Quiet Sleep and A Sweet Dream – Revisited

Posted on September 6, 2018 by Laurie Samsel Olson

Five years ago this month, in September 2013, I took my mother on her last outing. It was nothing extraordinary. We went to a doctor appointment, ran a few errands, and ate lunch at her favorite Mexican restaurant. Perhaps if we had known it was the last time we would be out together, we would have done something more purposeful, more memorable. Nevertheless, it was. That day, out of the blue, she told me that soon she would be leaving. Despite the fact that she was elderly, in poor health and wheelchair-bound, she remarked matter-of-factly that she would walk out the front door of our shared home and head down the sidewalk, carrying everything she needed in a small bag. A few months later she did leave. Just not on foot. She left on the wings of a dream and, in her memory, I am republishing the blog I wrote about her departure. Herewith is “Quiet Sleep and a Sweet Dream.”

Throughout her adult life, Mom experienced a recurring dream that was poignantly revealing. In the dream she roamed the halls of a school, unable to find her locker or her classroom. She was always lost, always searching, never finding. One hardly needs to consult a dream interpreter to understand the obvious meaning behind her unresolved quest. To think that she was perpetually adrift, unable to find her heart’s desire, was reminiscent of an ancient Greek tragedy.

Toward the end of her life, Mom also suffered from vivid nightmares. Many times I would hear her during the night or during an afternoon nap fighting against someone or something that posed a threat. She could rarely recount the experiences when I woke her, but judging by the flailing and yelling, the danger must have seemed very real. Sometimes she was so enmeshed in these dreams that it was difficult to break the spell. When gently touching her shoulder or softly calling out “Mom” didn’t work, I resorted to shouting her name, “Joy!”

One day just before she was admitted to the home hospice program, she was able to recall a particularly powerful vision. It began harmlessly but ended in disturbing cries that drew me to her bedside. Her story is still clear in my mind.

I was with a bunch of other people by the water. I’m not sure whether it was the ocean or a lake, but there was a pier. I’m pretty sure the people around me were my brothers and sisters. Sam (her late husband, my father) was in the water and he wanted me to get in. He kept laughing and trying to coax me, but I didn’t want to go. Finally, he grabbed me and pulled me in. Everyone was laughing, but I was really mad.

As with her recurring dream, this one did not require hours of thoughtful analysis. She simply was not ready for the end of this life … or on the flip side … the beginning of a new one. The hospice social worker she shared the story with concurred without hesitation. I was quietly concerned because I knew Mom did not have much time left to prepare. The ethereal boat was going to leave the pier with her aboard regardless of whether she wanted to go. I shuddered to think that she might die flailing and shouting – figuratively if not literally – as though she were in the middle of another bad dream.

The day inevitably came, of course, when she traded her hospital bed for a seat on that ghostly vessel bound for the Other Side. By that time, though, I was no longer worried that she wasn’t ready. Long after she stopped talking to us, my sister and I heard her pose two important questions to no one that we could see. I was alone with Mom for the first question. My sister was alone with her for the second.

Where are we? Where are we going?

Although she displayed some typical signs of near-death anxiety in the days leading up to her departure, Mom was entirely calm and peaceful when she asked these two questions. Her eyes were closed to the mortal world. There was no trepidation in her voice whatsoever.

I can’t think of anything she could have said in her last hours that would have given me more comfort. The answers would be interesting, but the questions are solace enough. Evidently, she went somewhere with someone.

The idea that our loved ones depart on a journey of mystical proportions is not without basis. Religious beliefs aside, it is a fact that the dying use travel as a way of expressing their impending departure without even realizing it. In their 1992 book Final Gifts, hospice nurses Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley documented multiple examples of patients who exhibited near-death awareness in this way. Mom could have been one of their case studies. Out of the blue, about three months before she died, she told me that one day I would come home from work and she would be gone – out the front door, walking and carrying everything she needed in a small bag. I thought she was joking as she so often did, but her voice was somehow different. Faraway. When I questioned her scenario, she was indignant. I let it go, and we didn’t talk about it again.

Today, with about 17 months of bereavement under my belt, I still miss my mother terribly. However, I don’t worry about where she is. I don’t picture her splashing around with my father in a lake or the sea near a pier, nor do I imagine her walking down the sidewalk of our neighborhood with a hobo sack slung over her shoulder. I don’t think of her futilely roaming the halls of a school because I think that, in the end, she finally located the elusive door of her locker or classroom and found paradise inside. No, I have embraced another vision – one that she shared with me on a sunny morning after she awoke from a quiet sleep accompanied by a sweet dream.

