Chapter 4 - Wind and Rain

Chapter 4

We continued heading north to Seattle. Though 3 had started out on the journy from Zenia, only 2 arrived, like the pioneers crossing the great plains, losing children to the harsh realities of life. Bob and Mary took us all in like we were family. Even my mother came and stayed. They lived in a big house on Capitol Hill, a beautiful old 4 story house that they were remodeling. There was a bedroom for all of us. I don’t know how Cameron and I would have survived without the love of those kind and generous people. In my mind, I had killed my son and yet they treated me like a normal, lovable human. They gave us the safety of their big wonderful family.

First thing I did when we arrived was try to get a hold of Nancy. She had given me two phone numbers of family members. I called the first number, “hello is Nancy there?” “NO!” And they hung up. Right. Ok so I tried the second number, “Hello, is Nancy there?” Never heard of her they say and hang up. Something is really strange here, so I try the first number again, and yell into the phone that I know they know Nancy and my son was just killed and I have to talk to her. They say hold on and give me the number, same as the number that said they had never heard of her. I call that number again and ask for Nancy. Never heard of her. Listen, I scream, my son is dead and I fricking want to talk to Nancy. She says wait a minute and soon I hear Nancy say Hello. “Oh Nancy, the most horrible thing has happened, Thomas is dead.” “Oh Deborah, oh no, oh shit, I’m getting on a plane tonight”, was Nancy’s response. I told her that I would get her a ticket and to stay put until tomorrow. I would call early tomorrow with a ticket and a plan as I couldn’t drive with a broken leg even if I wanted to and would have to arrange with someone else to be able to meet her. When I called the next morning, they told me that she had left late last night for Seattle to be with a friend who had just lost a child. I never heard from Nancy again and those on the other end of the phone numbers she gave me very claim they never heard from her again either, they were sure I knew where she was and holding out on them.

With in the first week after Thomas died, I got pregnant with my daughter. I had not slept with T and C’s dad since we made Cameron. He was freaking out that we had to “bring Thomas back”. I was distressed, I was on my period, I was stuck in bed and so I thought whatever. Whatever indeed. No matter what anyone says, you can get pregnant on your period. My friends thought that probably my hormones were screwed up with the death and all. What I know now she was meant to be, she has always been a precious gift. She and I have talked and she doesn’t think and I have never felt either, that she is “Thomas come back”.

I will have to say that at first I was not excited about this news. I wasn’t convinced I was glad that I didn’t die. I could hardly take care of my surviving 2 year old, how could I be pregnant? Pregnancy meant having hope for the future and I had none. How could I take care of a new baby when I had just lost my first baby? I was really scared; birth was too much like death for me to be excited about this. If fact the most amazing thing I kept feeling during that time was how much death was like birth, it is way more like birth than anything else; the suspension of time, the unreal quality of everything, the support of family and friends, but instead of someone coming in, someone was going out. Just as scary. I don’t like births even today for that reason; too much like death.

Another amazing thing to me at that most difficult time of shock and new grief was the out pouring of sympathy cards and baby gifts I received from my family, friends and community. I have saved all the cards. This is only the second time I have looked at them in these last twenty years. They were important to me none the less. I knew they were with me and I knew they were powerful. I remember how I had always thought of sending cards like this as corny or something, old-fashioned, but getting those cards, even as pat and trite as they may sound on the face, they really meant something to me. I have tried to remember that over the years and send cards and best wishes to others. It is so easy to not bother, or to feel uncomfortable like you don’t know what to do and so say and do nothing. I know from experience that the acknowledgment by family and friends is very important. It has taken me 20 years to be able to really read them again. Sure I’m crying, but I’m smiling now too years later. I want to thank all of you kind people from the bottom, middle and top of my heart, I probably never have.

I wanted to go back to Port Townsend; I had a baby coming and I needed to get my life back. Mary drove my mom, Cameron and I back to our little house on the Olympic Peninsula. The house had not been lived in for many months and the yard had run wild, the grass tall and golden. The roses were flowing onto the small porch. It was good to be back in this little town, it was Indian summer, the best season in the northwest I would learn years later, though that year it was summer in the yard but deep winter in my soul. The days were still long and sunny. The water in the bay still blue, in the little view we had of it. Not much had changed on the outside of my life, but everything on the inside of my like had been drastically re-arranged, ripped up and destroyed.

Thomas’s ashes were in a square cardboard box covered in white paper with a label. I set them on my shelves in the bedroom and lay down on the bed, my leg still not healed. Mom noticed that on the box of Thomas’s ashes where they had typed in the birth date and death date on the label, they had gotten the birth date wrong. That was very depressing, that they hadn’t even bothered to get his birthday right. His birthday was June 23 and they had written June 13. I tried to make the one into a two, but it never looked right. For some reason I felt June 13 would be an important date in my life sometime. It turns out that my husband’s birthday is June 13! But I didn’t meet him for many more years and it did nothing to help how flattened I felt then.

