2006-04-07 - 12:02 a.m.
What a funny way to have spent my spring break, I say to myself, especially when I reflect on my mad dash two or three weeks ago to settle on something special to do�pulling several all-nighters on the Internet in the days leading up to my last day of work before the break. Take a bus trip to all the Mayan archaeological sites in Yucatan; beach it at Cancun or Roatan Island, Honduras; rent a waterside cottage on Caye Caulker, Belize; take one of the heavily-discounted Caribbean cruises out of Miami or Fort Lauderdale; explore a hidden resort in the Dominican Republic; go to Venice. In the end, none of these quite moved me, not at what it would have cost me, at least $1,500 and up from there�more likely over $2,000. I JUST didn�t feel like it, ya know?
Thank God, I now tell myself, and I was especially telling myself that the second day after Dad had called to say that Mom had died. If I had booked one of the trips I had been considering, I would have vomited. I certainly couldn�t have considered going on any of them, if I had booked one, it would have been a total loss of the money that I had thought was too much to spend even if I HAD gone. But no, as it happened, my calendar had a completely clean slate for crying, grieving, family, death �business�, and the beginnings of the healing process.
While I had been more or less numb that first day, only in gear intellectually (and yet I was in tune enough to spend most of the day calling anyone who could help emotionally, which ended up mostly being people who had recently had family deaths of their own), the second day was a different story. I really did wake up crying, and then simply stayed in bed all morning crying. Well, I got out of bed once to close all the windows so that nobody outside could hear me.
Maybe some people don�t understand about this. After all, I am a 58-year-old man, quite independent, and am, I am pretty sure, someone who successfully �stole the key from beneath his mother�s pillow so that he could free the wild man�, to use a step in the fairy tale metaphor from Robert Bly�s Iron John, on the development of mature masculinity. But every single memory hurt; after all, she had been around throughout ALL of it, so everything was somehow touched by her. There are a hell of a lot of memories in a lifetime, and if they are memories of the mother, she was involved in every moment conceivable starting with the very first one.
I know now that so much of my grief was not so much that she had died, per se (that might be bad enough), but grief over how she had had to live, with pain and limitation, and then at the end of it merely drifted away and was gone, beyond reach, beyond words, beyond touch, beyond answering response. �Life�s a bitch, then you die� never seemed more apt, and yet, I didn�t want that to be her legacy.
If only I could call her. I kept thinking that I would, that I still could, even in the midst of my whole heart and soul knowing that she was gone. For how many seconds of life had her availability been assured, now no longer?
I found a book on healing in my collection, Help For The Hard Times, by Earl Hipp, actually a book for adolescents that I bought to help me help a grieving adolescent I knew. Now I needed it, or something like it, for myself. I reflected upon how I had entered a process that could take quite some time, several years in fact, at least, in the normal way of doing these things. That fact made me feel better somehow, as in, �Okay, that�s the way it is, may as well get used to it and deal with it.� It was good to think that I didn�t really have to feel sorry for myself (although I could if I wanted to), but that I could actually follow stepping stones of growth out of there and learn a lot of things about humanity along the way.
I remembered that a huge cycle had come into play and reflected that I ought to go out and meet it. I had long ago amped up my interest in cruising due to a cruise my grandmother (my mother�s mother) had taken in the late 60s or early 70s that took her by way of San Francisco when we lived down the Peninsula in Atherton. Her ship, the Norwegian American Line ship, Vistafjord, was going to be in the port there for two days and we, along with one of our uncles (my mother�s brother) were invited to be my grandmother�s guest on board. It was very exciting to see my grandmother on this amazing ship and during cocktail hour, she regaled us with hysterical stories of her various globe-trotting adventures. I still remember the feeling of absolute bliss sitting there in that lounge with all these wonderful people in our extended family, and hearing my grandmother just laugh and laugh and laugh. (Now, three of the people who had been there are gone.) Then, when it was time for dinner and we all sat at a big circular table, I was blown away by the ship�s dinner menu. They must have had twenty or thirty choices for every conceivable course, an infinite supply of food that my grandmother said the ship picked up along the way. Part of the pleasure of the cruise was enjoying local foods as they traveled the world.
After the scrumptious dinner, while the adults repaired to a lounge for more talk, we kids got to see a movie in the ship�s movie theater. To demonstrate how memorable this whole occasion was, when I mentioned this to my brother last week, he is six years younger than I am, but he not only remembered the occasion, but remembered which movie we saw, Billion Dollar Brain, starring a young Michael Caine. I have that movie on VHS. Maybe for old time's sake, I'll watch it again.
I finally went on my first cruise two summers ago, the Norwegian Cruise Lines �Texaribbean� cruise out of Houston, and then went on that smaller Mexican cruise last summer with my sister Ginger and her two kids.
Now, after all these decades, that same ship was docking in the Port of Los Angeles. It had taken some research on my part to know it, though. Norwegian American Lines had gone bankrupt many years ago, and their ship, Vistafjord had been sold to Cunard, who changed its name to Caronia (after an earlier ship Cunard owned that my grandmother had also taken, on a world-encircling cruise in the mid-50s, but since scrapped). However, Cunard ended up selling the ship to a London-based travel company, Saga, who changed its name, once again, this time to Saga Ruby. Saga also owns another former Norwegian American Line ship that my grandmother liked to sail on, called Sagafjord, but now in its Saga incarnation, is called Saga Rose.
