Five months later I took time for mom’s memorial service. My company gave me the whole month. Though there was an implicit suggestion that four weeks mourning sat as deep as the water on Long Key.
How do you mourn your mom?
Maybe it’s easier when you’ve had other family members to practice on. But I never had grandparents, aunts, or uncles. Not even a father. Just mom. And she went from feeling a little under the weather to dead in five months.
Mom wanted her ashes scattered back in South Carolina, a little up from North Myrtle Beach, just south of the state line.
‘Is that where you lived before I was born?’ I asked her, listening to the wheeze of her breath assisted by a machine which hummed like a refrigerator in need of servicing. Her skin was gray, like the vitality was already gone from her body and all that remained was a determination to not be dead. Maybe this was why. Maybe she wanted to tell me about where she lived before I was born.
‘Yes,’ she said, and smiled wanly while squeezing my fingers. ‘Lived right on the beach in a place that cost millions but, after the third coronavirus outbreak, had been defaulted on and then let out for peanuts by the bank.’ She leaned back and closed her eyes. ‘Actually, I’m not sure the bank knew about it. I think the realtor was letting it on the sly. You should find out.’
‘Maybe I will. Who was the realtor?’
‘I don’t remember. I’m thirsty.’
It felt like a brush off, that she’d reached the point in the bulwark of her past I wasn’t allowed behind and she still wasn’t ready to let me in.
Mom died August twenty-seven, twenty-sixty-nine. Two days after her cremation I sat in her attorney’s office and he read her will. Discovering she had twenty-two million in assets came as a surprise. She didn’t leave it all to me, but I figured I could be comfortable with thirty-million. Among the shares she held were a block of five-hundred in the company which ran the International Space Station. I’d never got round to buying any myself.
I went east to spread mom’s ashes over windswept dunes. Ralf offered to come with me, but I needed some time alone. The ashes dribbled away on a light breeze, coloring the sand lightly. I watched the sea roll over long inundated homes and the feeling in my chest was of coming home. Such a strong pull I wondered if it was a feeling of belonging because mom had been here, even while I didn’t know where mom, or any of our family came from.
Watching Atlantic waves roll mercilessly round the jagged remains of an apartment block I decided it was time to find out about family, to dig around and unearth my roots. It’s amazing the freedom which sudden unexpected wealth provides. And that’s another thing I wanted to know about. Where did the money come from? Most of it was investments, some of them going back to when I was a kid. Just something else mom never spoke about.
A gust of cool air heralded the arrival of a squall, the clouds loomed with dark threat. Sprinting to my hire car I almost made it, but almost was plenty of time to be soaked to the skin, hair flattened to the scalp, and tears streaming down the face while I heaved with sobs, because the rain was washing mom’s ashes away, and that meant she was really gone.
The car speaker clicked on.
‘This is mobile assistance. We believe you may be experiencing physical distress. Would you like help at your location.’
The voice was synthetic, an A.I. approximation of concern. Its faux soothing tones, the knowledge that the words came from an algorithm and not a well-spring of human comfort deepened the anguish even as I gulped in enough air to say, ‘I’m fine. No assistance is required.’
Silence. The car accepting my answer even as tears continued to flow and I began sobbing again.
Until now, this moment, grief had been a conceptual emotion, a thing acknowledged as existing, but never personally experienced. I’d sympathized with a coworker who miscarried, been conciliatory to those who lost family or friends. But none of that was my grief, my loss.
For the past two weeks what I’d assumed to be grief was only coping with absence - a yearning for mom’s presence which wasn’t fulfilled. It was like the week spent at a Wyoming wilderness ranch where the technology dial was wound all the way back to the early nineteen-hundreds, well before there was instant mass communication. The inability to call home, to speak to mom at a moments notice, had resonated somewhere deep and gave me a semi-conscious background anxiety which was only controlled by the over-riding knowledge that it was only for a week.
