Living with Loss

Living With Loss. I think I was about 8 or 9 years old when the first person I knew well, my 16 year old cousin, died. My cousin Bobby, had driven a car into a house with a full load of friends. He had turned his head to ask if everyone was okay. However, because his neck had broken in the crash the next moment he was gone.

I remember being 8 or 9 and feeling scared and vulnerable because of this. Life never felt as secure again after that.

Later that year I was playing on G hill in Los Angeles with friends and must have gotten heat stroke because everything turned yellow. I couldn't see any color but yellow. So I ran down the hill a mile to where I had left my bike and rode home as fast as I could because I was afraid I was dying. After that, I had a headache for 2 or three days. A year after that after I delivered my Sunday morning newspaper. I delivered them 7 days a week on my bicycle I got home after 6 am from delivering my newspapers. I went back to sleep and woke up after a nightmare on the floor with my mother holding my head and looking really scared. She just said I had had a bad dream but somehow I didn't quite believe her.

I had broken up with my girlfriend when I was age 21 and visited my Grandad for the last time in Seattle. I could see he was concerned about me. I tried to hide my desire for suicide from everyone but after you have lived to 30 or 40 people see right through you. (I realize that now at age 60). He died a month or so later when his wheel bearing froze in his panel truck and went off a cliff into an ice cold stream in Idaho. His wife by then in a rest home said, "The old man left me!" She passed away a couple of years later.

In 1970 my mother sent Nana, her mother that had mostly raised me for my Mom from birth to about 10 or 12. She was literally my nanny from birth to 12 and lived with Mom and Dad and I. Anyway, she sent Nana away to her sisters in Seattle because Nana was 80 and getting hard for Mom to take care of.

In 1978, when I was 30, my mother and I were driving up Interstate 5 and were about at Portland, Oregon when I felt Nana pass on. She was 90. I experienced her emotions of feeling very sad that she wouldn't see us in person before she passed but also feeling so happy to be free of earthly cares at the same time. When I experienced this I had no reference points and couldn't figure out what was happening until I arrived in Seattle and it perfectly interfaced with the exact time she had died. My mother was so destroyed by her loss that I had to be the minister at Nana's memorial service. Since I had experienced Nana's passing with her I didn't feel the same loss as Mom. But still I felt bad that I hadn't seen Nana the last 10 years of her life after she had basically raised me to about 12 years of age. Nana, since she was raised in Scotland had a Scottish brogue when she spoke. Now if you can imagine the brogue she used to say to me, "Now, Freddie, you've got to grow up and be a perfect gentleman. I want to be proud of you. You remember that, will you?" So I grew up and became a gentleman so I wouldn't disappoint Nana, who raised me to be one.

Seven years later my father died. That was the death that destroyed me at age 37. First Dad died and Mom was lost ever after that. She tried to date a man who was a long time friend of Dad and her but she just couldn't get over Dad so that ended fairly soon. Mom never dated again. So for me when Dad died it was very much like I lost them both when he went and Mom always did the exact opposite of whatever important wisdom I could share with her. It was awful.

However, when my mother got pretty old my son lived with her until she got too senile to live with because she would wake him up at 4 am and ask him who that guy was who just walked through the wall. After four or five times my son said being woken up to that insanity at 4 am was just too strange a thing for him to live with. Within about 6 months of that kind of thing she almost burned her apartment down by putting a plastic bowl on the electric stove(which she wasn't allowed to use) and watching the plastic drip down the stove on fire for 24 hours while she prayed for everything to be ok. When my son arrived to this we all knew that was the end of independent living for my mother. I was glad at that point that my wife and son could help me as emotionally putting my mother in a rest home was for me like putting my mother in a jail or mental institution. It was more than I could emotionally bear as her son. She had always been an amazing Mom until my Dad died and I would never forget what wonderful parents I had had. I could never be as good a son as they had been parents to me until Dad died.