Excerpt from "Moving Mom," a Memoir in Progress

Arleen Williams

 

The guest bedroom in my mother's beach house was cramped, dusty and filled to the walls with a double bed. A blue comforter covered the bed set on blue carpet. Heavy blue curtains covered the high, narrow window. The curtains allowed no draft of cold air in the winter, no breeze in the summer. Late at night the silence was heavy and comforting, with the crash of waves just at the edge of awareness like elevator music in a downtown skyscraper. I lay in the too-soft bed wide-awake. My mother slept beyond the wall separating the bedrooms of her small home.

Earlier that day I had arrived for an overnight stay. As always when I visited, I poked around the house looking for changes, for signs of my mother's activities or needs. Signs that she could no longer care for herself. I saw a large gift box in the bay window seat.

"What's this, Mom?"

"Oh, just an old album. Doreen got it out when she was here."

"Really?" I asked. "I wonder why."

"She was looking at it."

I knew my sister hadn't been in several weeks and nothing stayed in the same place for that long in Mom's house, but I remained silent. My mother's memory had become unreliable. I opened the box and found the album of photographs and memories from my parents' fortieth wedding anniversary party. I lifted it out.

December 1986. My sisters and I had planned a large party, asking friends and relatives to send memories, stories, anecdotes to commemorate my parents' forty years of marriage. The party was held only four months after the heart attack and triple by-pass surgery that almost took my father's life.

I sat on the sofa, my mother at my side, opened the album and turned the heavy pages. I read positive, powerful memories of my parents' goodness, laughter and joy. And yet as I read, I noticed that everyone had written about the early years of their marriage. The Seattle years, the first decade or so, before they bought ten acres of undeveloped land and moved their growing family out to the Issaquah valley. There were also a few memories of the early Issaquah years, but nothing more. No one had mentioned the later years – the second half of my parents' life together. Those were the dark years, the years when my parents' dream of an idyllic country life fell apart, when my older siblings had become teenagers, and my father lost control because he could not relinquish it with grace and respect. As the youngest of nine children, most of my sister Maureen's short life had been in the second half of my parents' marriage. She was murdered at nineteen.

My mother and I had kissed goodnight and closed our bedroom doors. As I struggled to find sleep, I was flooded with memories of my father. I tried to understand this man who, like Maureen, was now dead. Who was this man, this source of so much joy for some, and of so much pain and confusion for others? My father was a strong, controlling man – a man who insisted that we live by his rules, or we were no longer part of his life. He refused to speak to or even hear mention of the three eldest of his nine children for varying lengths of time. I was the middle child. When it was my turn to be a teenager, I was also disowned for a while. With time all but one of us were reinstated into the family circle by changing our ways, by accepting the conditions of my father's love.

Unable to sleep, I tried to name the gifts my father gave me, the teachings, the values, but I came up empty. I tried to remember the happy, singing, joking man that others remembered, but I couldn't. Instead I remembered the silence. What did my father teach me? I learned hard work, but little pleasure. I learned to be focused and organized, but also controlling and fearful. I learned the judgment that silence held, but not the acceptance. I learned the power and beauty of boundless creative energy and the destructive nature of conditioned love.

 

Up early the following morning, long before my mother would awaken, I headed for the stretch of Pacific beach in front of her home. I walked the sands, breathing the misty, salt air and talking to Maureen. Unlike my father's ashes still held in a sealed urn in Mom's living room, my sister's ashes are not contained. Years before, my parents had released her to the winds over the Pacific Ocean from the stern of my father's fishing boat. They did it alone without the knowledge or involvement of their other eight children. But still I'm glad they did it, for it is at this beach that I feel my sister's presence – in the power of the waves crashing on the sand. Those waves contain my sister, her ashes, and it is there that I am at peace.

If my father taught me the silence of conditioned love, Maureen's gift was voice – voice to speak, to scream, and finally to break the family code of silence enforced by our father. Only months after my father's death, I had sat in my campus office, surfing the Internet for writing programs. My desk faced a window overlooking a large grassy area with a clock tower and student center in the distance. My eyes strayed from the computer screen to the window and back again as I pondered. I knew I didn't want to do another masters or a Ph.D. I knew the writing program, the memoir program offered through the University of Washington Extension would be right. I signed up with no idea why, only that I needed an outlet, a creative release, a safety valve. Within a few weeks I was writing Maureen's story. Through my pen I became her voice, and with time, I began to find my own.

 

By late afternoon another short visit with my mother was over, and it was time to face the long drive back to Seattle, back to my husband and daughter and the circle of love we created together. I packed my small overnight bag, set it by the front door, and folded my mother into my arms.

"Good bye, Mom," I said. "I'll see you again soon. I love you."

"Drive safely," she said. "I love you, too."

Then, as always, I looked up at the ceramic urn on the top of Mom's bookshelf, red and green swirls over a black enamel finish, and I whispered a silent good bye to my father. I climbed into my car, promising my mother that I'd call when I got home. As I drove out of the fenced yard and headed towards the highway, I scanned the beach, gave Maureen a nod of gratitude, and felt my spirit soar.