The end of my first life here. (misc edits)

My parents died in 1977, when I was 15. My brother was not even 14 when mom died. Although mom and dad had always treated us as their children – we were both adopted – the rest of the family on her side did not. To them, we were interlopers, not really blood members of the family. Mom died of complications of diabetes at age 41, and dad died 5 months later of what was medically known as a cerebral haemorrhage, but what was most likely a broken heart. He was 50, and I think the stress of watching his wife decline the last two years of her life, and of having two teenage boys to look after was more than he knew how to deal with.

Dad was, I realize now, an alcoholic. His favorite drink was gin and tonic. He told me once that he didn’t like sweet liquors like rum or whiskey, and that may have something to do with my preferred drinks at a later age – I have always liked Bourbon whiskey. The last year of his life, he was working in Pasadena while we lived in Orange county, a 70 mile drive each way. I hardly ever saw him in the mornings-he was gone before we got up for school, and didn’t get home until 6 or 7 pm. As I remember it, he would come home, take off his suit and tie, and fix gin and tonics until he passed out or went up to bed. Work and drinking left not much room for two teenagers.
 
I do not want to paint my dad as a bad man, but he did have his faults and weaknesses. I used to fantasize about shooting liquor bottles in the stores we went shopping in, to destroy them, because I sometimes heard my mother and father fighting over how much he drank. That was a rare event though, and my childhood was not much scarred by the regrettable fact that dad was an alcoholic.
 
Except in one important way – he’d call his brother in law, drunk, and painted us both as bad kids who needed to be sent to Military School to “straighten us out”. As it turned out, that idea was years out of date; Military Schools had shriveled to bare husks of themselves in other days, when that Education fad had swept the states. The long years of the Vietnam war, and of constant military actions had eroded Public acceptance of Military schools.
 
The last year with my parents was dominated by diabetes. I grew up watching mom give herself insulin shots, and both me and my brother were trained at an early age how to give those injections if we ever had to. We were instructed in how to deal with diabetic shocks and knew who to call should mom go into a diabetic coma. Mom’s decline was slow, but rapid as I look back on it. A lot of that was hidden from my brother and I and to us, the periodic trips that mom and dad took to see her specialist in Santa Barbara were excuses to stay with our grandparents in Arcadia, CA. My grand parents, mom’s parents, had a good sized piece of property there in Arcadia, a small orchard and farmed plots. The garden, orchard, and grandpa’s wood shop provided places for my brother and me to play while mom and dad drove up the coast to Santa Barbara, and I remember those stays with fondness.
In those days, diabetes was a bit more severe a disease than it is now, not that it is any less of a trial those so unfortunate to have the disease. My father once told me, after she died and he was well into the third glass of gin & tonic, that mom’s doctor had given her twenty years to live when they married, and it turned out that she only lived for seventeen more. Her kidneys began to fail around 1976 and her health got worse. In 1977, she declined further, and it was decided that she would have to go through dialysis. She was hospitalized for the removal of her gall bladder which had been troubling her and while there, a vein from her leg was grafted into her wrist for the dialysis. It was also while she was there that her father died of a heart attack in his shop. This was such a shock to her that she had a “mild” heart attack herself and was hospitalized for more than a month before she came home and moved into the guest room downstairs.
 
My brother and I were blessedly ignorant of most of this. I was beginning my High School years, and he was finishing Junior High School, so we can perhaps be forgiven for not understanding the enormity of our parent’s pain. My brother was one of the few people that I’ve ever met that had real talent as an artist, drawing and painting, while I was considered intelligent and bound for great things. I think that both of us took these talents for granted and didn’t know what we had.
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The last day of mom’s life started very early. She’d been having problems with the diabetes the night before which got worse towards the morning. Dad woke me at 6:30 and asked me to help him get mom downstairs so that she could go to the hospital. We got her downstairs and into the car, but she was thirsty and asked me to get her a cup of ice, which I did. I gave it to her and she thanked me and told me that I was a good son. Dad drove away and that was the last time I ever saw her.
 
I was in tenth grade. I got on my bike a little later and went to school to my first class, photography. I was sitting there about 8:30 when a strong thought came to me-what if she dies? I pushed that away from me – "No!" – and concentrated on class, getting through that one and the ones after that-I don’t remember what- and lunch time came. My friend Ward and I went home for lunch to my house. I saw dad’s car in the driveway, which was very unusual. I told Ward to wait at the door and walked in the house.
Dad was sitting on the couch, his face in his hands. Without thinking, I said “how’s Mom?” and he turned a teary face to me and said “she’s dead”. Again, without thinking, I said “you’re kidding!” to which he said “no, she died at the hospital at 8:30”. I walked back to the door and told Ward that I wouldn’t be coming back to school, that my mother had died. He looked more shocked than I felt at the moment, and he turned, and walked away. I went back in the house, sat down in the kitchen, looked at mom’s bottles of pills on the kitchen counter, and realized that the worst thing had happened. I started crying.
 
