FOR ETERNITY
Mom and Dad met at the University of Oregon during the heydays of Prohibition. They were invited to many parties and speakeasy events because Dad played the piano and Mom was a beautiful coed. They had three children and had been married for 20 years, when dad left our home and their country club lifestyle, to take an apartment with his nurse Katie. Katie was an attractive redhead who had been dad’s nurse for many years. There is no way of knowing how long Dad and Katie had been in an intimate relationship.
He moved out shortly after his mother died in 1951, I was 13. He explained that a man may choose one kind of woman with which to have children and a different kind with which to grow old. He also told me that I was now the man of the house and that I would need to take care of the house and the women. The “women” being my mom and two sisters.
Mom was distraught for the first couple of years as her sense of loss turned to loneliness. She was slender and attractive at 45 when Dad left. Men asked her out, but she politely declined their pursuits. When asked why, she would explain “I have no interest in other men.” Then she would add “I suppose I could be called a one-man woman.” She lived the next 14 years resisting the label of divorcee. Then, after Dad died, in 1964, if someone would ask, she would explain “I am a widow.” She told us that she thought of herself as a widow because Dad had died for her when he left.
Dad was buried in the cemetery plot that he and Mom had purchased years earlier when they wished to be together for eternity. About a year later, Kay wrote to Mom asking if she would be willing to sell her grave plot next to Dad’s. Mom did not respond. Several years later Kay wrote again asking to buy her plot. Over the interval, Mom had spoken with us about her dilemma. On the one hand, she cherished the idea of being next to Dad for eternity. On the other hand, she was concerned that people would think she kept the plot in retribution against Kay for stealing her husband. She was not, and did not want to be remembered for what would be seen as a spiteful act. So she sadly gave up the one last, connection she had with the one man in her life, and sold the plot to Kay.
Aside from the eight years she spent surrounded by young men as the house mother for a fraternity at Oregon State. Mom lived the second half of her life in solitude. She enjoyed occasional social occasions with her women friends but for the most part her martini before dinner was taken alone. When she was 88 Mom was diagnosed with Lung Cancer. She was given the option of surgery and chemotherapy which, she was told, would extend her life six months to a year but would be accompanied by months of pain and discomfort. She declined feeling that the six months of pain would not be worth an additional six months of life to be followed by the same slow death a half year later. About half way into her last year, she asked me to buy a bottle of gin for her martinis. When I came back from the liqueur store with a half gallon she protested that she would not live long enough to drink it all. I told her that I expected her to last long enough to finish the bottle. It turned out that, with no treatment, she lived a year after diagnosis.
My sisters and I had a disagreement about how to disperse mom’s ashes. They wished to cast them into the Puget Sound off Alki where Mom had grown up. I had another idea. So we settled our dispute by dividing her ashes. My sisters spread theirs on the sound with a brief ceremony. I waited for a summer morning just after dawn, when no one would be in the cemetery, I went, with a day pack on my back, in search of Dad’s grave. I found his grave and sat down. Out of my pack, I took a trowel with which I cut out a round plug of turf. I set it aside, to later hide my work. I then dug a hole above his chest. And put the earth into a plastic bag which I stowed in my pack. Next to come out of my pack came the jar of Mom’s ashes. I poured them into the hole. I then took out two glasses, the last of mom’s half-gallon jug of gin, and a bottle of vermouth. There was just enough gin left in the jug to mix two martini’s, dry just as Mom liked them. As I sipped my martini, I poured sips of mom’s martini into her ashes. While we shared Mom’s last martini, I toasted her reunion with Dad for eternity.
Copy right 7/31/2022, Theodore “Tod” Lundy, Architect