Before I left on spring break, I had put a note on my calendar that the Saga Ruby was docking in Los Angeles (for the very first time) and I planned to go see it. I felt that the returning of that ship back into my life now that I was no longer a high school kid (and now that I had already taken two cruises) was somehow significant. I had no idea that the other cycle that would occur concurrently was the death of my mother.
It seems somehow appropriate that I now quote from the beginning of Kahlil Gibran�s The Prophet. How metaphorical this all is:
Almustafa the chosen and the beloved, who was a dawn unto his own day, had waited twelve years in the city of Orphalese for his ship that was to return and bear him back to the isle of his birth.
And in the twelfth year, on the seventh day of Ielool, the month of reaping, he climbed the hill without the city walls and looked seaward; and he beheld his ship coming with the mist.
Then the gates of his heart were flung open, and his joy flew far over the sea. And he closed his eyes and prayed in the silences of his soul.
But as he descended the hill, a sadness came upon him, and he thought in his heart:
How shall I go in peace and without sorrow? Nay, not without a wound in the spirit shall I leave this city.
Long were the days of pain I have spent within its walls, and long were the nights of aloneness; and who can depart from his pain and his aloneness without regret?
Too many fragments of the spirit have I scattered in these streets and too many are the children of my longing that walk naked among these hills, and I cannot withdraw from them without a burden and an ache.
It is not a garment I cast off this day, but a skin that I tear with my own hands.
Nor is it a thought I leave behind me, but a heart made sweet with hunger and with thirst.
Yet I cannot tarry longer.
The sea that calls all things unto her calls me, and I must embark.
I dragged myself out of bed, took a refreshing shower, and drove to San Pedro. I was amazed that I could actually step out of my grief and accomplish this.
I knew that I would be unable to board the ship that I had once been on so long ago, of course; Homeland Security measures prevented that, and besides, I wouldn�t have been a guest of anybody even if they still allowed guests on board. But I was surprised to learn that I couldn�t even park in the port complex�s parking lot�that was for passengers only, too. Okay, I realized that the best way to see the ship was from the water side, so I drove to Ports O�Call (shopping village) and took the harbor tour (for the third time in my life).
I have to admit that the ship looked pretty silly compared to the immense and immensely beautiful more modern cruise ships parked next to it, Royal Caribbean�s Vision of the Seas of 78,491 gross tonnage, and Celebrity X Cruise�s Summit of 91,000 gross tonnage. The gross tonnage of the Saga Ruby is only 25,000, so it�s about a third or a quarter of the displacement of the ships docked next to it. It�s a pretty wonderful ship to cruise on, though, according to the reviews I�ve read. Their cruises are only for passengers 50 and over, so they are more sedate (not exactly Carnival �party� ships) and they get much more in-depth into their destinations, not just a quick afternoon in a port for splashing around on the beach or getting a drink at Hussong�s Cantina. One idea that I like is that they actually have cabins for singles (and a quarter of those have balconies), so I wouldn�t have to pay double like I did on my two cruises (since prices are normally quoted �per person, double occupancy�). I just might plan to take a cruise on it, myself, some day. I�m kinda burned out on the boisterous Carnival idea, anyway, where if I had been given a dollar every time somebody official on board said the word �Fun�, I�d be able to completely pay for another cruise. Just saying the word �fun� every two seconds doesn�t MAKE it fun. Instead, it makes it irritating.
However, despite the quality of the Saga cruises, seeing the ship itself was a letdown. To me, it looked like a sombrero that somebody had stepped on. Well, I guess it�s more like a ship and less like a floating Las Vegas strip hotel. In my disappointed eyes (everything from the past just looks so much SMALLER), I figured that the lesson was the time DOES move on and things CAN improve.
After my brief rendevous with my blissful past, I drove back home again. I got calls from my brother and his wife, they just couldn�t sit still at home doing nothing and were now on their way up to my father�s (an eleven-hour drive), despite his stated desire that he wanted nobody to come. Then I got a call from my sister, Ree, insisting that she HAD to see Mom�s body and she wanted all of us join her for a viewing and some kind of a service, which she would put together. Perhaps I would join them?
Well, I had kind of wanted to see Mom�s body, too, but not enough to make it happen. I was content to let things play out in whatever way that Mom had pre-arranged them�but that wasn�t much. Just having the Neptune Society come get the body, cremate it, and then unceremoniously dump the ashes out to sea. Bare bones. As far as Mom was concerned, the body was nothing and being rid of it was good riddance. However, Dad said he didn�t care, if we wanted to see the body and have some kind of family service, he would go along with it.
So now it looked like I had to be on my way up there, too. That night before I went to bed, I booked two nights in a motel in Petaluma. It took me almost two hours to choose one�just to look at them on the Internet was suffocating. All of us were scared to death of that trip. I didn�t see how I could manage to drive for seven hours on the normal �holiday corridor� with no Mom at the other end of it, and never, ever again, would there be. Everyone was petrified over the idea of walking into that house, and then seeing that empty bed. Fortunately, Dad had �torn it apart�, meaning that he had taken off all the familiar sheets, etc., so that whatever he saw now when he looked at it was a sight he had never seen before.
That would help But only a very, very little.
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