I was riding a motorcycle down a winding road with tall trees on both sides. It was getting dark and all I could see clearly was the headlight of the motorcycle on the road as I went around the curves. I don’t know where I was going, but I could feel the wind in my face and I felt free.

That is how I like to think of Mom – on an endless sojourn with no particular destination. I can imagine her long, dark hair blowing in the wind and a beautiful smile on her youthful face. She leans right into one curve, straightens out her bike, and leans left into the next turn. She is free.

And maybe freedom is the real point after all. Not where you are going or how you get there.

When our family gathered to scatter Mom’s ashes at her beloved Oregon Coast, we took some time to play and sing the songs she had requested – Mr. Tambourine Man by Bob Dylan, Tender Years by John Cafferty, Around and Around by John Denver, Always by Irving Berlin. I read a little poem she wrote when she was a child about wanting to be a cowboy. We wrapped the tribute up with a piece by the late British poet laureate John Masefield; a poem Mom had loved since she was old enough to read and appreciate classic prose. I could never deliver it in the resounding, dramatic way she always did, but it was the perfect farewell nevertheless.

Sea Fever

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, and all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by, and the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking, and a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking. I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied. And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying, and the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying. I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life, to the gull’s way and the whale’s way, where the wind’s like a whetted knife. And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover, and quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

On this Mother’s Day 2015, my long trick writing Notes From My Mother has come to a natural end. I have shared all of the posthumous notes Mom left me and have posted some additional stories that fit in nicely with the theme. As of today, I am going to suspend my weekly entries in order to follow my maternal muse down a different path of remembrance. If you look back at my October 2014 column titled “Don’t Forget Our Secret Handshake,” you’ll get a clue about what is to come. I expect to check in periodically while my sister and I work our way through this other exciting project. For now, I thank you for reading these stories about my beautiful, funny, sometimes weird, always wonderful mother. And I wish you all – wherever you are – quiet sleep and a sweet dream.

Fat, Fat, the Water Rat

Posted on January 25, 2018 by Laurie Samsel Olson

My mother was fond of catch phrases, song lyrics, movie quotes and other familiar axioms from popular culture. Repeating these at apropos moments not only helped define those moments but also cemented memories of similar ones.

In her posthumous notes to me, delivered on fitting occasions by family co-conspirators, she documented dozens of her favorites. I have used each and every one of them in this column as a means of preserving stories about her and our nine-year relationship as caregiver and care receiver. Just this morning I noticed that one was missing.

Fat, Fat, the Water Rat

I remember Mom reciting this when she was in a self-deprecating mood about her weight, when I was about to indulge in some ill-advised sugary treat, or when one of our pets grew a little too rotund for his or her own good. She wasn’t using it to bully anyone as kids apparently did on the playground once upon a time. It was just the first line to an old song she remembered from her youth; one that she quoted when the circumstances seemed to call for it.

At any rate, the phrase came to mind this morning when thinking about my health. Next week I have to go in for my first routine blood draw to determine if there is any cancerous activity brewing anywhere in my body. I have to admit, it’s nerve-wracking even though the tumor they removed from my breast last fall was very small, and I’ve been on a cancer suppressing drug for the last few months. I keep thinking about the random microscopic cancer cells they found in one of my lymph nodes and try to silence the “what ifs.” It’s much more productive to think about the things I’m doing outside the medical arena to discourage a recurrence.

Which brings me back to Fat, Fat, the Water Rat.

The entire time I was taking care of Mom in our shared home in the Nevada desert, I told myself that I needed to work on weight loss and physical fitness to avoid the many maladies that plagued her. Diabetes runs in our family and is fueled by obesity. Mom was an insulin-dependent diabetic. Heart disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, kidney disease and osteoarthritis are also caused by or exacerbated by excess weight. Mom was under a doctor’s care for all of these issues.

So, of course, I was keenly aware of the chance I was taking by carrying around much more weight than I should. But there was one risk that escaped me.

Breast cancer.

Did you know that?

I didn’t. Not until I was diagnosed with it.

Mom and me in October 2013, about two months before she passed away.