Even now, years later, I can’t remember the next few weeks, so severe was the shock. I know that later that day, my brother and I took the dogs for a walk,and that grandma, mom’s mom, and aunts and uncles came, but I have no clear picture of events. I remember a few days later, dad told us there would be an open casket ceremony before the funeral, and my brother and I both said we would not go to it. We wanted to remember mom alive, so the last time I saw her was the morning or her death, and the last thing she said to me was “you’re a good son”.
 
I was offered the honor of being one of the pallbearers, but I refused. My uncle always held that against me. which became clear years later, but I wanted nothing to do with the matter at the time. Now I wish I had.
 
The day of the funeral was one of those beautiful spring southern California days, which offended me. I wanted it to be like I felt – gray and dismal and stormy. Mom is buried in Rose Hills cemetery in Whittier, a beautiful place. I go there every so often to visit with my mother, and the last time I was there, I trimmed the grass from around her headstone and sat and told her how life was going for me. I felt sort of stupid doing so, but did it anyway because one never knows.
 
My grandma started coming down from Arcadia everyday so that my brother and I wouldn’t come home to an empty house. She’d stay until dad got home, fixed dinner for us, and arranged with dad to return the next day. As I look back on it, she was the only one of our relatives who genuinely cared about us. The rest were vultures who descended in the days after mom died and picked through her belongings. I have nothing of hers but the silverware she and dad got for a wedding present. Not even a photo of her.
 
The next months are a blur to me. One day in the summer, I came home from school and dad announced that he’d made out a new will. He showed it to me and explained it, telling me that he’d picked mom’s brother to be the executor and guardian because he was the strictest of our family, and dad thought he’d straighten us out. He thought my brother and I were “bad kids”, although a lot of that had to do with the fact that our world had been destroyed and we were not given any sort of counseling at all. He asked that I find someone to witness the will, so I asked my scoutmaster and Ward’s dad to sign it for him as witnesses. I still have a copy of the will. It was set up so that the estate would be held until I turned 25. It would then be divided in half, and half of the half given to me then and the other half held until I turned 30. My brother’s arrangements were the same. The executor was directed to maintain us in the style we’d always lived with, and uncle dick was directed to invest the estate towards that end, with priority directed towards the one in school. Dad and mom were believers in education, and wanted us to pursue our talents.
 
Dad dealt with the loss by drinking even more heavily. One night, I watched him take an 8 ounce glass, fill it with gin, and top it off with a splash of tonic water ten times. He passed out on the couch in the family room that night and many more.
 
My brother and I moved through the days in shock and grief. I do not remember much at all. One night that October, I left dad passed out on the couch, and went up to bed. Sometime later, I dreamed the king was calling me and woke up to hear dad’s hoarse voice calling from downstairs.
 
I got up, went down, and found dad slumped in the kitchen, near the tray of mom’s prescriptions which had not been moved since the day she died. Dad was covered in blood. He’d fallen, hit his head, and had laid there in the kitchen for I don’t know how long, calling for me. I helped him up, got a washcloth from the bathroom, wiped him off as best as I could, and helped him up to bed. That was a Thursday morning. He did not get out of bed for more than bathroom trips for two days.
 
On Saturday morning, I woke up to hear him calling me again. I went into his bedroom and he told me that his head hurt so much the he wanted to go to the hospital. I called 911. The firemen and ambulance people came, loaded him into a gurney, and carried him downstairs. As they were carrying him out the front door, he asked me to get his wallet and to call the uncle and grandma, tell them what was happening, and ask that grandma come down to look after me and my brother.
 
That was the last time I ever saw him. The last thing he said to me was "you are a good son". Maybe it was "you’ve been a good son". Either way, the last thing both of my parents told me was that they loved me and that I had been a good son. Treasures beyond measure.
 
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Versions of this have been posted here and later privatized.
You might say that these events in 1977 were significant to me and have echoed through my life.
 
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You must understand that even 35 years later, this is very painful for me to recall, although I have thought of it all of that time.  Editing this turns out to be an unending process, so details may change or be added since this has been read the first time – like I forgot to mention WHY they treated us as THEIR sons – we were both adopted.  By people who wanted us and loved us, and told us so.

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