Motus Mentis

It’s over. My mother died today at 12:10 p.m. Pacific time. My father and I were on our way to the hospital; her best friend, Shirley Sherman, was at her bedside.

She had not really been conscious since late Sunday night; since yesterday afternoon she had been in a deepening coma.

It is a great relief that this awful time is over, and that her long years of pain and struggle are at an end. I will write a proper farewell to this extraordinary woman as soon as I can find the right words.

Later this afternoon, something remarkable happened.

After my mother had died, and we had said our goodbyes in the hospital and made the necessary arrangements, my father and I went down to the beach in Carlsbad for a walk along the seawall (well, I was walking; he was rolling along in his wheelchair). There was a damp cool breeze coming off the ocean, and the sky was a leaden grey, but it did us a lot of good. At about two-thirty we decided to go have something to eat, but the first two places we tried didn’t work out – one only had outdoor seating (not so inviting on such a dreary day), and the other was closed for a private party. So we found ourselves at the Carlsbad avatar of the Claim Jumper, one of those enormous steak-and-rib-and-burger-and-beer franchises.

As we rolled up to our table, I noticed at the booth across from us a sturdy and pleasant-looking fellow of about thirty years, holding an infant. It was nice to see some confirmation of the robustness of our species at such a dark moment, and I commented on his attractive young child (it was, indeed, a cute little thing). We exchanged a few pleasantries, and shortly he was joined by the distaff branch of his growing tribe – his lovely young wife, all aglow with health and fecund blondeness, and two chattering, golden-haired daughters of elementary-school age.

We dined, we in near-silent contemplation of the Abyss, they in happy clamor.

After about half an hour, our neighbors began decamping, always a logistically intensive process with kids that age. As the young Dad passed by, he gave me a cheery smile, and said something that went straight to my solar plexus:

“Now you can be at peace.”

I was dumbfounded, and after a startled moment, blurted out:

“Yeah, you’ve got THAT right…”

I quickly realized how that must have sounded, and said in some vague way that it had come out the wrong way. He didn’t seem offended, and headed for the door. But I felt it necessary to clear the air, and as his wife went by I explained the whole context. She was, of course, as bowled over as I was, and promised to tell her husband when she caught up with him.

I’m still startled. Not “OK, now you guys can have some quiet”, or “Sorry about all the noise”, but “Now you can be at peace,” from a complete stranger, in the booth right next to us, in the restaurant we ended up at after trying two others, three hours after my mother had died.

How curious this world is.

Goodbye, Mom. I love you.