When Mom was alive, I did try to lose weight a few times and a couple of times I was successful. Invariably, though, something always happened to derail my progress. Stress, an injury or an illness (mine or hers) would pop up, and the pounds started coming back. I finally gave up when she was in her last year of life. She was my priority. Period. Then, for the first couple of years after she died, I was too grief-stricken and, coincidentally, under too much pressure at work to even think about self-improvement.

Finally, in January 2017, I took the plunge. I joined a well-respected diet program online, started walking regularly, and by the end of August had lost 44 pounds. That’s when I scheduled my first mammogram in six years, and my life forever changed. At first, it was a whirlwind of tests, surgery, consultations, decisions and overwhelming worry. Worry about my future, our finances, our kids, our grandsons, and how my husband would cope if things got ugly. Eventually, after the initial shock passed, I took matters into my own hands and read everything I could find about traditional treatment and alternatives. That’s when I learned about obesity and breast cancer.

As it turns out, fat cells create estrogen. My particular form of breast cancer – invasive ductal carcinoma – eats estrogen.

If you’re overweight, let that sink in for a moment.

As soon as I read this, I renewed my commitment to weight loss and fitness. I was able to lose another eight pounds before the end of 2017 despite the challenges of recovering from surgery and the temptations of the holidays. I gained a few pounds back the first couple of weeks of January when I continued to snack on high-calorie leftovers and skipped some of my daily walks due to the flu. But, when I uncovered another sobering fact while digging into the role of nutrition in cancer recurrence, I quickly got back on track.

What was the sobering fact?

Sugar – which I love as dearly as it loves my thighs and my belly – is cancer’s friend.

German Nobel Prize winner Dr. Otto Warburg first discovered the connection between sugar and cancer in the early 1920s. After more than 40 years of research and study, he presented findings demonstrating that the fermentation of sugar suppresses oxygen in body cells, which promotes cancer growth. Another study released just last fall by a team of Belgian scientists says the same thing. The best explanation I found is from a New York Daily News article written by Dan Gunderman and published October 18, 2017.

“Scientists explain the customary way non-cancerous cells get energy – through a process called aerobic respiration, where digested food is transformed into energy-filled molecules. The process … requires oxygen and releases carbon dioxide. Cancer cells, however, do not fall in line with that biological process. Instead, cancer cells harness energy from fermenting sugar. This means sugar can ‘awaken’ cancer cells and make them multiply and expand.”

Sugar can awaken cancer cells and make them multiply.

Oh my gosh, this is scary stuff. Sugar is omnipresent in the average American diet. I know it is in mine. Even when diligently dieting last year, I managed to include it in my meal plans and stay within the allotment of points my weight loss program allowed. I knew that sugar is a major contributor to obesity, but I figured it would be OK as long as I kept it under control. “Everything in moderation,” as the saying goes. The fact that I lost weight while consuming modest amounts supported my theory. I didn’t know about the cancer connection.

With these two ghastly realities about fat and sugar fresh in my mind, I’m now working on identifying the foods I should be eating to continue to lose weight and further reduce my risk of cancer recurrence. As you might expect, it’s mostly about fresh fruit and vegetables, whole grains and lean meats. There are also some so-called “super foods” that bear consideration. However, I’ll leave the details for another column. Today I just want to spread the word about the two very important things I didn’t know but wish I had.

Fat cells create estrogen. Breast cancer (at least my variety of breast cancer) eats estrogen.

Sugar not only contributes to obesity but can encourage cancer cells to grow.

I thank the good Lord that Mom never had to deal with cancer on top of everything else that plagued her. She was certainly a prime candidate for it, just as I was. Hopefully, I learned about the risks of fat and sugar in time to save myself further health issues in my retirement years. Time will tell. For motivation, I’m going to make a little sign and tape it to my bathroom mirror. Thanks, Mom, for the quote.

Fat, Fat, the Water Rat

Quiet Sleep and A Sweet Dream

Posted on May 10, 2015 by Laurie Samsel Olson

Where are we? Where are we going?

And maybe freedom is the real point after all. Not where you are going or how you get there.

Sea Fever

Life Is Just A Bowl Of …

Posted on May 3, 2015 by Laurie Samsel Olson

Forrest Gump famously said that his mother compared life to a box of chocolates because you never know what you’re going to get. My mother had an opinion on life as well, but it was a little more fruity. Depending on the circumstances, life could either be a bowl of cherries or a bowl of cherry pits.

