Remembering Mom: She Knew Her Tomato Plants

Back in the old days, we would buy a bag of pot and hope that no more than a fourth of it was stems and seeds. No matter what we tried, there were no good ways to consume the stems and seeds to get high. Just smoking the crap was more likely to give you a headache than a high. If a wayward seed made its way into a joint or a bowl of weed, it would pop like popcorn, except there were no kernels. The lit portions blown out by the seed popping were going to be holes in your shirts and cloth seats.

One of my final antics before leaving home was to use some of the seeds to start about twenty plants. I did it in the closet of my upstairs bedroom with a sun lamp my dad once used.

It wasn't an overly well-thought-out plan. Even cousin Guy caught me. I had to beg him to not tell on me.

The Family Finale

This was originally published on May 14, 2020.

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One of the things that Dad was most proud of showing off to people was how quickly he could muster the family to gather. He has been dead now for nearly twenty-eight years, and so has the family unity that died with him. It didn't have to die, but it did.

I think the erosion of the family was mostly due to regret. I cannot get into the heads of people, but I can listen to what they say and observe what they do to figure out if they are being honest. If they say one thing, and then do another thing, they aren't being honest. It isn't rocket science; it's human behavior. Actions generally reveal more about people's motives than do words.

Pondering Death and Its Options

Intellectually, I know that I will eventually die. However, there is this little part of me that wonders if I might be that special someone who somehow defies death. If you will excuse the source if it bothers you, Woody Allen said it best: "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying." It is natural to feel that way because of our basic instinct for survival, but it is also intellectually dishonest to hold onto the thought for anything other than fantasy.

While we hold onto those thoughts in one part of our minds, another part of us wants to be adventurous and to live life to the fullest. James Dean's self-fulfilling quote, "Live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse," takes the idea to the opposite end of the spectrum of life and death from immortality. While most of us don't go anywhere near that far in our pursuit of adventure, we tend to tie the will to live to having a life worth living.

Remembering Mom: Her Trips to the Cemetery

There was no pain that Mom carried in her heart greater than the pain of losing David, her youngest child. He was born in early December 1964 and died the next March at three-and-a-half months old. 

I was seven when David died. Mom and Dad let us view his body lying in state, which is the most vivid image of David that I retain, but we weren't allowed to go to his funeral. He spent so little time at home that we never got to know or play with him. 

More vivid than the image of David in his coffin are the images of the many times Mom walked across the uneven ground of Lullaby Land to put flowers on his grave. Her regular trips to the cemetery began on her birthday in 1965. Her birthday, and David's birthday and date of death, became ritualistic for her and Dad to visit David's grave. In 1993, she added Dad's dates of birth and death, and we children became her support system accompanying her to our brother's grave and our father's crypt. 

Remembering Mom: She Wanted to Live and Go Home the Last Time I Visited with Her

A memory came up in my Facebook feed today. It was the third anniversary of a post I made after visiting Mom for the last time. We did not know it was the last time at the time. My post was not about it being our last face-to-face visit. March 9, 2020 was also the date that more than 100 cases of COVID-19 were discovered at a nursing home in King County, which prompted an immediate halt to visiting patients in nursing homes and hospitals the next day. 

I don't recall if my older sister told me that Mom had been transferred to a nursing home the morning of the 9th or the day before, but it was the day Mom was transferred. I am thankful to this day for her keeping me advised about Mom and what was going on. I would not have liked visiting her in the hospital and finding an empty bed where I expected to see her. 

She also told me in that conversation that our sister who had "the plan" for Mom to live with her was probably going to have her move into a long-term care facility rather than accommodate her home for something as unpredictable as Mom was going to need accommodations for a wheelchair. 

Remembering Mom: Meeting Loren Hancock

Mom was quite active in the PTA when we were in school. She served several years as the president of the PTA at Fawcett elementary school. They would hold their regular meetings at the school, and she was often down at Central school attending school board meetings. However, for special events, planning committees would form and meet at the home of one of the members. It was probably 1968 that the Halloween party planning committee met at the home of Elaine Hancock. 

When Mom got home from the meeting, it was not the plans for the party she wanted to tell Dad about. What shocked her, and probably all the other mothers in attendance, was what Elaine's crazy husband, Loren, said. Mom told Dad that the meeting had pretty much ended, and the group had begun talking about costumes they were going to wear. Loren walked in on that discussion. 

