CLOSURE

It’d been 12 years since I last made the drive up to Frazier Park. The last time I visited the tiny cabin in which my mother lived with her husband (number 3). It was late summer, 1994; my mission was to find the money I’d given my mom a few days earlier. I saw her on a Sunday. Later that day she collapsed and was airlifted to a hospital. Two days later she was dead. The money would be used to help pay for her funeral.

Her husband, Jerry a.k.a. “Doobie,” was somewhere in Wyoming when he heard mom was in the hospital. He could have caught the next plane to be by her side. But he’d filled his boda bags with vodka, and saw that the Greyhound left sooner than the next plane. So he bought a bus ticket. He didn’t get back in time.

We held the funeral without him. He was in the hospital with pancreatis, near death himself. I didn’t care. Served him right for the way it all went down.

A few months passed and I tried to make my peace with him, even though he did stupid things like accuse me of stealing his mother’s jewelry from the house (I got questioned by the Kern County Sheriff). My uncle, Stuart, and I met with him for dinner at various chain restaurants off the 5 in Valencia. We tried to somehow reconcile grief and anger and all the other raw and confused emotions that stared us all down after mom’s death.

But even as Doobie wept, he got remarried – to a big biker chick, I’m told – within a year of mom’s death. This, to me, was a big fuck you to my mom’s memory and I shut him off. The marriage lasted only a few months.

Over the next decade, I spoke with him only once, when his own mother died, in 1997. But even during a call that was meant to offer sympathy, the end result was an ugly shouting match that ended with the phone thrown onto the hook.

Doobie called me earlier this year to tell me he wanted me to have some of my mother’s possessions. He cried to me on the phone about her. How much he missed her. How she meant everything to him. I told him that in my eyes he killed her. Killed her spirit, sapped her will to live. Wasn’t there for her on her deathbed. I knew she wanted to leave him, but she was afraid. Afraid to start over. She was 48 and she felt old. But he didn’t want to hear this.

My mom had been systematically beaten down over the course of three abusive relationships (five, if you include her parents), and she would never be happy. Had given up on the idea of being happy. It was enough for her not to be alone. That’s why she stayed with him. It was awful, but it was the path of least resistance. She was ill with a debilitating kidney disease and no longer had drive to do more than just get by with what little she had.

He didn’t want to hear of her unhappiness. He refused to believe it. Memories washed away by gallons and gallons of cheap vodka.

Yet I knew I had to let it go. I was a cauldron of negative energy whenever we spoke, and I didn’t want to be that person anymore.

After months of procrastination, I finally drove up to Frazier Park. The town had changed a great deal since my last trip. Lots of development, lots of big properties. Doobie’s lot is small, and from the front looks like a junkyard, the sore thumb where the crazy old man lives, the place that singlehandedly drives down the block’s property values.

Doobie had aged several lifetimes in the decade since I’d last seen him. He was once a hippie troll with a Jewfro. Now, at 60, he looked 20 years older. He was white-haired, feeble, missing teeth. A career scenic artist, he no longer had full range of motion in his meal ticket – his right arm. This was a lifetime of alcohol and drug abuse staring back at me. He was the guy who’d taught me to roll joints, how to mix a drink, with whom I’d snorted a bunch of cocaine long ago. Party on, Doobie.

I went hoping to take home one last piece of my mom. I grabbed some photos, some items that belonged to my grandparents. A large painting of my mom hung from a living room wall. He said he’d been working on it for eight years. He pointed to the mountaintop where he scattered her ashes. He showed me a memorial he created for her in the front yard, consisting mainly of rocks, flowers, a coffee mug. I added a plastic dinosaur belonging to my son, whose middle name, simply the initial “J,” is the same as my mother’s.

I stayed for about 90 minutes and I was careful to avoid any subject that might provoke conflict. Better to go out on a good note. I knew that he loved my mom in his own destructive, massively fucked-up way. He just didn’t know any better. We choose to remember things differently, but there’s no longer any reason to kick on him. He’s been splayed out on the floor a long, long time. I left without having raised my voice even once.

Good-bye Doobie.