CELEBRATING A LIFE

I had known him for almost sixty-five years, this tall, blonde Adonis of a man.  When we first met I was five and entering Kindergarten, he just twenty-one with a chauffeur’s license that enabled him to drive for my foster-mother for all the rest of the 26 years of her life.  When he picked me up at school to take me to the Hollywood hotel home of my foster-parents, I used to sit in the front seat of the Buick with him and we would listen to the latest tunes on the car radio.  But when I accompanied my foster-father home from the Studio, I sat nestled in the crook of “Daddy Max’s” arm in the back seat with Jay at the wheel speeding us home for a “Room Service” dinner.

Jay knew all the ways to get from point A to point B in Hollywood, and back streets were his favorites. Anyone who knows Franklin Avenue, north of Hollywood Boulevard, knows it hugs the Hollywood Hills, and rises and falls like a roller-coaster.  I loved it when Jay took me that way and we whooshed up one hill and down another like an elevator ride while still seated in a car.  The lifetime I knew him was a long ride, and I wouldn’t have missed being at his side all the times that came my way over six-and-a-half decades.  He died on a Tuesday morning in late April, and it was the end of an era for me, for he was my last link to the woman who was for both of us, “a second mother.”

When his beloved wife called to tell me of Jay’s gentle but not unexpected death, her voice was calm.  She assured me she had reminded him in those last moments that his had been a “charmed life.”  How true!  And so, for the next few days, until the Memorial event which would take place at his minister son’s home, I did my grief work over the loss of Jay in my life.  I call this process of dealing with a loved one’s death, “a reverie of remembrance.”

While I was taking the course to become a palliative care/hospice volunteer at a large Eastern hospital, my father died some twenty-three years ago.  He was in his nineties, had suffered many strokes and lived his last months in a nursing home in Idaho.  I had flown West three times to spend quality time at his side.  I had done much anticipatory grieving as I drove back and forth from the airport to see him on those occasions.  But when the news came of his actual demise, the hard grieving began.  A dear nun took my handicapped daughter for the day, my husband went off to work and my teenage son to high school.  I was left alone to cope with my loss, and there would be no comforting funeral nor memorial, at my father’s request.

It was in this vacuum of collective grief that I happened upon the “reverie of remembrance.”  I lay upon my daughter’s bed, -- a place I was unaccustomed to be, -- and looked skyward through a high window.  There and then I reviewed in mental pictures my whole life’s interaction with my father.  For me, chronological order comes easily, so I began with the earliest memories and progressed through the years, recalling and savoring the many times and ways in which my father and I had “connected.”  Sometimes I wept and sometimes I talked out loud to the remembrance of Dad.  It was like a movie rolling before my eyes and my heart.  I took time out for lunch, and returned to the “movie” afterwards.  Six hours after I had started, I had come to terms with Dad’s death, and I knew the hard grief work was done.

Thus was the reverie I entered upon to grieve now for Jay.  I had not the luxury of this process all in one day, as for Dad. So I accomplished it whenever I was alone or alone in my thoughts as my husband and I drove to Los Angeles for Jay’s Memorial.  I will not tell you that these tender recollections are not painful to recall, that they do not bring tears to the eyes and a lump to the throat.  But immersing oneself in them, -- not resisting them, or denying them, or repressing them -- actually concentrating on them, heals.

I recalled how Jay had driven and accompanied “Mommie Winslow” and myself on a leisurely auto tour of California in 1938.  Early in the summer, the three of us spent a week at Yosemite, seven days indelibly imprinted in memory.  We stayed in a cottage at the sumptuous Ahwahnee Hotel, ate on the terrace, breathing in the perfume of pine trees.  At nine each evening we watched the famous but now defunct “fire fall” from Glacier Point, an event signaled by a ranger calling, “Let the fire fall.”  One day we motored to the Point and watched the rangers raking the coals, preparing them for the spectacle.  We saw a mother bear and two little cubs lumbering along the road.  We swam in the Merced River and drove through the ancient “drive through” Sequoia Gigantea tree  that 1938 cars could easily slide through.

