RIP Opal

Real life continues to happen even though we’re on the road. A few weeks ago, Mary got phone calls from various family members telling her that her step mother, Opal, was in the hospital with cancer and had been given only two or three months to live. Opal lived in Phoenix and we weren’t too far away at the time. When we called her step brother Jim, he told us that he thought Opal was failing and might have only a few days.

We dropped all our previous plans and traveled to Phoenix so Mary could be with Opal while she was still alive.

This was always an extremely difficult relationship for Mary; I’ll just say here that Mary experienced many years of verbal and emotional abuse from Opal, continuing even after she left home and after we were married. For many years, Mary has tried to maintain as much distance as possible while still trying to keep at least a cordial relationship, almost entirely for the sake of her father and to keep peace in the family with her brothers and step-brothers and sisters.

All of this made a final goodbye all the more difficult, but by the time we got to the hospital, Opal was no longer conscious, and it was clear that she had at best only a week or so left. Jim wanted us to stay around for the funeral that was to come soon, but we felt that things were too uncertain just to stay in Phoenix, which we don’t like, and wait for a death that would come in its own good time and not before. We ended up traveling to Santa Fe with the idea we could return quickly when it was time.

In fact, Opal lasted about a week longer without ever regaining consciousness, and with a few days’ notice about the funeral, we headed back to Phoenix for Mary’s one last great effort at keeping her other family relationships alive and healthy.

Difficult as it all was, we actually ended up enjoying the reunion, and surprisingly, the funeral itself turned out to be, for me at least, almost fun. Opal, who never believed it was possible to be too lavish, had planned an open-coffin ceremony in a casket that looked a lot like a Lincoln Town Car, not a bad ride to carry her into the afterlife. The pastor from her church turned out to be quite an elderly fellow himself and seemed to mostly lose track of where he was in the eulogy. At one point, he rather fell into an internal theological dispute about whether Opal was greeted in heaven by an angel or by Jesus himself.

First he said it was an angel, but then he said sometimes in a few special cases, Jesus himself actually greeted the Loved One in heaven, though he didn’t seem quite clear on what conditions would trigger the deluxe reception. It wasn’t something you could arrange with the funeral director, but probably you had a better chance on week days when things were otherwise kind of slow in Paradise.

In the end he came down on the side of Jesus. He managed to piece together a few Bible verses suggesting that death was only a passage from this life to the next, though he didn’t always seem sure exactly what his point was.

At least the whole service was blessedly short. After a drive out to the cemetery, the men among the mourners were informed we were going to be the pall bearers, which alarmed me because I’d never born a pall before and I was convinced the mostly old and feeble men in attendance wouldn’t be able to lift the Lincoln and Opal’s earthly remains and make it over to the grave site without tripping.

In the end, though, we were successful, with only a few alarming stumbles, and after a few appropriate words from Pastor, Opal was lowered into the earth for her eternal rest. This final moment made me decidedly claustrophobic, but otherwise, the service had been mostly enjoyable and sometimes amusing.

I doubt Mary saw it all in quite the same way.

We continued on to a fine Italian restaurant where step-brother Jim hosted an excellent buffet, and we all enjoyed spending some light-hearted time together. When we got back to our trailer, Mary was emotionally exhausted but content in having done the right thing and hopeful she could move on with her life now, free of some of the emotional burdens she’s carried all these years.

I wish her the best with that, but we both know that all of us carry stuff for as long as we live, and the best we can do is to try to live well with our stuff. Mary works harder and with more success at that than just about anybody I know, and it’s one of the things I most love and respect about her. Thus, some good comes from bad, and our stuff becomes in part the clay from which we mold our lives, we hope with some success.

Today we stay over one more day in Phoenix to handle the mundane chores of doing laundry, cleaning the trailer, and stocking up on food and supplies. We leave tomorrow for the canyon lands of Southern Utah and point our compass more or less in the direction of Klamath Falls. We might still stay out the final two weeks we had originally planned, or we might make a more deliberate drive straight through to get back to the comforts of life at home.

In any case, there’s a sense that this year’s winter travels are coming to a close. I’m looking forward to getting back on my motorcycle, among other things, and Mary is missing her horse and other good friends.

And weather reports from Klamath Falls suggest it might not be too soon to return. Spring is on its way. Rebirth and all of that.