In the latter half of the 1980s, Mom and I repeated the cherry pit version often. We would laugh each time we said it, but it wasn’t really very funny. During those years, Mom lost her little home on a forested acre with a creek running through it because she couldn’t afford to install a dedicated water system as the bank required for refinancing. That meant she was unable pay off a 10-year mortgage balloon on her private contract, and the house reverted to the former owner. Also during that time, she spent the last year of her career working as the administrator of a nursing home that was in danger of closure due to licensing violations. The corporation she worked for gave her the assignment because they trusted her to bring the facility into compliance and, indeed, she did. However, the stress was monumental. All the while, she was living in a rustic geodome without water or heat on a friend’s property.

As for me, I was burned out as the editor in charge of the content of eight neighborhood newspapers in the city of Portland. Although it may sound like an important job, it didn’t pay particularly well. Neither did my husband’s job, so we were constantly counting pennies. At least we were when we were together. In 1988, we hit some bumps in the marital road and split up for several months. The same year, my mother-in-law succumbed to a six-year battle with lymphoma. That was in May. Two months later my father died unexpectedly during orthopedic surgery. My parents had lived apart for years, but his death hit my mother hard nevertheless. Looking back, it’s no wonder that she and I periodically shook our heads and, with utter resignation, made the cherry pit comment.

By 1994, both of our fortunes had changed. Mom had retired and realized her dream of moving to the Oregon Coast. I had embarked on a more fulfilling and financially stable career in public service and happiness had been restored to my marriage. In a just-in-case farewell note I wrote and tucked away for Mom that year, I documented five rules of life. A few I’ve covered in this column because they were also among the posthumously delivered farewell notes Mom left for me. Live long and prosper. I’m the pretty one. A more uplifting version of Mom’s personal mantra, I’m the only one. In the Number One spot was the Joie de Vivre we had lost for a while.

Life isn’t always a bowl of cherry pits.

Whether you compare life to a box of assorted chocolates, to juicy cherries or to the ugly pits, the fact is that life is an ever-changing adventure. One day can be entirely different from the next. Grief is of the same nature.

Over the nine months or so since I started writing this column, I’ve sometimes gotten lost in the joy of remembering my beautiful, funny, sometimes weird, always wonderful mother. Some weeks, though, I’ve found myself slipping backward into sorrow. During those times, I would trade all the sleep and personal freedom I now have for the pleasure of helping her in and out of bed, escorting her to the bathroom, preparing her meals, managing her medications and otherwise caring for her 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

These past few weeks have been like that. I miss her so much that my heart aches. Even with other family and friends close by, I feel lonely. Talking to a peer the other day about the tough choices she is faced with concerning her elderly parents, I was secretly envious because she still has her folks … even if they are in fragile health. I want my mother back, gosh darn it.

It started because I discovered something tucked away in her closet that I didn’t expect. It was a surprise, a delight and a source of agony all at the same time. Three big scrapbooks full of memories.

I knew the scrapbooks were there; I just didn’t know what was in them. I found out while searching for documentation of a particular event in Mom’s life. I wanted to see if, by chance, she had saved the program from the Christmas Day party aboard the battleship U.S.S. Oklahoma in 1937 when she received her first doll. I didn’t find that particular item, but the pages were filled with so much more.

Inside one of the scrapbooks were touching mementoes that celebrated both special moments and everyday occurrences. A postcard my father sent from the Gulf of Mexico in 1947 was full of passion and love, along with a P.S. to order a new lens for his glasses while he was away. A 1977 letter from my grandmother shared all the family news from afar. A pocket pasted to one page held poems, songs, quotations and toasts that Mom explained “all meant something and touched the inner me in some way.” Another pocket held a multi-page love story she wrote when she was a pre-teen. Roughly the second half of the scrapbook contained page after page of drawings, stories and cards from her children and grandchildren.

Another of the three scrapbooks was home to dozens of examples of Mom’s artistic gifts, including a self-portrait etched in charcoal in 1949. I browsed through the drawings with interest and appreciation until one page stopped me short. I immediately felt a lump in my throat and tears stinging my eyes. I was looking at the faded remains of a once beautiful watercolor Mom painted for a community college class that we took together in the spring of 1974. Our instructor sent us into a wooded area adjacent to the campus and told us to paint what we saw. I was in front of Mom. She painted me amongst the tall trees and bushes. As I gently ran my fingertips over her brushstrokes, I was overwhelmed with longing to share the moment with her. Instead, I texted my sister, who said she knew about the contents of the scrapbooks since she helped Mom fill them. Even in a text, I was too choked up to say little more than, “Well, I did not.”