The Yosemite journey was followed by preparations for an extended vacation, one that would take us up the backside of the Sierra Nevada Mountains to Lake Tahoe, then to San Francisco, Monterey, Carmel and Santa Barbara.  We stayed in every five-star hotel along the way and became typical tourists for several weeks.

I remembered with gratitude how Jay had gone to give “Daddy Max” back-rubs in his last illness, and how the last day I had seen “Mommie Winslow,” it was Jay who drove me to my home, giving me precious moments with her in the back-seat.  The next day he would take her for her last drive, and ten minutes after she arrived home, she collapsed and died from a heart attack.  I fell into his arms at her funeral, shoving into his hand a handwritten outpouring of love for her, which I knew we both felt.  Then I recollected all the visits to Jay’s home that my second husband and I had made through the years when we lived East and came periodically to California.  We were always fed beautifully and made welcome by Jay and his gracious wife. There were so many marvelous moments to recall!

Then came the Saturday after his death when three couples joined Jay’s enormous family to celebrate his life.  As we entered his son’s home, we were greeted by Jay’s granddaughter offering us something non-alcoholic to drink.  His two sons directed us to a photo album capturing Jay’s rugged handsomeness from boy-hood through old-age.  One photo showed Jay with his two sons as boys at the same drive-through tree on the outskirts of Yosemite.  Jay had remembered and recreated for his sons the thrill of our first sight of it twenty years earlier!

A caterer had prepared a delicious buffet supper which we took outside on plates to eat at tables under umbrellas.  My husband and I sat with Jay’s widow, his sister-in-law, a nephew and two neighbors the family had dearly loved over the years.  When the meal was over, we formed  our chairs into a large circle and one of Jay’s sons, with his mother at his side, thanked everyone for coming and announced that now we would speak our remembrances of this beautiful person who had meant so much to each of us.  Boxes of tissues were strategically passed around and placed among us.

One of Jay’s nieces began the oral history of love.  The thread of lovingness passed around the circle, each niece or nephew recalling their uncle’s unconditional love for them at each stage of their lives.  The remaining siblings of Jay’s spoke of his generosity during the lean years of the Depression.  One son spoke of his fatherly guidance and Jay’s widow repeated how “charmed” had been his life.  She shared how they had met, had their first kiss and when he had proposed.  The circle adjourned for a bathroom break and moved indoors as evening cool spread over the yard outside.

The gathering continued its fond remembrances with great nieces recalling how they had gone to sing carols for Jay at Christmas time, and how they wished they had known him as their fathers and mothers had.  I read aloud from my newspaper columns some of the memories of Jay I treasured and had written down.  At last it was his youngest son, the minister, who spoke and described how his dad had taught him so many things, like courtesy and humility and hospitality, merely by his actions rather than words.  Tears flowed aplenty yet our recollections were peppered with hilarious laughter and witticisms Jay would have relished.  His presence in our midst was very real, almost palpable!  This was his kind of a party!  We closed out the evening by singing “Amazing Grace,” with Jay’s sons each taking a turn dancing with their mother to his favorite Louis Armstrong song and by singing together Jay’s all-time favorite ballad, “Easter Parade.”

Was Jay’s the perfect life?  Whose is?  No.  There were sorrows and tensions, as with any family.  But the gathering to celebrate his life brought transcendence to all the painful difficulties.  When “Mommie Winslow” had died almost forty years before his death, and Jay and I had lost our “second mother,” I had been married to another man who did not like funerals and opted out of our attending the post funeral reception for her – what would have been a celebration of her generous, loving life.  Somehow I never felt completion around her loss in my life.  But being invited to share with Jay’s friends and family what he, and likewise what she had meant to me and to him, had brought a sweet closure I had never dreamed possible.

It is really true, when you choose to look death in the face, embrace your loss and integrate the pain it causes, you may be blessed by the discovery of what truly matters about a person’s life – the richness of relationships, the meaningfulness one human life can hold, and beholding with awe and gratitude how one life made such a difference in the lives of so many others.  Thanks for the memories and rest in peace, beloved Jay!

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