Life can be so weird and wrong. It is my 39th birthday, March 9th, 2009. I am sitting here in Verona. It’s early morning and I’m writing about my mother’s death on her former laptop, which I inherited. There’s a batch of photos from XMas ’07 she had loaded onto the computer, shots of us making cookies and setting up the tree. I’m thankful we had all been together that year, one last time together in Mom’s little house. There’s a shot of her regarding the still undecorated tree with an expression so fixed and contemplative- I wonder what she was thinking. Mom was scared to grow old, scared to die, though she faced these fears with pragmatism and strength as she faced everything. I just hope that, when she went down, she fell into the darkness too quickly to be afraid. This thought haunts me.

She was in a swimming pool when she had her brain hemorrhage, at the Winona YMCA, doing water aerobics. This was her new passion, her new thing. Back in ’06, L. and I took her to the thermal baths at Villa Cedri and she was raving about how submersion in water completely relieved the discomfort of her damaged left shoulder.

We had spoken on the Skype phone just days before it happened and she was feeling great, finally able to walk around freely on her improved left leg, “besotted” with her little dog JoeJoe, back on the great American roadway with her recorded books and Motel 6 itinerary.

Mom and I took some mythic road trips together. There was Milwaukee to Dallas, 1978, a grueling family move in U-Haul and boat-like Pontiac. We finished off the long days by jumping into a motel pool. There was the period when they were doing my Dad’s play, Custer, on the East Coast and Mom and I would fly from hated Dallas to Washington D.C., Connecticut, NYC, and New Jersey. Mom was doing costumes so I’d get to skip school for tech week.

When we moved to Virginia in the early 80′s, Mom, Dad and I would shuttle between Lynchburg, Roanoke, and C’Ville, visiting Patti and Gordon Ingham, Ma Jean and Dad’s oldest sister, Arlene. Then there was the trip to Utah, summer of ’88 when Mom designed Macbeth at Utah Shakespeare Festival and I painted costumes. We saw Yellowstone, the wild horizon storms of Indiana, the majestic Grand Teutons, the KOA campground, the fantasy-scapes of Zion Park and Bryce Canyon. Mom turned me on to Kris Kristofferson. Remember driving that wide open road, Mom always driving -she insisted on it- and singing along to “Me and Bobby McGee”?

Then we had some tougher journeys, sadder ones. Summer of ’93, after Dad passed away and I was deeply sick, physically and mentally, Mom flew me out to Utah to see the shows. She knew something was terribly wrong with me. We drove back to Virginia together, stopping along the way for two nights on the Grand Canyon’s Kaibob Plateau. Remember that freezing first night when the July temperature dropped to 35 and we had to huddle together to stay warm? Or the second night when I left the tent to take a leak and saw shafts of moonlight like luminous blades firing the bare floor of the tall pine-forest, a light so rich and mystic you could hear it humming? And there I was, still sick from my excesses, leaning on Mom to pull me back from the brink.

Our last road trip was from Virginia to Winona, Minnesota, summer of 2004. It was the first year of The Great River Shakespeare Festival and Mom was slated to design the shows and get the shop up and running. She had just suffered the massive medical screw-up at F’Burg Hospital where they severed the nerve in her left shoulder, an appalling mistake in a long string of medical difficulties.

Naturally, Mom would be unable to make the drive West alone. She was in terrible shape. They gave her antibiotics that tore up her stomach and she had this awful wound in her neck from the bungling doctor’s incision. How she figured she could handle the manic schedule of building two shows in a month I don’t know, but that was Mom’s way. Her good friend, the adoring Paul Barnes, had promised to do everything possible to help her out and Mom was determined to go.

So we set off in her Toyota. The first day she was so ill from not eating properly, from the pain and the antibiotics, that at one point I thought she would pass out. I pulled off the highway and took her to a timely Cracker Barrel where she forced down a banana and immediately felt better. Cracker Barrel was part of our road mythology. We used to have breakfast there in years past, back when it was still just a Tennessee chain. The thought hit me that we had transitioned into a new phase. As much as I’d needed her, much as I’d leaned on her over the years, it would now be my job to help guard against the exigencies of her fragility.

We got to Winona at sunset the next day. Remember that stretch of the Mississippi revealed grandly to our right, the staggering width and the lines of green bluffs? Remember that majestic, un-hurried current and the river islands? We’d made it!

That night they held the first company meeting where Mom was specially honored in the words of Paul Barnes. How many times have I felt this way- tingling with pride, proud of my Mother and honored to be her son?