Until I Say Good-Bye (8 page)

The Yurt

M
y trip with Nancy to the Yukon was scheduled for October, about a month after Mom was hospitalized. The trip of a lifetime, but I almost didn't go. Mom's condition was critical as the date approached. I couldn't leave her.

Then Mom improved. She stabilized and gave me the okay. She wanted me to experience the wonder of the northern lights, and she knew how much Nancy meant to me.

I never told her I was making another stop on the way.

There were no direct flights from south Florida to Vancouver, where we would catch a plane to the Arctic. When I realized that, I scheduled the layover for San Francisco. Nancy and I would visit Ellen, then continue on to Canada.

I kept that part of the trip a secret from my parents. It would have been too complicated to explain, and I didn't want to cause Mom pain.

Now, Nancy and I had decided that on this trip there would be no skimping. “Life's too short to stay in crappy hotels,” I said. We booked the Four Seasons in Vancouver. And we rented a town car and driver to tour San Francisco before heading to Ellen's house, an hour away.

Our driver was named Irving. He wore a black suit and black chauffeur cap, but looked barely old enough to drive. He assured us, though, he had been chauffeuring around the Bay Area for years. And he had a GPS.

The three of us bopped around San Francisco: took a tour of the Bay, had an Irish coffee at the Buena Vista Cafe, went to Chinatown.

We turned a corner and caught sight of a rocky island in an azure bay. “Wow! Is that Alcatraz?” Nancy asked.

“I don't know,” Irving said.

I had heard of these creatures: young people who have grown up with GPS and have no sense of place or direction without it. Who never see the world around them, only the screen. But not recognizing Alcatraz after years in San Fran? Ridiculous!

Nancy had her sights on dinner at a certain restaurant in Chinatown, recommended by a friend. Miss Google-vision rarely forgets a meal (or misses one). She can recall years later the crispy parsnips sprinkled on the ricotta-and-spinach ravioli in butter sage sauce. And woe to the soul who interrupts her daily gastronomic pas de deux.

I was envisioning a repeat of my last meal in Chinatown—dim sum, ceremoniously served, steamer baskets and plates of bite-size delicacies covering the white linen table.

Sam Wo was not that place.

For starters, the entrance was a kitchen door propped open. A colander full of entrails draining was our first sight.

The cooks shooed us past the steaming woks to a dark stairwell. Nancy helped me up the stairs into the dining room, which looked as if it belonged on a ship. A Viking ship. The ceilings were low and the tables utilitarian blocks with benches. A dumbwaiter lined with newspaper brought food up from the kitchen.

“Let's just order something fun,” I said.

So we did. Singapore Style Chow Mai Fun. It was $5.25. Nancy's friend had led us to the cheapest dump in Chinatown.

I don't remember the Sam Wo food being good, bad, or otherwise. No, I blotted from my mind the fact that I ate there right after using Sam Wo's bathroom. Nancy took pictures, it was so dirty. Dust so thick on the exhaust fan you could braid it. A white sink with just one ungrimed area where the water and soap hit.

“That was an adventure!” I said as I returned to the table.

We would chuckle over and over about our Sam Wo experience. And we were not a whit surprised to learn months later that the health department had shut down the restaurant, citing a host of fire and sanitation code violations. Including rodent feces in the kitchen.

Our chauffeur Irving picked us up at the kitchen door. We drove over the Golden Gate bridge at sunset, stopping for a photo. There was a bride doing the same, freezing in her strapless gown.

I had told Nancy to pack only one carry-on bag for the trip, hoping to travel light. Which Nancy did. Then I pulled up with two suitcases overstuffed with full-length cashmere coats and more sweaters than there were days on the trip.

I couldn't roll the heavy suitcases with my weakened arms, so Nancy did the lugging. “Whaddaya got in here?” she asked. “A piano?”

“No. Two boot sets. Two coats. Six cashmere sweaters.”

So we were stylin' in our chauffeured black town car and cashmere when we pulled into hippie headquarters—the Sebastopol town square.

We were early, so we parked to kill some time, bought a German chocolate cake to take to Ellen and hot tea to sip on the square.

At this time, there were demonstrations going on called “Occupy [Insert Name of City Here].” An international protest movement against social and economic inequality, people camping out in cities around the world.