Mom said she would walk Cameron over to the grocery store and get some things while I rested. I tried to rest but I kept looking at the box of his ashes. I picked some roses out the bedroom window and put them by the box. I put my favorite rocks, crystals and tarot cards on the shelf next to it. It was a little altar of my favorite and powerful things. It didn’t really make me feel any better but it was the first time I had done any ceremonial or spiritual acknowledgement. As I was laying there I realized that I was finally back here. Who was I when I left last fall for Mexico? Oh and didn’t I have a stash of smoke somewhere? I find my stash, pretty slim pickings, but I roll a joint and lay back down on the bed. Not long after that my mom comes home from the store. Oh my God, she says, what are you doing? What are you smoking? She starts crying. You know never in my life would I have smoked herb in front of my mother, and here I was lying there smoking. “You never would have made this shrine if you had not been smoking that, that marijuana!” I never did have the heart to tell her that I did it before I smoked.

I never really knew how my parents heard about the accident and Thomas’s death. I remember calling them from the clinic that day or maybe the next day, I‘m not sure. When I was visiting my mom and dad last fall, mom told me how she had found out what had happened. The police had come to their door and told them that there had been an accident in California and that one of their grandsons had been killed. She said they would not tell her which one, nor did they know what happened. That must have been horrible for her. I never really thought much about how that impacted my folks. Now I am a 2 year old grandmother myself I see now how horrible that must have been for my parents.

Finally, of course, mom had to go home and Cam and I were alone in our little house. All I could see were the bunk beds I’d built last fall, with one empty bed. I saw two boys pushing their Tonka trucks in the yard when I know there was only one. Cameron kept following around boys a little bigger than himself, looking for Thomas. I did too, constantly looking for Thomas, like I had just misplaced him or something. It felt terrible and unsettling and I knew I could never be happy again. Nothing would ever be right again.

Soon the weather changed and the winter storms began coming out of the north and down the Straits of Juan de Fuca, blowing through Port Townsend. I didn’t mind the howling and raging of the wind, the dark fast moving clouds or the torrents of wind and rain. It suited my inner life just fine, the weather and I were screaming most of the time. For over 20 years that climate ruled my inner life until moving to southern Oregon 3 years ago. I wrote the first draft of this book the first winter we were here.

Though I was back in Port Townsend, nothing in my life was the same especially my friends. It is interesting how in times of crisis, some people rise to the call and others shrink. Things had gotten very real for me; all fluff had disappeared from my life. I couldn’t make small talk anymore. I only wanted to be around those friends I could really trust. People use to say some really dumb things to me after Thomas died. I know they were trying to be kind but they said stock phrases they had heard and they really hadn’t thought about. The one I heard the most was, “Time heals all wounds”, which they sang happily and as if there now everything is ok. I was always thinking, so even if it does, it takes about 100 times longer than you think and it never totally heals, not like a broken leg, because you can never go back, you never get that second chance. Once I realise that, it changed me, it scared me and it colored my life.

I found that certain friends, though they might mean well, totally grated on my nerves and I didn’t want anything to do with them. I found others, even when I didn’t expect it, were balm and salve to me. I was surprised and often disappointed at how others handled me and the situation. I think some of them were surprised by their reaction too. Susan, who I was looking forward to seeing as one of my best friends back in Port Townsend had trouble being with me. One “friend” called me up and said excitedly, Deborah, turn on Donahue, he is doing a show about mothers of dead children and I thought of you. I made sure I never saw that woman again.

Several of my friends from Zenia went to heroic efforts to comb the mountain we went off for things thrown out of the car. I saw the car only once the day of the accident when I was at the bottom with Cam; it was further down that us, the top was flat on the doors, and it was sitting upright, though tilted sideways. It was an old Volvo station wagon, navy blue. None of us were wearing any seat belts; the car didn’t ever have them. I had heard that getting thrown out of the car if you go off in the mountains was the only way to make it, not strapped into the car as it bounced and banged down the hill. Many of our cloths were found, though it was hard to see Thomas’s. I am very grateful that most of my photos were found, I had all of them with me as I was moving. Many of them have rips and scraps. They never did find my purse, several other things were missing and my bike was toast, but I had lost something so huge, so irreplaceable, so permanent that nothing else mattered. Someone said they saw the car and a tire was blown in such a way to indicate that is what pulled me off the road. I don’t know, we never had the car examined. I have seen many times since how just a second can make the difference between staying on the road and not. A one person accident, I totally blamed myself.

Movies and TV shows love to show a car going off the cliff, I hadn’t noticed this before the accident. I realized that there is some fascination with this in our culture. I hated it. If they had gone off the cliff in a car they would not be so fascinated. I still can’t watch anything with car crashes or violence. I have no tolerance for it. Why do I want to see a made up horror story, if I want a horror story, I can just replay my own.

