May 23, 2012

• White Bird

   

  
   

  

  
  
  
  My Mom died last Sunday at home. It was not an easy transition but I was there with my sisters and brother, a niece and a nephew and PLC.
  It was very hard on us all and tragic to us as well because, though we all die, she was so vital and spirited and loving and, I think, important to so many people she knew and met in her life. She was also young in some essential way that makes death all that harder.
  
  We are all still in shock even though the fact of her death seemed set as a fact for some days before.
  
  My Mom was a beautiful woman and I say that with all humility and she lived with a unique combination of vivacity and pride, yet with self-containment and humility as well.
  
  I will have more to say about my mother who had a love for animals and many, many of those young people who struggled in this world finding their feet in it, their own way.

  Within moments when we all realized she had let go of her last struggling breath I walked outside of my parents modest house in Hayward - the town where my siblings still live and I did for several decades- and saw that the light was different than I'd ever seen it. It was the eclipse, of course. I knew it was coming but it was somehow stunning to see as the light was darkened in a manner I may have seen once before in my life but I do not remember it if so. My Mom's father was from Swedish and Norweigian ancestry and I wondered if this was like the dark twilight light of the northernmost realms of the world.
  
  As I wrestled with the timing of my mother's fate from pneumonia and lung cancer I remembered that when my father died Elizabeth Taylor had died a couple of days before and that Geraldine Ferraro- America's first woman vice-Presidential candidate- died the same day. A lot of people had thought my Mom had more than a passing resemblance to Miss Taylor, at least one friend said she'd reminded him of Jean Seaberg. My Mom liked Elizabeth Taylor and so there was a sort of backhanded "appropriateness" that my Dad and Liz should be booked on similar flight schedules as it were.
  
  My mother was preceded and accompanied by two icons now most associated with "disco"- and that is, in it's most essential meaning, simply a style, an idiom for, more generally, "dance". The first was Donna Summer and on the same day my Mom died, so had Robin Gibb I later learned. My Mom's musical taste ran more to Barbra Streisand and her dance appreciation more to Rudolf Nureyev but there still was a synchronistic tip of the hat from the seeming heavens in all that.

  My Mom loved dancing and to dance. It was a lifelong passion and something she and her sisters had learned from an early age. She and my father were very good dancers together in social settings. Once in Mexico a bandleader had asked them if they could come back every night of their stay on vacation because the crowd loved to watch them so much.
  Both of my sisters took dance as young teenagers as well.
  
  
  We loved my Dad dearly but this was and is something even more. I will have more to say- just not today.

  • 10:52 am
  • 3 Comments