She is just away

The summer of 1971, at the age of nine, I had an up-close and personal introduction to the meaning of loss. My sister Phillis and I lived with our Mom, Beverly Jean Wiemann-Wulf in a rented house on Harrison Street in Exira, Iowa. My mom worked two jobs nights as a waitress, one at The Shed in Audubon, and the other at a then, Conoco truck-stop where State Highway 71 intersects with Interstate 80. Memories I’ve somehow managed not to forget since those days, flow back to me now in fragments of what then must have been a hard life for my mom. Divorced, with an expanding collection of bills overflowing their corner of the kitchen table, Ray Price’s “For the Good Times” in heavy rotation on the radio, she had a stubborn consistency at dozing off on Sundays in our regular pew at the Holy Trinity Catholic Church. I believe she must have been doing everything she could to pull-off a comeback against impossible odds. My mom was a beautiful and good human being, who embraced the promise of tomorrow, no matter how dim the prospect might appear in the current light of day. She always did her best.

You develop a respect for the fragility of life when you watch your own mother, in what seemed then only a matter of months, go from a vital force of a woman to a pale emaciated resemblance. It all began she, sitting across the table from me, apologizing for “ruining my supper” after she had to run from the table to vomit in the bathroom. Me sitting there feeling guilty, letting her believe she really had ruined my appetite, all along knowing the real reason was the barbeque beef on a bun was never going to be eaten anyway. Later I would come to understand these were the symptoms of someone in an advanced stage of stomach cancer. As if it wasn’t enough raising a family alone, she would have to wage a battle on yet another front.

The street sign hanging over 36th and Meredith marked the termination point for our daily trek to Immanuel Hospital in Omaha, Nebraska. Looking up from the back seat window of my Aunt Gwen’s car each time, it seemed like some other worldly place, far from reality. Yet this will be the place I will remember the rest of my life, the place where my mom makes an attempt at recovery from a surgical procedure that essentially removes most of her digestive tract.

In-between visits Aunt Gwen keeps things hopeful. She orders a bucket of chicken, and Uncle Don brings it home after work at the US Post Office. The kids Randy, Jim, Pam, and I gather around the kitchen table and talk about the day’s events. Gwen is always dressed in a red, white, and blue coordinated outfit from her spacious, Amway themed, wardrobe. I remember a pair of patent leather pumps, cream, with red and blue accents. She seemed to me like the most sophisticated woman I’d ever known. Randy and I sneak out late at night onto the patio, slip beneath the kiddie pool cover, swimming circles. Round-and-round we go. Days we spend playing cards in a triangle-shaped tree house out back. I think how different life here is than the place I call home. Some days a phone call comes in from the hospital. Mom is resting quietly now Gwen says, and her smile calms me. I imagine her lying there in her hospital bed, dreaming, and in her dream she rests adrift in a sea of clover while a gentle breeze eases her pain, and the sweet smell of summer calms her every worry. I fantasize I am drifting by, and I whisper on the wind, “Feel better Mom, I love and need you so much.”

It was a summer of best intents. My mom, trying to survive, Aunt Gwen trying to keep it together, the medical staff trying to do the impossible, and me, wanting to so badly get my mom back, all of us without satisfaction in the end. Then that day, I can only remember Aunt Gwen saying, “Do you understand what he’s saying?” I can barely stand, the doctor with only a vacant glance in my direction from the doorway of my mother’s room. My insides feel as though they have fallen out of me, and all I can manage is a blank stare as my head begins to spin. I remember nodding in confirmation but thinking all the while I was being lied to. My mom is not dead. Not here in this place, not without a last kiss, no not now, it’s all much too soon, and too much to bear. She is just away. She will be back any moment. If we just wait, be patient, she will open her eyes, smile, and we will go on together. Aunt Gwen bends down, puts her arm around my shoulder. Her face is strained, not just worn as usual, red cheeked, and tears in her eyes. I don’t recall crying, only a resolve to not believe in things as they appear. Late into that evening, and into the next day I believed the phone would ring and we would be called back to the hospital because Mom had reawakened and she would be wondering where we are. It was all just a terrible mistake. But, no matter how firm my focus, nor how pure my desire, reality prevailed.

I’m packed up now, and ready to make the trip back to Exira for the funeral. Sitting on the edge of the bed alone, Aunt Gwen quietly settles in beside me and after a bit asks how I feel and if I want to live with her now. I could go to school here, make new friends, and be a part of the family. She says with watery eyes and runny nose, “I promised your mother I would take care of you and your sister.” She puts her hand on my knee applying a reassuring pressure. I feel hollow, like I cannot feel safe at this moment, or for that matter, feel anything ever again really.

After the long drive back, I remember bolting from the car and busting through the front door at 219 North Kilworth Street where my grandparents, John and Lula “Peg” Wiemann lived. Calling out, I can find only framed prints of Jack and Bobby Kennedy on the walls but, reaching the kitchen I meet Grandma at the door to the “washroom”. She looks at me with those same watery eyes and runny nose and instantly freezes me in place. “You don’t want to go away and leave us do you? This is your home.” I instantly burst into tears and so does she. I feel loved.

I have played back these moments in my memory many times since then, each separated only by a couple of hours and a hundred miles or so, these women, my mother, my aunt and my grandmother left a mark that defines me to this day. Life is hard sometimes. People you care the world for, die, but we are strong and will surely go on. Being knocked down leads only to the inevitable getting back up, all the while knowing fully well being knocked down again is only a matter of course. It is who we are to be there when someone needs you, no matter the situation. Stand up for someone. Someday, you may need someone to stand up for you.

The days following the funeral are marked by shouting and arguments in my grandparents’ home, leaving a divide in its wake. Afterward, we will not see Aunt Gwen for the better part of a decade, except for the occasional holiday card. For years, I carry a guilt thinking I was the cause of all this anger and despair in the family. Years later still, living in California, I bring my now wife, Lesli Johnson, home to meet Grandma, who is living at the Exira Care Center. Aunt Gwen is there too and on first meeting it feels awkward, yet there it is, still the warm eyes and smiling face. Still the intelligent vibrant mind. Still the strong and confident tone of coming from life experience beyond my own. I want to tell her I am sorry that I let her down all those years ago. I wonder if she thinks of me as having turned-out well in life so far, and what it has been like for her, carrying on all this time without her sister, my mother. None of that would see the light of day.

Looking back, Grandma gone long ago, and now, in proximity to my Aunt Gwen having passed on recently, I cannot say I can make much sense of it all. I do know I have carried a weight, a persistent wanting of more from life, and a disappointment at having not been more than I am at times. Although I wear a scar, mine has been to push on, in full recognition of it, but not making too much of it, fearing if I examined it too carefully, it would define me.

Reality persists still, leaving me with only memories of the moments we collected between us. There is a hollow place inside me, I cannot fill. It seems the shadow cast from the street sign at 36th and Meredith turned out longer than I ever envisaged. At the beginning or end of a day with the sun hanging in a pocket carved from the horizon, or in the darkness in my love’s embrace, or in realizing amid the succession, once again another son whose hand has outgrown my grasp, I carry on. And, in life I am buoyed by the occasional lucidity presented by the similarity of the sound of my sister’s laugh, or the scent of a drawn Calgon bath, or the taste of a Butterfinger just plucked from the freezer, or on seeing a lilac in full bloom, it is not so difficult to imagine really, she is just away.