My sister commented that, for Mom, the scrapbooks were “a work of undying love for her family.” How I miss that love right now. Friends tell me that the love is still there or that I will see her again when it’s my turn to Walk into the Light. Of course, there is truth in those words. But when I go into Mom’s bedroom, today’s reality is that she is not sitting in her recliner watching the birds in the trees that my husband and I planted by her slider. She is not napping peacefully in her bed with her oxygen machine rhythmically pumping nearby. She is not there to talk to me, smile at me, laugh with me or cheerily greet me with a lyrical, “Hello, Laurie Joy.” She will never be there again.

Never. For those coping with grief, that word cuts like a brutally honest knife. The only thing that can dull the pain is time. The most we can hope for is to cherish our memories and move on in a way that would make our departed loved one proud. Through this column, I have been able to bring my mother’s memory to life for family, friends and other interested readers. I’ve often felt as though she has been standing at my shoulder whispering in my ear, “Put in this. Don’t say that.” I hope that she is proud of the result.

What I think she would most be proud of, though, is any success I may have in moving on with my life after 12 years of sharing a home with her and caring for her. It’s not an easy task, especially when every room in our house is filled with reminders that she is gone. But I am trying. I just have to remember that some days are always going to be better than others. As the late singer-songwriter John Denver once sang, “Some days are diamonds. Some days are stone.” And to paraphrase what Mom and I used to say …

Some days life is just a bowl of cherry pits. Other days you get the cherries.

Here’s to more days full of ripe, juicy cherries. As for the pits, well, I guess when you think about it, they aren’t really so bad. Pits are the seeds that grow into the trees that produce the cherries that fill the bowls. With apologies to Forrest, you can’t say that about a box of assorted chocolates.

The Dead Cabinet

Posted on April 19, 2015 by Laurie Samsel Olson

For at least the last decade, my living room has featured an unusual conversation starter known as The Dead Cabinet.

Although I am at times likely to curl my upper lip and offer “aargh, matey” as a gravely greeting, this wonderful curiosity has nothing to do with pirates. It’s not a reproduction of the Dead Man’s Chest where scurvy buccaneer Davy Jones stashed his broken heart. It’s not a rendering of a faraway Caribbean island where 15 men sang about a bottle of rum.

It is, however, very much a treasure chest.

Safe behind three glass casements are keepsakes so precious that, in case of fire, I would likely choose to save them as soon as I was sure that people and pets were out of harm’s way. It’s not because any of these mementoes could add significantly to my bank account. They are, instead, an irreplaceable link to my family’s past. Dead men may tell no tales, but The Dead Cabinet surely does.

Mom and I bought the cabinet a few years after we began sharing a home in the high desert of Northern Nevada. During one of our Sunday morning coffee chats, I mentioned a long-time fantasy of creating a sort of family museum if ever I had enough space. It seemed so pointless to accumulate mementoes of lost loved ones and then keep them packed in boxes gathering dust in the garage. Mom’s eyes lit up.

We didn’t have enough square footage in our little, yellow house to devote an entire room to things that belonged to the dead, but we could certainly spare some wall space in our main living area. A trip to the local furniture store turned up the perfect size display cabinet fashioned like a lawyer’s bookcase. As soon as it was delivered, we both began unearthing treasures that hadn’t seen the light of day for decades.

Vintage jewelry, eyeglasses, Bibles, a well-loved Raggedy Ann, a pair of tiny antique baby dolls, a blue fabric hat, letters and postcards, trinket boxes, photographs, sheet music and dog-eared, yellowed documents all found a place on the shelves. As long as an item was handed down from a deceased relative, it was a candidate for the cabinet. Once we discovered that a small plastic Kewpie doll standing in one corner had actually belonged to my husband and not his departed sister, so out the little guy came. Exactly how and when we started calling the case The Dead Cabinet, I don’t recall, but it was typical irreverence for Mom and me.

There’s nothing irreverent about my adoration for what is in the cabinet, however. Every piece is a true delight. If I had to pick a favorite, it would be my grandfather’s wallet. Perhaps it’s because I never knew him.

