West Seattle, Washington
03 Sunday
A few years after we moved to West Seattle, my mom decided it sounded like a great place for her to get a midlife re-start. So she moved here too. She found a great apartment near the Morgan Junction, with a peek view of the Sound and the Olympics. Eventually she found a job with a local nonprofit and started to build a life.
Then she started losing weight. We thought she just had an appetite problem. After a few months, we convinced her to see a doctor … who discovered she had one of the nastiest forms of cancer. (Not that any form of cancer is NOT nasty, but some are curable or nearly so — this one wasn’t.) Things fell apart quite rapidly. The nonprofit cut her loose before she even had a chance to start treatment (I won’t name them here but I do hold a bit of a grudge because of the way they treated her). She accepted the incurability faster than we did — and just kind of settled in to die.
This wasn’t really like her. She was always a bon vivant. But she decided she’d lived a good life (even though she was ridiculously young, still). She had an interesting take on it — “Doesn’t make any sense to say ‘why me.’ If you say ‘why me’ in the bad times, why wouldn’t you say ‘why me’ in the good times?”
She didn’t want to move in with us. She wanted to stay in that cozy apartment, with its peek view, and her stack of movie tapes, till the end was truly in sight, and then she’d think about her HMO’s inpatient hospice.
So we visited her every day. A hospice nurse came in a couple times a week. I could see my mom’s apartment from my road to work early each morning, and was haunted by the thought, “Wow, until I call and check in with her later, she could be dead in there, for all I know.” Strange, but maybe if you’ve lived through a loved one’s slow death, you understand.
The cancer that kills most people within six months of diagnosis didn’t get her till she was into month 9. The hospice nurse who admitted her to the inpatient facility when it seemed clear she had “days to go” was shocked that she didn’t move on to the next plane of existence till she’d been there six weeks.
My mom’s death wound up teaching me a lot about life. So I pay tribute to her here on Memorial Day. Especially because she died this time of year — and the bush that yielded the rose I took from her hospice bedside vase, to lay on her chest, not long after her last breath, still blooms bright this time every year, right next to our front door.
… I’d have one for the people who keep decorating their traffic island along the west side of Fauntleroy, just before the bend into Morgan Junction. It was sparkly for Christmas; now its trees and bushes have heart ornaments for Valentine’s Day. I’m not much into “cute” but I still think they deserve props for creativity that just might make a passing driver or two smile.
Some people can’t wait for Christmas to get here. Not me. The holiday itself always makes me sad. I love Christmas lights more than any other feature of the season — but once December 25 arrives, it seems half the people who put them up, stop turning them on. I know they’re not out there on Christmas Day dismantling their displays, but suddenly they just stop bothering to go out back and plug them in, or whatever. Personally, I don’t believe in taking down the tree or deactivating the lights until after New Year’s Day. This is still a “holiday week,” even if you’re working. So here’s a shout-out to all the fine folks who “let it shine, let it shine, let it shine” until the day they box everything up again. Especially West Seattle’s boldest and brightest, the Menashes down on Beach Drive. (But what happened to Fauntlee Hills, over the ferry dock? We took a spin through their neighborhood this year & it seems to be a shadow of its former self.)
Westwood Village may be a mall wanna-be, and the addition of Barnes & Noble and Pier 1 certainly has nudged it closer to mallhood. But it’s never going to be a real mall until it’s got its own after-Christmas-sale mania! We’re just back from a trip over there and pshaw, no bargains to write home about. Especially Bed, Bath & Beyond. Quel disappointment! We couldn’t even find a $20 choco-fountain. B&N has calendars on sale at half price, but then again, you didn’t need a Magic 8 Ball to see that one coming …
The Seattle Times Christmas edition features more than a bundle of after-Christmas-sale flyers — it also showcases a nice collection of local folks doing good. Among them, this guy. Trivial side note — nice picture of our west-facing shore behind him, too; so many people think West Seattle=Alki=downtown skyline views.
Honestly, this is intended to be a blog about West Seattle — what’s going on, and what’s not going on, on this side of the city, the quasi-peninsula that used to be a city all its own.
However, today, while this is still in stealth mode, we just have to say something about one of the “who stole Christmas?” controversies raging wildly across the Web.
The East Coast substitute teacher who revealed the truth about Santa Claus to a class of first-graders wasn’t all wrong.
“Those same children are going to know someday that what their parents taught them is false,” she explained, according to newspaper accounts. True. Exactly why we chose not to start the whole Santa mess with our kid, and honestly, we’re surprised more modern parents haven’t chosen to go that same route. Were we the only ones who felt betrayed when we realized we’d been deceived all those years? Did all the rest of you really just go “Oh, OK, whatever, fine,” when you found out? Didn’t it make you wonder what else your parents were lying to you about?
And yet … there is another side of Santa, also represented in the article we read about the East Coast controversy. One of the miffed parents mailed the substitute teacher a copy of “Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus.”
To this day, we do believe in that Santa — the symbol of unconditional giving, and therefore love. That’s the Santa we taught our kid about, not the one that scratches up the roof, tumbles down the chimney, and cleans out the cookie jar.
Merry Christmas. No, we mean it. Not just Happy Holidays.
Much more to come …
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