"You'll never believe what he said," she told him. "He said you can all shove sticks up your asses and go as popsicles." 

Remembering Mom: Her First Mother's Day in Heaven

David was born in December of 1964 and died in March of 1965 at three-and-a-half months old. I cannot imagine how much pain Mom must have felt that first Mother's Day without him. She never lost the grief of losing him. Some of my most vivid memories of Mom are walking with her over the uneven ground in Lullaby Land so she could place flowers on his grave. 

At first, she would go on the anniversaries of his birth and death, plus Memorial Day, which is really close to her birthday. Dad honored and adopted the tradition until his death in 1992. 

Lying, Sabotaging, and Communicating Passively Aggressively, or How the Family Came Unglued

A memory from four years ago that popped up on Facebook today was a post I made in response to my younger sister's passive aggressive message that had been sent that morning.

To put it into perspective, Mom had moved in with her in March of that year. In addition to her realizing that I had been telling the truth that taking care of Mom was more of a job than it was a joy, she was also dealing with the "unforeseeable emergency" that everything that wasn't dealt with at Mom's house when it might have been, had to be dealt with then when there were other things that needed to also be dealt with, like taking care of Mom. 

Remembering Mom: She was Always 29

Mom wasn't vain or pretentious about her appearance or her apparel. She was a modest person who put more emphasis on getting ready quickly than she did on fashion. She was never unkempt. She liked her hair short, she wore no makeup, and she dressed modestly. Despite that, when it came to her age, she was always 29 years old. 

She wasn't vain about her age. She just needed to be younger than her mother, Dobie, who always claimed to be 39 years old.

Remembering Mom: Finding Her on the Floor

I don't remember the weather or the date, but I will never forget the feeling I had that morning in April of 2008 when I opened the door to Mom's house and heard her calling for help from the back hallway. When I rushed back there, Mom was on the floor where she had lain soiled since she got up in the middle of the night for a drink of water and to go to the bathroom.

I wanted to call 911 on the spot, but she convinced me to call Maureen to help instead. She assured me that she had laid there for several hours, so another little bit wouldn't hurt more. She did not want the medics coming in to deal with her soiled and dirty. I called Maureen, told her we had an emergency, and went to help Mom a bit in the five minutes or so that it took Maureen to arrive. 

Remembering Mom: If Her Services Had Been About Her

Mom was entombed yesterday. Her service was a lovely sermon that she would likely have despised. It isn't that the minister wasn't eloquent. It was that he talked too much about religion and got too many things about her incorrect.

To be fair, the job of speaking at her service was offered to me before the minister was hired. I declined. I had the experience speaking at Dad's service. Besides not having practiced public speaking for almost two decades, Mom never asked me to do her service. Dad did. There were points during his service that, if I had broken down, I probably could not have recovered. I was practiced in those days. To that end, it is as much my fault as anyone else's that Mom's services turned into a sermon like at a church service.

Yvonne Koecke (1935-2020): Third Eerie Premonition About Death Came True

Mom told me that she didn't fear death; she feared the mode of death. When she explained the difference, it didn't have anything to do with her cause of death. It had to do with the third of her three eerie premonitions that came true. I'll get back to that.

Mom was born on May 31st, 1935, in Leith, North Dakota. Her parents, Roy "Clair" and Dorothy Kamrath packed everything up that July and moved to Oregon with their oldest child. 

She told us tales about growing up in the logging camps, and various homes and farms, as her father moved the family seeking regular work during the Great Depression. The family would grow with Clarence, Bill, and Eileen added to the pack. Pa, as we used to call him, found regular employment with Oregon State College in Corvallis, and the family settled into its permanent home.

Prancer (2001-2019)

On the afternoon of August 10th, a car pulled into the driveway. Unfortunately, Prancer had found a piece of ground to sun upon in the tire tracks of the driveway, and the visitor who pulled in did not see her. Her death was immediate.

Remembering Dad: His System of Cycling Junk

Dad was a collector of many things. He had his old cameras, his library, his painted engine collection, and hundreds of his favorite movies on VHS tapes. He was highly creative at using junk in wonderful displays, like his magic garage. However, he also was organized, and did not like junk hanging around the house.

Mom enjoyed many of his collections, and tolerated others. She also does not like junk hanging around the house, but her definition of junk differed from Dad’s definition of junk.