I grew up in California.  My first home, Long Beach.  Later Orcutt and then years in Santa Maria.   My father was constructing missile bases at Vanderberg.  In the summertime, my mother took us to Carolina, where we eventually moved to be closer to her parents, octogenarians.  It wasn't that my grandparents needed caretakers, I think it was more my mother needed her community.  She was blessed with good genes and a large, healthy family. One of her paternal aunts, Essie,  lived to 106.  When Essie was, oh, a 100 or so, my mother took me to visit this aunt.  Arriving on her street, we pulled into Essie's drive, she unbent her frame from pulling weeds in a garden, wiped her hands on her long apron, and waved, welcoming us to her home.

In the early nineties, I moved from my comfortable home to a small trailer that I'd placed in the yard next to my mother's country home. Although I had children, I was the single one in a family that did not contemplate divorce.   Therefore, when daddy's cancer was clearly not going to go away, someone had to help mother.  And, well, we were a family that by example, took care of our own.   No one had to ask me, will you go help?

Since this post is not about my father's journey with cancer, or the next five years of a daughter's caretaking, I'll push past to my witness of the aftermath and his gift, post death.  The evening of his passing, a gentleman visited my mother's home.  He spoke with us and brought to us plans my father had made.  In other words, my father had prepared in great detail how his earthly life would close.  He had loved and maintained my gentle mother well for more than forty years, in death he would do no less.  To be brief here, all plans were made and visible.  Next steps were taken with minimal effort.  My mother was left to simply don her silk black dress and to retreat inwardly for years to her own mind, as he knew surely she would need to do.  I moved again, this time to a cottage in town.  

As a result of a car accident in which my brother was the other driver, my mother's death was unexpected. My time had come once again.  I knew the first steps.

Mother had prepared me well.  She had told me more than once, I"ll probably live to be a hundred, but  if I don't, look in my blue train case. 

I knew this luggage as it was the only set I had ever seen her use.  A set she had lovingly maintained since early in her marriage to my father.   Her packing was meticulous, and when she carried her good luggage,  she did so proudly and with memories in tow.  

Mother stored her train case on a high shelf in a narrow hall closet.   I removed it from its place one afternoon late May and relocated to my mother's tidy kitchen. 

It was there, among the contents of an old blue train case upon a familiar childhood table, I drifted through my mother's mind, back in time, and through the layers of a life.  In her train case,  my mother had meticuously grouped items for my viewing.  Some of these included:  (1) Scup, read this first.  (2) You'll enjoy these. (3) This needs to be done. (4) I'd like for this to happen next. (5) Cards I've loved. (6) For my tumbleweed, (7) You know you'll have to....  

Mother had tied each packet with a small white ribbon, and in her neat and beautiful script, she'd left notes, anecdotes, instructions, and musings for my review. Sitting there, I imagined her hands as she had written and wrapped these items.  Not only was my mother a stunning beauty, she was willowy, her hands were tender, her fingers long. No one touched like she. 

I studied the fine script of her notes.  Her touch came across my face.  She stroked my arms.  I read her meagerie in gentle peace. Some of her notes were detailed to the umpteenth.  Some were direct, some her stupid-funny, some gentle, some sad, and some introspective.  Some were secrets. As I sat there drinking tea, celebrating my mother's life, and looking deeper into a soul that I realized I had only known in segments, I had the impression that a gentleman had just come into the room. He'd spoken.  I could don my simple frock.

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Notes:

Blue Train memory, with love, 1929- (May) 1998.

DakiniDancer, (May) 2009 

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