Mom was 14 years old when her father, Noble Cleveland Metzger, was one of about 45 people killed at sea during the only tropical storm to make landfall in California in the 20^th Century. It was the proverbial “perfect storm” because the currents off the Pacific coast are very rarely warm enough to carry a Mexican hurricane that far north. The difference that day in September 1939 was that the area had just experienced a week-long, record-breaking heat wave.

In the absence of any kind of weather tracking system, the historic storm caught everyone by surprise when it whipped through the region with gale force winds and torrential rain. Onshore, cars floated down flooded streets past homes and businesses that had washed off their foundations. Offshore, pleasure and commercial boaters frantically fled for safe harbor when the pleasantly rolling sea suddenly turned into an angry, churning adversary.

A fisherman by trade, my grandfather was trolling aboard The Nina off the coast near Oxnard when the storm struck. The engine swamped and failed, but the captain of a nearby fishing charter loaded with guests came to the rescue and tossed a tow line. In a punishing shower of rain, salt water and foam, my grandfather steadied himself on the pitching deck, caught the line and lashed it securely to The Nina’s bow.

Mom with her Pop, sister Carrie and friend Mr. Schneider.

At first it seemed that The Nina was out of danger, but it soon became apparent that both of the wildly rocking vessels would likely be lost if the tow line was not severed. Over the roar of the unforgiving wind, the two men desperately called back and forth. My grandfather begged the captain not to cut The Nina loose. The captain shouted an anguished, “I’m sorry,” and sliced the strained line. It whipped back toward my grandfather with violent force and broke his neck. He was killed instantly, his deck hand perished, and The Nina sank.

My grandfather’s body, with his wallet still in his pocket, washed up on the beach at Point Mugu a few days later. The distraught captain of the other vessel told the authorities and my uncles the details of the heartbreaking story. It was passed down to me through my cousin, Norm Metzger, from his father, Cecil.

The fact that my mother, the youngest of 10 children, ended up with my grandfather’s water-logged wallet is a blessing to me. It’s empty now except for the fine grains of sand leftover from that tragic day. Once in a while I take it out of its place of honor in The Dead Cabinet and run my fingers across the brittle, stained leather. I close my eyes and imagine my grandfather’s strong hands flipping it open to retrieve a dollar bill to buy chewing gum or soda pops for an entourage of children, and then slipping it back into his pants pocket. The vision connects me to a man I can only dream of through my mother’s stories, photograph albums, and documents discovered on genealogy websites.

Of course, not every family keepsake from the past few generations will fit into one, small Dead Cabinet. Now that she has reunited with her beloved Pop, Mom actually has her own display case. We used to talk sometimes about what items she might like me to place in the original cabinet after she passed, but she left behind so many meaningful mementoes that I simply turned the tall curio in her bedroom into a resting place for a generous selection. Inside are elephant figurines, crystals, a charm bracelet, sparkling earrings that dangle to your shoulders, a white feather boa, old tin tags for dogs who crossed the rainbow bridge more than a half century ago, a bust she made in a long-ago art class, and a lengthy list of other memorabilia. The little brass bells she chimed to summon me after our relationship evolved into one of caregiver and care receiver have a special place in front.

Fittingly, Mom’s bedroom has become the quasi family museum that I once envisioned. The curio is the centerpiece, but the room is a cornucopia of heirloom furniture, photo albums, handmade quilts, fat scrapbooks and vintage clothing. Most of Mom’s bedroom furnishings also remain in their original places. I picture her watching from a safe distance, chuckling as she remembers a conversation we had when we knew her time was growing short.

“What are those black spots on the arm of my chair?” she asked as I prepared to help her transfer from her wheelchair to her lumpy, old, beige recliner.

“I don’t see anything. I’ll have to get down there.”

“Right there!”

“Oh. Those little spots? They look like ink marks. Your pen probably slipped when you were writing down your blood sugar.”

“Oh. Oh well. You’ll probably get rid of that chair anyway when I die.”

“No, Mom. Your room is going to be a shrine.”

“Well, in that case, you should buy a better bed.”

“What? Mom, you’ve waited until now to tell me you don’t like your bed?”

Priceless.

Priceless is also the most appropriate way to characterize the family keepsakes I’m fortunate to have amassed. They are like the keys to the kingdom in terms of our heritage. Clues in a vast treasure hunt through the roots and branches of the family tree. The elusive “X” every pirate seeks on his tattered map to buried booty.

Hold that thought while I curl my upper lip, clear my throat, and conjure up my inner sea-going scoundrel.