I spent most days after returning to Port Townsend, lying on the day bed in the living room looking at those torn photos of Thomas and crying. My friend’s said that although I wanted to “suck something out of myself” and that “this was not a dysfunctional thing”, it quickly was becoming dysfunctional for my two year old they said and I needed help. They suggested a group. A Grief Group, they called it. I am not much of a joiner, not much of a group kind of person. I couldn’t picture sitting around with a bunch of other totally depressed and sad people, adding their horror story onto mine. No way, that was not happening. My friend’s kept on me, bless their hearts, and “Was it good for Cameron, my very much alive son, to see his mother sobbing all day? Was it good for the unborn baby?” They said I needed to “see someone” and “get some help”. We knew this was big, we knew this was out of our league. We dealt with, boyfriends, kid’s quarrels, even an alcoholic father or two, but this was something we never imagined happening to any of us. Something we had no language for, no treatment for, had not read any books on - go see someone.

I had gone to a therapist only once before in my life. It was when I was working on my master’s degree at Western Michigan University, in Kalamazoo. I had taught high school physics, chemistry and biology for two years in a small town in rural southern Michigan. Those subjects were a piece of cake compared to understanding the politics of the town and school system. Who was sleeping with whom and who wasn’t suppose to know. They wondered why I didn’t I wear a bra and the principal said, if you don’t catch your quota of smokers in the girls lavatory this week Ms. Daubner, you have to take on the after school study hall. Oh and the two doctors in town both had sons in my class and they went to the school board to say that they didn’t think a woman should teach physics, that physic and chemistry were was men’s subjects. I needed the money, I needed the job, then I saw that teachers that had been there 30 years were waiting as eagerly as I was to get that paycheck every other Friday cause the last paycheck was already gone and I knew I did not want to wake up there 30 years later.

I went back to the University, wow, at the graduate level it didn’t take me long to realize how incredibly more political it was than high school. It made the high school seem easy. I was teaching undergraduate zoology labs under a certain professor. I took my work very seriously and spent a lot of time with my lab students. About half way through the quarter, they all flunked a test he had given. I looked at the test; it had a date of eight years ago on it. It was nothing like the material he and I had been covering. I was sure he had just made a mistake. No he hadn’t. He had just been lazy and taken a test out of his files, he regularly does this I learned only it isn’t always that far off. Right. The head of the department said that is just how it is and if you want your job you will basically shut up, apologize, say you have made a mistake and tell your students to do likewise. I don’t want this job then, I said, my master’s degree passing before my eyes. Oh and at the same time my fiancé was breaking up with me for the third time. I went to “see someone” on my own that first time.

I choose the doctors at the university health center. I told the good doctor that my life had fallen apart. That everything I had pursued in my life to that moment was over, my teaching career, my masters program, the love of my life. He listened, thought for a minute and said, do you have any idea or plan? Tell me, no matter how crazy. I had thought of one thing – running away. I had a cousin in Southern California and I had been there once when I was 16 and I had fallen in love with it there. I told him I briefly had thought about going there. He said, Great. Your brave, that’s a perfect idea. Have a good life, good-bye. I thought I had an hour? I said. Oh you don’t need it, go to California, it’s the right thing, you’ll be fine. And so I did.

And he was right I was fine, better in fact I realized later. I gave up my adorable apartment, left, to his surprise, my adorable fiancé, packed a few things in my Fiat and this young woman headed west. I cried for the first few days. Everything I thought I had always wanted was already over. I didn’t know what would replace them. I was heading down a two lane road in west Texas when things started to get a little better, with Dylan on the tape player and a little toke as the sun was going down. This was a big wild beautiful land and though I was scared, I was on an adventure. By the time I got to my cousins in the San Fernando Valley, I was having a good time.

I was not at her house an hour though, when her roommate came home and kicked my cousin out for sleeping with her boyfriend. I left them screaming and yelling at each other while I went out to my car and looked at the map, I saw that a road called Topanga Canyon went to the coast and I started out, really on my own this time. This is where I leaned about maps and roads out west. It was a narly, twisty, windy road to the pacific coast, not the little black line short line it had looked like on the map. Coming out of the canyon and seeing the sleepy blue ocean appear around the last hill was breathtaking. When I finally got to the beach I jumped out and ran up and down. I’d left winter and snow back in Michigan and here I was on the beach in shirt sleeves, soaking up the sun and staring out at the big blue sea.

I drove south into Santa Monica and stopped at a gas station. A kind looking man, a little older that me who was walking by stopped and asked if I was from Michigan as the plates on my car said. We got to talking and it turned out he knew of an office in an artist’s workshop down the street that might be for rent. He worked there during the day doing ceramics. The workshop, actually called The Workshop IE, rented space to artists needing a kiln, a press, work space what ever. Jack the owner was agreeable and that began my stay on Main Street Santa Monica. I am sure there is a whole book about that place but not for telling here. Leave it to say that Jim, the children’s father, was living in his van in the parking lot of the workshop at the time I arrived.