to do it or I’ll haunt them.  So look out Jamaica here we come – some day. 

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© Copyright 2008 The Gypsy Widow