Chapter 13: If Only
Chapter Thirteen If only
In two months, I will be 73 years old and already worlds of eloquence have been lost. Beginning to write this chapter I am looking back to a time when I had just turned 50, to when my son and I had finally spread my mother's ashes in the places where we thought she loved to be. Today his ashes rest inside a box inside a closet in my house waiting for some kind of reconciliation with the earth. Tomorrow will be Memorial Day 2012 and I will remember both his life and his death. He was 43 years old when his time ran out and he left the two people he loved the most behind, his son Cameron and daughter Sierra. In 1989, neither of them had yet been born.
As my fiftieth year began, I was busy in many ways - sponsoring seven women in Recovery and attending meetings and conferences with them, working full-time, and by December celebrating five years clean. During that year, my aunt Marjorie who had outlived my mother and was now 91 was enjoying a brisk art career. In October in San Francisco, the 6.9 magnitude Loma Prieta earthquake struck at 5 pm during warm-up for the World Series between the Oakland A's and the San Francisco Giants, and we worried briefly about how Ron would fare. That same month I started playing tennis seriously, taking lessons at the Portland Tennis Center.
Josh had met Sarah when they were both so very young (21 and 19) and both worked at the Lloyd Center in different stores and in November they traveled together to California where Josh worked for Jeans West in San Bruno as a store manager. Having started at the Foot Locker and then Jeans West in Portland, it was the beginning of many jobs in retail over the next 20+ years. In March, he transferred to The Athlete's Foot in Cupertino as Sales Manager. In April, he threatened suicide for the first time that I can recall. I hoped his father would help him get into counseling but it didn't happen. The echoes of this conversation never reached me. How I wish now that I had sought more support at home to understand how to help Josh. There would follow many years during which he had ongoing emotional ups and downs until finally they led to his darkest moment and the end of his life.
Meanwhile, Jane was applying for graduate school and in April she also left for Europe to visit her father, returning in May. During that visit she got her second tattoo and attended a tattoo convention in Amsterdam with the family. She would only see her father one more time before he died of throat cancer in 2002. She has retained connection with her four half siblings in the years since but has rarely seen them in person.
Around this time, I began to go through menopause. Oh my god, it seemed like there was no one else in the entire world willing to talk about it or admit it existed. I had to find books to read to learn what was going on. It turned out I had very few of the famous symptoms and sailed through the transition with minimum fuss.
In February 1991 Josh was laid off from his last job in California and Sarah's mother found an apartment in northeast Portland for them to return to in April. Excessive mothers, endlessly furrowing the massive heart - she and I hoped so much for them. My father's other sister, Mary, who lived in Portland left for Alabama to spend the remainder of her life with her son.
In May, I met a man who would become the last brief Relationship in my life. Bill was a newcomer to N.A., an angry Vietnam vet, and was going through a treatment center program with the V.A. in Vancouver. Leave it to me to pick a fixer-upper with issues. This connection would take my attention for the next few years before I was able to break it off with the help of therapy. He later married someone else, divorced, and returned to live at his mother's house where he was found dead in a sleeping bag from overdose. It has now been over 20 years since I last told a man I loved him. Though the door is still open, no one has appeared. Most of my friends my age have ruled out this part of life, but I have never given up the idea of The Companion.
Just before my 52nd birthday Cameron was born on July 18, 1991. This was a joyous day. We all were present at the hospital, Josh in the delivery room and the rest of us waiting outside in the hallway. It had been a Caesarian birth. When Josh emerged carrying my first grandchild in his arms, Cameron's tiny cheeks were shaking with the shock of being in the world. It was the beginning of a love story - me and my grandchildren. Several years later, Sierra would arrive and that would be the sum of it. And the two of them would be extraordinary. I've spent entire nights watching them sleeping.
This was a hard time for a young couple with their first baby. Josh was having to commute to Kelso, Washington for his job at Foot Locker. During this time Ron began to take more of a role as a father and grandfather in the family. He was just 44 then, one year older than Josh would be when he died 20 years later. Sarah worked one day a week and on that day Josh was home to be with Cameron. The rest of the time she was home. In November Josh was transferred to the Foot Locker at the Lloyd Center in Portland.
