Mom once said, "All my favorite people are dead."

Aging does separate us from those we've loved, at least in the physical realm.

She had the moles removed in the 60s

My mother did our family tree during a Geneology class in the late 80s. In the 1950s, she’d been told to get an MRS degree from UCLA. Her father said, “Go to business school and you will meet the appropriate man.” Mom secretly wanted to be a social worker. There was a social worker in the distant family but she never reached out to talk to her. Mom said she never thought she could tell her father a business degree held no interest to her. “In the early 50s,” she said, “you just didn’t do that. You didn’t stand up to your elders. You didn’t challenge their assumptions about what was best for you.”

Mom left school embarrassed. She lived at her parent’s home in Long Beach and got a job in a local lab cleaning glassware and another job in a department store wrapping gifts for people. She’d set her sight on a man she met in the Greek system. They’d met on the UCLA campus but not really started talking until a Greek weekend in Las Vegas. That’s where she realized the attraction she felt for him and began to think he might be the one.

He came around. He’d had a seven-year relationship through junior and high school with a woman who didn’t share the same religious background. He told me he wasn’t sure he loved my mother but knew he didn’t want to lose her. With my mom, he said, “I couldn’t get away with anything. I hadn’t felt that way before and I respected her for it.” They married. They had children. Dad went into her father’s insurance business. They built a life their elders respected.

When dad found out mom didn’t finish college, he told her to get her “tushy” back in school. With all three of us out of the house, she went to Cal State Long Beach; finished her bachelor’s, then got a Master’s in Social Work. Working for the state of California, in a mental hospital in Norwalk, she loved meetings and lunches with other professional women and had a fondness and connection with the Hispanic men she counseled because she’d learned a fair extent of Spanish. Her self-esteem rose and she wasn’t the uncomfortable highly emotional woman of my youth, that I feared as a child.

She became much more confident. I learned how to talk with her. Instead of my fear causing me to stay away, I learned how to communicate with her. Instead of cowering, I’d ask if I’d done something wrong when her mood scared me. Most of the time I’d done nothing. If she had a bone to pick with me, my confronting the situation and being able to see plainly that which prior had been unspoken made getting through the challenges easier. Instead of fearing her, I learned more about what she needed and through the decades got better at reading her because I was no longer afraid.

When she got CLL (Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia) in 2004, the same cancer I would get in 2010, I was able to be there for her; listen to her needs and fears. I could support her in the way she needed someone to recognize her. She’d never had that with anyone. No one had taken the time to address her concerns and fears since she was a child and her beloved grandparents had saved her sanity in a house with squabbling and unhappy parents.

Mom wanted desperately to communicate with her youngest son who died in 1993 at the age of 31. During those last 27 years of her life, as I was learning how to communicate with my physically dead brother, mom tried to keep her mind open. My dad didn’t believe in it. Mom would say, “My grandma Rosie used to say if it was so good on the other side, why didn’t they come back to tell us.”

On January 8th, 2010, Mom was with me when I had a breast biopsy. Afterward, we went to the yogurt shop near her house. Sitting in the car enjoying our reward treat I looked to my right when a car drove up beside us. The black car had a white racing banner that had the number 427 on it.

“Mom, look, 427 (my brother Steven’s birthday was April 27th.) Steven is here.” This is when the communication with him really opened up between my mom, me, and Steven.

In 2011, the folks drove me to my first cancer treatment in San Diego. I said, “Mom, let’s ask Steven for a sign.” Within two minutes a license plate with his birthday 427 crossed over in front of us. “Let’s look at the letters. LUM. Maybe he’s saying LOVE YOU MUCH.” She got better at playing this game with me.

She was in the hospital when Covid hit. Her neck had been hurt when she was carried incorrectly, this after she had a flu shot and an updated Penicillin shot on the same day. It happened a few days before her 85th birthday. I wasn’t with her. She’d signed her power of attorney for her health over to my older brother who lived in the house with her. He found the new doctor out of the yellow pages because he didn’t like her other doctor. I wouldn’t have allowed for that. It was a new doctor’s office and the nurse pressured my brother to ensure my mother got both shots. My mother never met that doctor. A couple of hours later my mother’s legs buckled. She never walked again. That doctor never visited her in the hospital or nursing home after she stopped walking.

On May 1st, 2020, I was out early on a walk. I saw a hummingbird do something I’d never seen a hummingbird do before. It shot really high straight up at least 20 yards, then shot down and out to the ocean like a maniac missile. I got the call 90 minutes later that my mother had a heart attack in an ambulance. The nursing home sent her to the hospital that morning because she was unresponsive. I was told by someone who used to work in an ER that she probably didn’t feel anything.

Recently, I looked more closely at the double seahorse she colored in between the lines.

I turned it over and found this:

Her handwriting had really progressed but she could still color beautifully and with patience, every day for a year after her husband died.

Earlier that week I had to take the Lymph & Longevity book I’d borrowed back to the library because someone else wanted it. Off the cuff and quiet within my head, I said to mom, “Why should I buy this book? It’s full price and not on sale. I took that $377 class in March.” I felt like I could hear words in my ears, “Lisa, put as much about lymph in front of you and it will become second nature to you.”

Pulling out of the bank later I saw this license plate.

Diane Maxine Guest. Less than an hour earlier I had that conversation with her about the $377. I drove back into the parking lot to grab this picture. To me, this proof is stunning. She didn’t tell me how great life is over on the other side, but her loving interest in my life is still present and conversational.

Driving home after the last errand on my list I drove by my old apartment. I had to drive by again to get a picture of what I saw in the window.

Fuzzy, but it’s two white seahorses, back to back.