|
| My parents: Norma Valenza (1920-2000) and Gaetan Valenza (1917-1995) |
We had just finished watching an improv show across the street, and we were on our way inside, when the dog caught our eye. It was sitting in the driver's seat of a car, leaning back as if it had parked the car itself, and--this is what came to our attention--its tongue was was hanging down from its closed mouth. We watched the dog for several minutes, wondering if it would ever retract that tongue, but it never did; instead, it just looked at us plaintively, with its ugly wrinkled face, sadly resenting that we were laughing at it. I don't think I'd laughed so hard all week. Finally we left the dog to do our shopping, and when we came back outside, the car and the dog were gone.
Life is like that sometimes.
The next day, 3000 miles away in Naples, Florida, my mother stepped out of her air conditioned condo, into the sweltering Florida summer heat. She turned her thin 80-year-old body to lock the front door, and then walked to her 1996 Oldsmobile. She was planning on having lunch at Picadilly's, a cafeteria in the Coastland mall. Picadilly's was an ordinary cafeteria, but for some reason it was her favorite place to eat. My mother drove the car to the exit gate of her condo complex, and waited for the traffic to clear so that she could turn left on Airport-Pulling. Airport-Pulling is a busy, divided highway, with a speed limit of 45 miles per hour, and usually the traffic is so dense that one can only turn left in two stages--first, by waiting for the traffic coming from the left to clear before crossing to the median; and then waiting again, from the median, for the traffic from the right to clear before turning left. She waited for a car coming from the left to pass, and then she headed towards the median crossing. It was 12:15 Eastern Standard Time. She never made it to the median.
28-year-old Eddy Vina, who was driving his motorcycle at speeds that have been estimated to be around 80 to 90 miles per hour had just zoomed past a car on northbound Airport-Pulling. The driver of the car Vina passed turned to his wife and said that the motorcyclist appeared to be trying to kill himself. If that was Vina's wish, he got want he wanted. Eddy Vina crashed into the driver's side door of my mother's car. He hit the car so hard that it rolled over onto its side, with such a force that the driver's side door of my mother's car was pushed almost to the middle of the car. My mother probably died instantly, as did Vina, who was hurled over the car into the street, but not before leaving one of his arms in my mother's car. A car traveling 90 miles per hour covers the length of two football fields in less than five seconds. It is doubtful that she ever saw what hit her.
I did not know about that accident until 14 hours later. It was a beautiful, cool, sunny day in San Francisco, and Cindi and I had gone out for pizza and later walked to a park to watch the children play. The Florida Highway Patrol had tried to reach me by phone, but of course I wasn't home. My brother Keith was in Disney World with his girlfriend, and would not find out about it until late the next day. The FHP managed to reach my other brother, Gary, who lives in Cleveland. Gary didn't know my phone number, so he sent me an e-mail message. I read the e-mail when I got home that night.
It is hard to convey the weird, stunned feeling I had, and hearing the news by e-mail gave it an air of unreality. I called Cindi and told her the news. She later said that it was clear that on some level I didn't really believe it. As I was speaking to her, I noticed the flashing light on my answering machine. I played the message. "Hello, this the Florida Highway Patrol. Can you please pick up?" That was the end of the message. I said, "Oh shit", as the reality began to sink in.
I called the FHP, and spoke to a woman who was as nice as she could be, offering her condolences. Every time I spoke to someone at the FHP, no matter who it was, they knew all about the accident. Accidents like this one are big news. Cindi came over to spend the night with me. I couldn't sleep. I went to the computer room to play a few games of Free Cell, hoping that it would take my mind off of it. Instead of doing that, my obsession about the accident got the better of me, and I dialed in to the Internet to see if there was an article about it in the Naples newspaper. There was. And with the article was a picture of my mother's car, lying on its side in the middle of the road. It was a car that I had ridden in just two months earlier when I visited my mother. The Ft. Myers newspaper also had an article about the accident. There was no place else to get any more information, although for one brief moment I considered checking the CNN web site. How could a death as important as this one not be on the national news? But from the perspective of the nation as a whole, my mother's death was just another Memorial Day weekend statistic.
I finally managed to get an hour's sleep.
