Mother and Child Reunion

I wanted to do something special and memorable for our first Mother's Day without Verna. So I announced to the kids, “Let's bring some photos to the cemetery and share a story or memory of Mommy.

Miguel lowered his shoulders and shrugged in full teenager mode, “Do I have to?”

“No,” I said, “but Maya and are going to and you have to come with us.”

He brought a tennis ball and asked if we could play catch. “No, Miguel, it's a cemetery. We are going to be reverent,” I said, using a word I purposely knew was unfamiliar to him. “This is a sacred space.”

Then he asked if he could bound downhill over and across other grave markers. “No,” I said again, “do you need to ask?”

We knelt by Verna and her mother's grave marker. I wiped away some dried leaves, dirt, and grass, and emptied the water from a few flower pots. Someone had left fresh flowers that the deer had already snacked on.

Maya chose a photograph taken last August, less than two weeks before Verna died. Verna rests her head against the olive green cushion on our living room couch, a thin smile stretched across her lips, her face steroids puffy, clasping a completely naked Maya in her arms. Happiness is etched on Maya's face, the fingers on her left hand gently touching the cross around Verna's neck, her ears sparkling from what were then days old earrings.

I brought a photograph from 1997, just a week or so after we'd found out Verna was pregnant with Miguel. We are at the home of her best friend from kindergarten, Rose, and her husband, David, wearing Raybans and opening a bottle of champagne. I am wearing a homemade tie-dyed t-shirt and my formerly ubiquitous fanny pack. Verna has a black v-necked shirt and jeans shorts.

We were still stunned and elated that we were going to be parents. Verna was not quite 33. I'd just turned 38. I told Miguel and Maya how excited we'd been when Kaiser confirmed that Verna was indeed pregnant.

Miguel tossed the tennis ball. “Miguel, “ I said sternly. Maya flitted near me. My sister-in-law, Donna, showed up with her eldest daughter, Jillian, who turns 21 this year on what would have been Verna's and my 20^th wedding anniversary.

Maya walked around the grass and gravestones with Jillian, then Miguel on the periphery started chasing the girls. Donna and I reminisced yet again about the surreal and awful times of last year, the pain crises that sent Verna to the hospital several times, the decision to defer her care to hospice, the tears, the anguish, and finally the reality that Verna's death was imminent slamming against us all like a vicious wave.

Later in the day, I said to Donna, “I felt so alone,” referring to me being Verna's primary caregiver the last two weeks of her life, totally responsible for administering and increasing the narcotic cocktails, and wavering about what was best for her, the kids, me, the rest of the family.

She responded, “It's time for me to give you a hug,” as she pulled me to her chest like a mother comforting a child.

Maya brought home a photograph of herself from school, a multicolored construction paper background, wearing a sweet smile as she gazes at the photographer, probably a preschool teacher. The picture is soft-framed with a blue matte and a white border, three flowers and a bumblebee on the corners.

Underneath the picture it says, You're the best! “It's a Mother's Day present for Mommy,” Maya said. “I wish I could give it to her.”

“Me, too,” I said.

Just three weeks ago, Maya stamped her foot outside our garage and said, “Daddy, I am angry. I want Mommy to come down and be with us, and hug us.”

“I know,” I said.

“And that's why I have been so grumpy,” she said apologetically. “Because I miss Mommy.”

I hugged and kissed her and wished I could bring Maya her Mommy down from Heaven, to sit on her bed so they could affix stickers in Maya's Disney princess sticker books.

But, alas, it is not to be. I know that, as do Miguel and Maya, but that still does not erase the longing, the confusion, the pain.

As Miguel and I walked upstairs on Mother's Day for his nightly routine (teeth brushing, one toss of his Oregon Ducks football, and then I read to him), he said, “I want to find a picture of Mommy and me and make it bigger and then put it in a really nice frame in my bedroom.”

I was temporarily speechless. Finally I said, “Sounds like a great idea.”

And completely reverent.

Happy Mother's Day, Chela

This will be my wife’s first Mother’s Day without her mother, Maria Graciela “Chela” Wefald, who died last October after a brief and sudden illness. She was 84.

She and Verna were very close, so the past several months have been very hard for her; even more so as the holiday approaches. One woman told Verna, “My mother died ten years ago and I am still not over it.”

So Verna started informally planning about a week ago what we might do on this Mother’s Day. Boom! An idea bolted into her head almost instantaneously.

“I know what we’ll do for Mother’s Day,” she said. “We’ll have a picnic…at the cemetery and then play a game of P & M,” which was one of her favorite family card games.

Either Miguel or I joked that we would have to open the grave so we could retrieve the playing cards Maya threw in on the day of Chela’s funeral and burial.

Maria Graciela Wefald, who was born in El Salvador and came to the United States in the 1950s, was one of the most unconditionally devoted parents and grandparents I’ve ever known. Her selfless embrace of her family reminded me of my maternal grandmother (who died in 1999) and my paternal grandfather (who died in 1992).

Shortly after Verna gave birth to Miguel in 1998, Chela took the bus from San Francisco to our home, 30 minutes north, with a pot of chicken soup. She then walked nearly a mile from the bus center, more than ¼-mile of it uphill, to our shaded duplex overlooking San Rafael High.

I have several memories of Chela I’d like to share. Even into her early 80s, she routinely hiked 2-3 miles. She chided her family to eat their “green things,” which were vegetables. She called root beer soda “ruse beer”.

She and my father-in-law trekked to our home everyday, five days a week, when Verna was first diagnosed with cancer. They came for 9 months, and then thanked us for giving them the gift of spending time with their grandchildren.

She had a reverence for the cycles of life. She truly believed in the power of the moon as a healing force. She felt one had to be near the ocean during a New Moon to fully experience lunar intensity. One time, while Verna, Miguel, she, and I drove up the coast to Portland, OR, we stopped just before lunch so Chela could dip her feet into the Pacific.

She doted on all her grandchildren, but I saw her mostly with our two kids, Miguel and Maya. She actually played with them. She was always on the floor with Maya, building something or getting swept up in other imaginative play. And she tossed baseballs outside with Miguel or played board games with him.

She occasionally gambled in Reno or Tahoe, but almost always played the nickel slot machines.

She was very devout in her faith, but it was a quiet devotion. She always felt humbled and awed in church, but never expected any kind of religious reciprocity from her family.

Verna, her two brothers, and her dad had a musical photographic video made a few days after Chela died, and we viewed it at her funeral and at the memorial gathering at our home later that day.

Maya asks to watch “Grandma’s movie” several times a week, and usually Verna complies. She and I still get teary-eyed and we’ve seen it more than a dozen times. Chela’s death left a gaping hole in our lives and hearts. She is terribly missed but her legacy of devotion and nurturing lives on in Verna and, I hope, Miguel and Maya and all her children and grandchildren, as well as the great grandchild she never met, Lola Chela.

Rest in peace, Chela, rest in peace.