Mother's Day

Mother's Day
by Ron Morgan

(This article first appeared in the Summer 1997 issue of the Bastard Quarterly.)

This Mother's Day will come, and after my kids give Loren their home made cards, and after I have some coffee and a half dozen morning cigarettes, I will hike up Bernal Mountain to visit my a-mom.

Bernal Mountain isn't much of a mountain, just an undeveloped promontory above my neighborhood, bristling with microwave antennas, laced with trails and dog runs. There are a couple of rock croppings that jut out toward the City skyline, and there is where I will sit. From these rocks I spread my mother's ashes, June 18, 1995.

I don't have much to say to her. The words have all been spewed out of me, during visits to the beach in the dead of night, with letters asking, "Why?" and ionger entreaties,' which I offered up to her memory in a blazing Bic sacrifice, hoping the smoke might catch her attention. When that didn't seem to work, I'd yell at the surf. And go home. And Iook at the box containing her ashes.

The box arrived one day while I was at work. The UPS man remarked that the parcel seemed heavy for one so small. Loren said, "Of course its heavy, it's my mother-in-law." The Neptune Society had fucked up and sent it to me, against the instruction and payment to store her until I figured out what to do with her. Interring her next to my father was prohibitively expensive, as he was buried cheek to jowl with some army buddies, and would have to be moved to a new spot along with Carmen. That was her name, Carmen. I couldn't figure out what to do with her. I was torn between chucking her out of a moving car and fevered grandiose gestures of memorial storage. The only thing I knew for sure was she didn't want to be scattered into the ocean, because she told me so several times over a course of 30 years.

She left no specific instructions, though, so I put her on a shelf beneath the shrine I used to meditate. Instead of insight meditation, I did this: Breathe in: my mother sitting at her dressing table, telling me the stories of her family, chatting, turning, and wiping a smudge from my face with a Kleenex dampened by her spit. Breathe out: why did you lie to me? How could you lie to rne? Why did you lie to me? Repeat.

I stopped meditating. I put Carmen in a drawer. I discussed my dilemma with Loren, but no one else. Carmen shamed me from the drawer, then from a shelf where I used her for a bookend, then back to the shrine, because though I didn't have a clue what I was doing, I did know that as an ex-person she deserved some sort of sacred space, however provisional that may have been.

Discovering I was adopted a couple of weeks after Carmen's death put a big crimp in my grieving cha-cha. Every mournful memory was woven into a curse. I eventually succeeded in not thinking about it for long stretches of time, but that didn't make it any better when I did. Years passed, and I let this reproachful situation eat at me slowly.

Then something clicked, I don't know what, maybe nothing more than the same urge that gets us out of an uncomfortable chair we've been sitting in too long. I chose her birthday, and after dinner I went to the basement to prepare her. She was in an embossed metal box, welded shut for an apparent eternity, and I had to use an old fashioned can opener to cut it open. It was a struggle. I worried about letting fly her ashes to the basement floor, commingling with redwood sawdust and bits of solder droppings. She was placidly resting in an ultra heavy duty plastic bag, tied at the top with a twistie.

I strode up the hill with Carmen's baggy nested within a double Safeway plastic shopping bag under one arm, disguised because I had become aware that what I planned was illegal, and counting prayer beads with the other hand, because I was praying a Buddhist rosary as I went. I was undisturbed as I stood on the rock outcropping watching the City radiating out from the foot of Bernal Mountain. I searched the night sky for the owl that lives up there, but she was out, hunting. I talked to Carmen, look I' m still fucking mad as hell, but I can't keep this up. Rest here, I like this place, I come here a lot. I hope you're happy (this last said in earnest).

I opened the twistie and threw the baggy up, holding the bottom corners. Instead of the even, gentle dispersal I had imagined, my mother's ashes came out in three or four heavy lumps, and formed some odd but distinct shapes on the ground a few feet away. I crawled down and spread her around a bit.

Then I left. It rained lightly two days later, and washed the hill.

Ron Morgan discovered his adoptee status late in life and sat around in a stupor until he crossed the border into Bastard Nation. He lives in San Francisco and has recently found his maternal birthfamily His birthmother died last year, before he could find her.

This article first appeared in the Summer 1997 issue of the Bastard Quarterly.