As you can imagine, it is the off season for tourists, and with the help of a coupon Cindi and I found a huge hotel suite for a reasonable price. We had taken the redeye from San Francisco, managed to get a nap in, and finally we met my brother, Keith, and his girlfriend at my mother's house. Entering the condo complex required driving past the crash site. There was no sign of the crash, other than some flowers left by friends and relatives of the motorcyclist. Every time we came to that intersection, we drove extra carefully. During the few days we spent in Naples, we saw three other accident scenes, although none appeared to have any fatalities. I began to develop a healthy hatred of Naples drivers.
Everything was as my mother had left it when she left the house. The Sunday paper was resting on the table in the lanai. Her favorite candy was in the refrigerator. The chrysanthemums that I had sent her for her birthday just three weeks before her death were planted outside the house, dying in the southern heat.
Keith had already taken care of many of the important arrangements, and there is so much that has to be done. They are the last things in the world you want to be doing after your parent has died, and yet they have to be done--everything from telling Social Security to stop payments to stopping the newspaper deliveries. Death notices to the newspaper. Contacting friends and relatives. The funeral and cremation. Keith took care of most of those things, but because I was named the executor Keith and I had to meet with her financial advisor and attorney. I was prepared to sign over my executor responsibility to Keith, who was living in Florida and better able to take care of the remaining details.
At the funeral, we showed a video that Keith had made for my mother as a birthday gift five years earlier. It showed her laughing and having a good time. It was the best possible way to remember her. The very last clip of the video showed her walking away from the camera, then turning and waving good-bye. It was such a poignant ending.
The night after the funeral was very hard for me. I wanted to revisit some of the places I had visited with my mother. I went with Cindi to the mall where mother was headed when she died. We went to the TCBY I had gone to with my mother on two occasions when I visited her in March. Walking out of the yogurt shop, I broke down and cried.
I hate crying. It is physically uncomfortable. It hurts in the head, and then your nose gets all stuffed up and you can't breathe. It is also psychologically uncomfortable. I am not used to this crying concept; I know how to keep my emotions in check. In fact, I would say that there are really only two emotions I allow myself to express fully--rage, and outrage. But not sadness. I had no idea I had this pain in me. I hadn't cried like this when my father died five years earlier. But dad's death had been expected, a relief in a way, because he had been suffering from years of dialysis sessions. And I was probably closer to my mom. And now I was an orphan.
Later, in bed, I heard my mother's voice in my mind, and I realized that I would never hear it for real, ever again, and Cindi held me as I sobbed like I had never sobbed in my life. It scared me to have my emotions so out of control like that. I didn't know what to do. I knew that the grief would pass, but it didn't make the feeling of having my emotions out of control any less scary.
The last night we were in Naples, Cindi and I ate dinner at an Italian restaurant, Frascotti's, that I had eaten at so many times with my mom, and also with my dad before he died. We went to the Naples pier to watch the sunset over the Gulf of Mexico. We got there a little early and walked along the white sandy beach, dipping our feet in the Gulf, which was the temperature of bath water. It was nothing like the frigid Pacific waters we were used to. We watched the shore birds and the seagulls, and finally headed back to the pier as sunset neared. We sat on a bench on the pier. A gray haired man walked up to us and asked, in a German accent, if we minded if he and his wife sat there on the bench with us. He said his wife would be coming shortly.
 |
| The Valenza family, circa 1960. |
It seemed odd that he would have left his cane walking wife to walk alone to the pier. It was only later that it occurred to me that maybe there was no wife coming to the pier, no wife at all, except in the old German man's memories.
The last day there, we stopped at the condo one last time before heading to the airport. I walked out of the car and whispered at the condo, "Good-bye, mom." A whisper was all I could manage to get out.
On the plane home, there was a young couple sitting across the aisle from us, with an adorable and very outgoing infant daughter. The little girl was maybe two. At one point I said to Cindi, "You know, she loves her parents, but someday when she is older they are both going to die on her." Cindi looked at me sympathetically, yet, even as I said that, I wasn't really feeling like life was quite so tragic as that. The important thing wasn't that her parents would die on her someday, but that she loved her parents now, and her parents loved her. When we got off the plane, she waved good-bye to all the passengers around her. And Cindi and I returned to our lives in San Francisco.
Life is like that.