March 9, 1997 -- Return to Santa Cruz

Linda and I were visiting Santa Cruz this weekend. Mom and Day moved there in 1965, when Dad became the first professor on staff at the new University of California at Santa Cruz. We visited often during the turbulent sixties when I was a graduate student at nearby Berkeley.

Dad died of a heart attack during the summer of 1970, and at the same time I moved back east to take my first academic job. We still managed frequent visits to Santa Cruz. For our twins those trips to see their were high points of their childhood. I can still remember staying behind and `putting them on a plane one day when they were four for their first-ever flight by themselves to visit "Granny Peggy." They were so proud of themselves and excited about the adventure ahead.

Mom did not take to being a widow easily, and I think that she and Dad would have had glorious times together in their sixties and seventies -- but it was not to be, and without Day she lived as fully as she could. She cherished old friends, made new friends, belonged to a church and a garden club, and did volunteer work -- 17,000 hours in all for the local Catholic-run hospital. When dementia set in and she needed to move into the retirement home run by the same Catholic order, I visited three or four times a year to see how she was doing.

Then we needed to move her to a more active care arrangement near my Bellevue home. That was three years ago, and Linda and I had not been back to Santa Cruz since then. This past weekend's visit was to check in on Mom's sister, Aunt Emory, and her good friend, Ruth Engel. I am so accustomed to seeing Mom in the Seattle region these days, that nothing struck me as unusual in her absence -- until Aunt Emory and I went to church.

Mom had been a life-long Episcopalian until about twenty-five years ago a controversy in the Santa Cruz church resulted in some of the parishioners -- including Mom and Emory -- forming a storefront church of their own. But there were too few of them, and so they joined a local Lutheran church in nearby Aptos.

The church community meant a lot to Mom, and she would regale us with the stories of her two or three favorite parishioners and their families. She seemed to be drawn to young couples who were having problems, but steadfastly raising their kids. She seemed like an honorary god parent to those children. She was also fond of the minister, a man named Paul. I occasionally caught a glimpse of these folk when I made my regular pilgrimage with her to church on our visits to Santa Cruz. As her dementia grew more serious, I would need to find the right pages in the prayer book for her and hold the hymnal open to the right pages.

In retrospect, I think of all of Mom's friendships and activities as filling in -- but never entirely filling in -- the void left by Dad's death.

Anyway, on this past weekend of returning to Santa Cruz, I was not really thinking about Mom until Aunt Emory and I went to church. Then as our little congregation of about 50 worshipers turned to the entryway of the church and began singing the processional hymn, it suddenly hit me -- Mom was not in her usual place me.

"O God beyond all praising, we worship you today, and sing the love amazing that songs cannot repay.

"For we can only wonder at ev'ry gift you send, at blessings without number and mercies without end."

Suddenly tears were pouring down my face, and I wondered whether I could get through the service. Then my shoulders began shaking with my emotion, and I imagined myself retreat to the bathroom and bawling.

After the anthem, I "got a grip," whipped away the tears as inconspicuously as possible, and settled in for the service. During the next hour, I thought a lot about Mom and her predicament. I realized that my reaction was a reaction to the strangeness of her condition. I was sorrowing at her death and so needed to shed those purging tears.

And yet of course she is not dead -- she is alive. And yet again, how alive is she really....Once you say that the old Mom is dead, you have to recognize that there is still life there. And once you say she is alive, you have to recognize that much of what she was is no more.

What an appropriate place to be thinking those thoughts -- in a church. For Christianity teaches a parallel lesson about life. Life and death are tied together: "There is a time to be born and a time to die." In life are the seeds of death, and death can come at any moment. But then there is the other side. In death there is life: Christ on the cross, the sinner regenerated.

Mom is no more in Santa Cruz, in the Lutheran church or anywhere else, and yet she is not dead. Day by day she lives out the murky twilight of her life.