There was an “Occupy Sebastopol” under way. We sat nearby, enthused to see the social activism, talking of how if we were younger we might have joined in. Laughing at ourselves. The men nearby thought we were laughing at them.

“Ack! We look like capitalist pigs. Let's go. Where's Irving?”

Ellen's home is surrounded by an extraordinary garden with eighty-five varieties of roses. The setting is secluded and cool; the breeze sweeps through her home, tinkling wind chimes all around. She set us up in an airy bedroom, asking only that we close the shutters during the day to keep sunlight from fading the family quilt on a wall.

Ellen loved her childhood on a farm in Iowa, where they didn't have indoor plumbing until she was seven and electricity until she was fourteen. “Idyllic,” she said. There were mementos, like the quilt, all around.

She left the farm for adventure. She studied nursing in Minnesota. Took a bus, while pregnant, to California, then cross-country to Florida. After giving me up for adoption, she continued nursing—including in and around Haight-Ashbury, the San Francisco 'hood where drug culture and psychedelic rock flourished.

Ellen was indeed a hippie, she said, but she never “checked out.” Always maintained a job. Retired from years of training nursing students to work with psychiatric patients.

As Nancy pointed out, Hollywood could not script two more opposite women than Ellen and Mom.

A hippie and a Baptist.

An adventurous experimenter and a devoted housewife. I doubt Mom knew anything about drugs.

Mom wanted more than housewife-hood for Stephanie and me. She wanted us to have choices, and she drove us hard to succeed. Mom was an academic taskmaster. Sweated each low test grade. REQUIRED straight A's.

She never made us wash dishes. “It's more important that you study,” she'd say, washing the dishes herself.

And it worked. Both Steph and I were top students in high school and entered fine universities.

My first semester of college—my first time away from Mom—I went wild. The first night, I drank so much spiked fruit punch I hurled red for hours. Then I fell for that UNC swimmer and his four-foot bong. I squeaked by my classes with C's.

The second year I lived with Nancy, the consummate student. She completed projects months before they were due, always earning A's. She urged me to go to the library rather than frat parties and helped keep me straight. With her help, I made my best grades since Mom.

I have always needed someone like that to help rein in my wild side.

Ellen, it soon became apparent, may not have been that person.

I had brought my adoption records, and we discussed them one night. Ellen read the comments on each page, remarking over and over how they were “free of judgment, free of judgment.” Amazed. Thankful. Ellen, I realized, was fearful of being judged for what she had done.

It was heavy stuff. Tense. Emotional. I needed a cigarette, but I was out. So I asked Ellen if she had one.

“No,” she replied.

To lighten the mood, Ms. Phi Beta Kappa joked: “How about some pot?”

Ellen perked up. “No. But I have a friend who has some.”

She called her friend, and we drove over to pick it up. I asked if we needed to pay. “No, no. I did her a big favor. She owes me,” Ellen said.

Back at Ellen's house, she got out her pot paraphernalia box. Rolling papers. Pipes. Little one-hit wonders.

“Some of this is my daughter's,” Ellen said.

Nancy gave me the can-you-imagine-doing-this-with-Tee? look.

We smoked up. We laughed and laughed. Nancy and I helped Ellen sort through a host of old coats. She tried them on for us, and we gently reminded her of the decade in which they had gone out of style.

Lying in bed that night, I had an epiphany. Mom's hard hand had made me the successful person I was today. My work ethic and self-reliance: those were gifts from Tee.

“Man,” I said to Nancy. “I am glad Ellen didn't raise me. Can you imagine me with a pot-smoking mom? I'd have ended up barefoot, stoned, and living in a yurt.”

Living in a yurt. Nancy and I have laughed about that phrase ever since.

T
he next day, Ellen took us to the Sonoma coastline to Goat Rock Beach. To high hills overlooking the Pacific Ocean. There's a massive stone outcrop just offshore. Goats once lived upon it, thus the beach's name.

There are vistas there where you can stare in wonder at miles of craggy coastline and wide beaches. We walked the overlooks. We took pictures.