Somewhere in the past fortnight I convinced myself, allowed myself to believe, that mom wasn’t really dead, just not contactable. The delusion was gone, washed away like her remains.
The feeling left was hollow and empty. Every attempt to remember some time we shared together was gone too. The only thing that came to mind was the coffin sliding through the curtain at the crematorium. Maybe my memories had been scattered with mom’s remains.
I’d never get to speak with her again, and she’d never meet the grandchild I’m pretty sure I’m carrying.
Rain pummeled the car again. This time it wasn’t a passing squall but the precursor to a storm whose forefront was gathered a few miles out to sea, and now raced with the incoming tide towards the shore. Light from the setting sun fell on the dark cloud mass but failed to penetrate, giving the illusion of something solid approaching.
A bolt of lightning cracked down the front of the cloudwall, a thick streak of incandescence. A few seconds later the sundered air rolled over the shore. The storm was still nine or ten miles away, but it wouldn’t be for long. I started the car, and headed for the hotel.
With every lightning strike and thump of thunder memories returned, as if the squall had taken mom away, then the storm returned her.
The first to come back, fittingly, was an impromptu evening drive from home, all the way up through L.A. to avoid a rare storm that was forecast. We spent the night in a motel near Oxnard and laughed at how funny the name sounded. Other memories followed. Some were old friends, fond recollections that would normally spring to mind with ease, others were strange, almost new, until I poked around their edges and joined them up with other events in the time-line of our life.
But for all the memories there was nothing that was more than mom and me, and the things which happened when we were together. There were no memories of grandparents, of aunts or uncles, cousins, or other vaguely related people. There had to be some still in the area.
The following days were clear and bright, the air fresh and invigorating. I sat at a table facing the ocean and set up search parameters on my device: Her date of birth from an old driving license which she gave me to put in my first purse, which I’d kept in every one since; her social security number; her name - and, while typing, I thought about the unusualness of a mother calling her daughter the same name. Some old posh families did it and you ended up with Gunder F. Hunderson IV or something equally strange, but for Ursula White to call her daughter Ursula White was odd, a naming convention that wasn’t common by any means.
Of course, mom never made me feel like Ursula White the Second, just her special daughter. Even so, I wasn’t sure I’d have the chutzpah to name a daughter in the same manner.
There were no middle names, no maiden name, married name. Just in case, I also asked for returns on pre-adoption names.
The search command had an annoying audio cue which I’d forgotten to disable, but at least it confirmed things should be happening. I ordered another latte, and sat watching waves. When the waiter brought the coffee over he opened the sliding window screen which turned the closed cafe into an open space. The sound of water was distant enough to be a gentle murmur. People lay on the sand, some played in the waves, or swam beyond them to float in quieter water and watch a windsurfer with bright yellow sail speed along the length of the beach. Various windsurfers rode the waves, often falling in the attempt, climbing back on, dragging the sail up only to fall off again, and then still have another attempt.
Like back on the east coast, time and money had been put in to recreate the beaches which disappeared under a rising sea. Now the sand was some way back from a double row of what had once been beach front properties. The jagged remains of some apartments still stood above the waves, in other places buoys marked out channels where properties had been cleared, or there had been none to start.
One thing different was a relaxed air here that was missing back at Carlsbad. Maybe it was the feeling that people were enjoying themselves and not aching to portray casual coolness, or superior proficiency, not seeking to give the image of being too cool for Venice, Sunset, or Santa Monica.
Halfway down the latte my device pinged, the search was finished. It was quicker than expected. I was used to running searches which took hours.
The file was a list of databases referenced and results found. As expected mom was in the California voters register and drivers license register. Her tax returns showed, and an application to redevelop the house, from fifteen years ago. There was a wealth of information going all the way back to her purchasing the house in Carlsbad in July twenty-forty-three.
Missing was any links to Ursula White in North or South Carolina, apart from registration of my birth on December twenty-second, twenty-forty.
Part One Here
Part Three on Wednesday
text by stuartcturnbull picture by AberrantRealities via Pixabay