Sunday mornin coming down...
Some of my best memories happened Sunday morning.
Like the Sunday in 2002 sitting with my Mom in her Toledo home reading
The Blade (“one of America’s Great Newspapers”) with her dog hanging out with my two dogs and two Maine Coon cats as we visited Mom for the first of three times in 2002 and 2003. Those three nationwide road trips gave me a true sense of being American and remembering certain moments of sleeping a couple hours in my car at a truck stop always brings a smile to my face.
Thoughts of Emma,Teddy,Ned and Lulu on those trips make me wonder what the hell I was thinking to believe that those cats could peacefully co-exist with me and my Clumber Spaniel and Shit-tsu inside my leased Jeep Cherokee for over 5,000 miles. And then do it again six months later. I did my third and final Toledo road trip from LA in April, 2003 after wrapping up my job as PR guy for the Oscar show producer following Mom’s news she had esophageal cancer. Once again, I moved into Mom’s home with my dogs and cats and stayed there through the Fourth of July. I started taking Mom to her chemo treatments everyday and we spent more time together than we had since she divorced my Dad when I was 13. Now I was her only child doing my best to be there for her despite my ingrained uncomfortableness with daily human interaction of most kinds as evidenced by my three divorces absent her fondest wish of a grandchild.
Mom’s cancer was nasty, putting her regularly in the ER then a nursing home then hospice after her last hospital visit. That last Sunday morning with her in the hospital before she was transported to NW Ohio Hospice in Perrysburg was peaceful as we again performed our Sunday morning ritual of The Blade with coffee and something sweet.
In the hospice, I spent many hours with her going over decades of family photos and sharing our memories. I pushed her wheelchair over the grounds and still have a picture I took of Mom in front of a giant butterfly metal sculpture so that it looks like she has angels wings. She liked that.
The throat cancer took her ability to swallow but she asked me to bring her an order of her beloved egg foo yung so she could chew it and spit it out. Sounds gross, huh, but who am I to question my mother’s wishes?
Like the time she insisted I go buy a power washer from Target because it was a good deal. I gently reminded her that she would be unlikely to be able to use the power washer at her next destination but she ignored my entreaties. Also, she opened a new account at Lowe’s to purchase other “good deals”
Mom never passed up a good deal, to the end.
The last week of June I spent parts of four days walking around Inverness at the U.S.Senior Open
before visiting Mom. It was an opportunity to be appropriately reflective regarding, mortality, roots, road trips, women, golf, animals and Chinese food.
The last time I saw my Mom was a Sunday morning when I stopped to say goodbye at her hospice on my way out of town back to Los Angeles. I was antsy after these months of nursing duties and restrained mobility and Mom knew it right away. “Did I do something,Chuck,” she asked. I reassured her but we both knew I was lying. After more mutual reassurances, I left.
That was my all-time fastest drive to LA from Toledo, rolling up to my Sherman Oaks house after midnight Monday starting at noon Sunday.
Thanks Mom for naming me after your favorite brother Charles Ayres, killed by Nazis as a POW in 1942. That is true brotherly love!
Happy Sunday and Happy Memorial Day Mom!
I love you and I miss you.
RIP
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