California sits upon fault lines, where Earth's tectonic plates crash constantly into one another. Throwing up these rocks and cliffs, reshaping entire continents a millimeter at a time. The football stadium at the University of California at Berkeley, which sits directly upon a fault line, is being split apart by this stealthy force. Fourteen inches apart, to be precise, since being built in 1922.

I had once told Ellen that finding her had been like an earthquake. That I would need time to shake off the shock and find balance again.

I felt balance there at the coastline after my stoned epiphany. I felt balance between the dynamic woman who made my body and soul, and the devoted mother who reared me, controlled me, and shaped me.

As we left Goat Rock, I stared at the trees along the highway. Windswept cypress, their branches all pointing the same direction, whipped into form by invisible forces.

Forces still at work today. Shaping continents. Coastlines. The human soul.

Closing the Loop

I
n California, Ellen explained the pregnancy to me simply. That it was a sexual fling and nothing more. That the man, Panos Kelalis, was a playboy, and she saw no future with him. That he was intent on returning to his home country of Cyprus, and giving the baby up for adoption seemed the only way out.

Ellen talked of how she plowed through the pregnancy with no emotion. How she told none of her family. How she ran off to Florida and worked as a surgical nurse so no patient was awake to ask her about the baby.

They put her to sleep for my birth, so she would have no memory of it. Against the advice of the adoption workers, Ellen asked to see the baby—to see me—in the nursery, knowing she was having no emotional reaction.

And still she felt nothing.

Wow, that's cold! I thought when I first heard her say that.

Wow, that's strong! I tend to think now.

Ellen acknowledged that as a nurse she understood abortion and could have found a medical colleague to do it. In fact, she later aborted a second unplanned pregnancy. “I have no idea why I never considered it,” she said.

I told Ellen I understood her decisions.

To have the baby.

To leave me behind.

If I got pregnant by some man I had zip-zero connection with, and I would have to move someplace I didn't know and never wanted to live in . . . say, a one-stoplight farm town in North Dakota . . . well, I wouldn't go either.

Which is to say I might consider the exact same thing.

Consider, yes, but Ellen did one thing I could not abide: she didn't tell the father.

Panos never knew he had a daughter.

I would have told the father. I would have done it in fairness to him and the child. For I was taught a deep sense of conscience by the two extraordinary people who raised me. My mom and dad.

For years, Dad volunteered at a nursery for AIDS babies. He donated medicine from his pharmacy and went every Wednesday night to hold the babies and rock them. He lived for two years in Ethiopia as a missionary. He started a puppet ministry, hand-making eight hundred puppets on a sewing machine, so that he could share with children the story of Jesus Christ.

I have been frustrated since my illness by Dad's lack of warmth. He is a great man, a caring soul, but he has not spoken to me of ALS. When I told him recently I was signing up for hospice, he said, “Oh.” Then changed the subject.

I know he hurts. I have heard him say, when he thought I couldn't hear, “I don't cry, because if I start, I will never stop.”

I thought of that, when going over this section in my mind. I thought of how Dad couldn't say those words to me.

But how his actions speak volumes.

How all our actions speak more than we can know.

I thought of how, in a moment, without even stopping to think, Dad rattled off ten feature newspaper articles I had written, even though he had never spoken to me about them. Ten or fifteen years later, he knew the titles. He knew the details. He talked of how I had gathered the information. He remembered the methods I had used.

I wanted, in this last year, to close the loop with Mom and Dad. To heal the rift that had formed as I explored my birth parents, something that did not diminish my love for them.

I understand now that that moment will not occur. We will not talk our way to understanding. It's just not in their natures.

And as ALS reminds me each day, you can't fight nature.

Rather, I embrace the small things. Like the words of a friend who talked to Mom and Dad the day after an article about my illness and book deal appeared in the newspaper.

The friend had been mentioned, so Mom went to get him the article. She had fifteen copies of the newspaper, in a neat stack in a cabinet.

“Give this to your mother,” she said, handing him one.

Not to just anyone: to your mother.

Because your mother is the person who loves you. Who has always loved you. Who is proud of you, even if she keeps those feelings locked away in a drawer.

I took many journeys over the course of the year with the people I love. I never even considered a journey with Mom.

Rather, I traveled three thousand miles to California and found peace with the person who had been one mile away all along.