In December of 1991 I celebrated seven years of Recovery. I had been in the difficult relationship with Bill for over seven months by then. Jane continued toward her Master's degree at PSU. How proud I was of her to move on with her education and use her wonderful mind. It was such a happy Christmas that year. Everyone celebrated the addition to the family of precious Cameron. Ron flew up from California and we were all together. I loved you.
During the first six months of 1992, there was much activity in space. NASA launched space shuttle missions three times - in January, March and May. They were called Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavor. In March Russia launched Soyuz, their first manned launch since the collapse of the Soviet Union the previous December. The space program has waxed and waned since then but just this week, August 6, 2012, NASA successfully landed the Mars Rover named Curiosity on the red planet.
In June Josh had his first Father's Day and Jane graduated from PSU. Josh and I both attended the ceremony. Jane got her first job in NE Portland at an agency that served low income and African-American families. In July we celebrated Cameron's first birthday in Laurelhurst Park with many family members. Josh was just 24 years old. How I wish I could reverse time and return to that day in the golden sun with the picnic food and the laughter and love without haste. Today as I write this in on July 18, 2012, Cameron has turned 21 without his father but he wrote this note online: "Thank you to my father, you've always been ready to aid me in anyway shape or form and although you are gone, your spirit lives on through me and all of those who knew you."
The next major event of 1992 was Josh and Sarah's wedding on November 28 at her mother's house in Northeast Portland. Pretty much everybody in the family was there - on Josh's side we were Ron and myself, and Jane and Brian. I found a photographer in my Recovery circles that took all the wedding photographs and did a wonderful job. I also paid for a limo to take Josh and Sarah to Genoa for dinner afterwards. And I gave them a money market fund of $500. Eight days later I reached eight years clean.
I still lived in a tiny duplex on Kelly Street at that time and when Cameron was just less than two he began to come visit me on Saturdays when both Josh and Sarah were at work. This would go on for years to come. It was a headline in my life. He came to me by invisble paths. On June 7, 1993 I wrote in a journal, "there is nothing like a sleeping baby in my arms."
That spring of 1993 I was admitted to Portland State University I had decided to major in French and started from the beginning with language classes. OHSU had a tuition break at that time because they were a state institution, so I could take one class at a time at night. The first class I took was Introduction to Linguistics for which I received an A grade in June 1993.
If Cameron is reading this some time in the future, the address where you lived at this time was 2339 NE Everett. Things were tense at home and in photos you look subdued. We built castles, cardboard houses and made puzzles and read books. This quiet child, this big-eyed child, what did you make of it all when you were two years old?
That summer I turned 54. I took Native American Fiction at PSU and once again got an A grade. But the big excitement towards the end of this year was deciding to buy my first and only house. Using money my mother left me, I took a class about buying a house and paid only $5000 down on the loan for it. A friend I knew from Recovery was a real estate agent who led me to the house I chose, which I never regretted. I had pictured to myself a garden and this house had a curving English garden in the back and flowers along the sidewalk in the front that convinced me this was going to be my home (and it has been now for a long span of years).
In Winter Term at PSU I began the French classes with First Year French and got an A. In December came the first death from AIDS of someone I knew well. He had been my sponsor for a brief period when I needed one and contributed a lot to the NA community. By January 1994 I was installed in my new home where I have lived ever since. It was so wonderful - a whole new lease on life, as they say. The house fit me like a glove. And the yard was a magical adventure. It is a tiny house - 700 square feet - but I've never wished for more. The street it sits on is quiet and well kept. In it are many of the things that were in my parent's house - furniture, my father's carvings, my mother's jewelry and dishes. I sleep in the bed frame my parents used to this day. It keeps them near to me. In the Spring I took the last term of first-year French and got an A again.
That summer Cameron turned three and we had a party on my back porch in my new house. It was sunny and peaceful and all was well. I put a card on the wall when I moved into my one and only house of my life that says, "To cleanse the Heart, to unlock the lock, to open the Door, to Live at last." How could we know that my son had only 17 more years to live.
So I will reach for every tiny joy I can,
Each blessed touch from those I love
And those who love me,
All the miracles that can be felt at any moment
Of my days, and I will let the sadness of your leaving go
And hold you gladly in my heart forever.
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