Losing one's parents is hard.
My father and I had no relationship. The last time I saw him, I was seven years old. He never tried to contact me. When I was grown and married with children I called him in Chicago where he lived. He told me I had the wrong number. I knew I didn't.
When he died of stomach cancer in the hospital when he was sixty-one years old, which happened not too many years after my calling him, he listed his sister as next of kin. She was on vacation in Australia. The police where I lived in Portland came to my home to tell me he'd died. It seems he kept all the Christmas cards I'd sent him over the years and this is how they got my address. I didn't go back to Chicago for his funeral. I still wish that I had.
My stepdad, who I loved, died in the West Los Angeles V.A. hospital of lung cancer with no warning when he was 64. He was a very practical man, he didn't want any fanfare surrounding his passing and his wishes were granted. I wish I’d been there to say goodbye. My sisters were with him.
After my stepdad died, my mother moved to Oregon to live with my family and me. She was dying from emphysema. She lived with us most of the time for three years. She was always a difficult person to live with and her grave illness didn’t change that.
Although, she was in and out of the hospital several times, she managed to travel to New York by car with her longtime lover twice. On the second trip they got married and went to France to see my uncle. On the trip back to the states she was so ill, she was taken off the plane on a gurney, loaded into an ambulance and taken directly to the hospital.
As I did with her first trip east, I flew to NY to drive her home to Oregon in her car. There were times when I’d look over at her skinny body and fluid filled legs and think she’d died, right there in the car next to me on I-80. She hadn’t.
After a hospital stay and a short stay in a nursing home, she came back to our house for a couple of months. Then she went back into the hospital. The night she died, I visited her and told her that she couldn’t smoke when she came home because she’d be on oxygen. I guess she didn’t relish that idea so she died. She was 61 years old. She smoked as many as five packs of cigarettes a day up until the day she died.
Phillip Morris sent advertisements to our home for several years until I contacted them and told them they they’d already killed her.
Love her or hate her, I think about her more often than not.