Avast, me hearties! Riches await ye. Meet me here next week. Together we’ll set sail and venture …

Beyond The Dead Cabinet.

The Perfect Thing

Posted on April 12, 2015 by Laurie Samsel Olson

My mother was the classic child of the Great Depression. Though she remembered her upbringing with fond nostalgia, the stories she told were mostly of staying one step ahead of the landlord, relying on government commodities to keep food on the table and learning to make something from nothing.

Puppies and kittens substituted for dolls until she was 13 years old and the sailors of the U.S.S. Oklahoma threw a Christmas party for impoverished children onboard their massive battleship anchored in California’s San Pedro Harbor. As afternoon shadows began to fall on that 1937 holiday, she contently rode the motor launch back to the docks with her very own doll cradled in her arms.

Like so many other men and women of her generation, Mom didn’t understand or condone the throw-away mentality of the modern age. If something was broken, you either fixed it or kept it until you were able to fix it. If you didn’t need something today, you hung onto it because you might need it tomorrow.

Family folklore is packed with stories of Mom retrieving this-and-that from boxes bound for thrift stores or tables laden with items priced and ready to be sold at the next day’s garage sale. While I was her caregiver, my hands were tied when it came to clearing out clutter. Once she spotted a broken birdfeeder I had tossed on top of a rubbish pile way off in the far corner of the backyard, foolishly thinking she wouldn’t notice before we loaded our old pick-up truck for a trip to the dump. She did, and the next morning I tramped out there and found a place for the poor, maligned birdfeeder in the bushes under the crabapple tree by her bedroom slider. Another time I bought her a new wind chime to replace the mangled one hanging from the trellis near the same crabapple tree. She wouldn’t let me throw away the old one, and I’m quite sure it’s still tucked in a box in our laundry room.

I also still have the last two of the four acrylic tumblers she bought at a neighbor’s yard sale some 25 years ago. Painted with pink and purple flowers and molded of thin material, they were just the right size and weight for the fresh glass of water she liked to keep handy to wet her whistle now and then. Eventually, the tumblers began to crack and leak, but parting with those last two was never an option for her and, by way of respecting her memory, it is not an option for me either. They were and always will be the best example of …

The Perfect Thing.

That was the line Mom used to justify countless stops at garage, yard, driveway, lawn and patio sales as well as the occasional second-hand store. “They might have the perfect thing,” she would say to me or my sister or a granddaughter or whoever was in the driver’s seat that day. Somehow, having a house full of her own paraphernalia was not quite enough. Someone else might have something better or different.

After she moved to Nevada to live with me, we managed to squeeze two households of furniture, kitchen gadgets, memorabilia and other miscellaneous belongings into one little, yellow house. Seven years later my ex-husband and I remarried, and we bought a 2,369-square foot, four bedroom, three bathroom house with a three-car garage because wedging yet another household of stuff into our compact, 1,420-square-foot home clearly exceeded the state’s legal limit. Still, the treasure hunting continued.

At times, the accumulation was laughable. If Mom could have rolled on the floor guffawing when my visiting sister played us a video of a George Carlin routine about stuff, she no doubt would have done just that. As it was, she and I both had tears of glee rolling down our cheeks.

That’s all your house is, is a pile of stuff with a cover on it,” the late comedian quipped. That’s all your house is; it’s a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff! Now, sometimes you gotta move. You’ve gotta get a bigger house. Why? Too much stuff!

At other times, belongings were anything but laughable. Mom was already in Nevada with me when my sister and her family packed out Mom’s storm-damaged trailer and transported a small U-Haul down the long Interstate 5 through Oregon, across the northern tip of California, and finally to our little house in the desert. For years Mom was convinced that some of her things were missing no matter how many times we tried to reassure her that none of us would ever betray her in that way. She had seen too many of her brothers and sisters give up treasured possessions in their old age and too many residents of the nursing home where she worked sadly arrive with just the bare essentials.

In the end, of course, we all move on to a place where stuff isn’t necessary. We can’t pack a bag of our favorite things and take it with us when we walk into the Light, cross the Great Divide, ascend to Heaven or make the final trip Home. Mom prepared for that eventuality by amassing an inventory – on cassette tapes and on dozens of pages organized in a three-ring binder – virtually everything she owned. If she remembered when and how she acquired an item, she documented it for posterity. The tapes even have some amazing back stories that shine a light on family history, on bygone days, and on Mom’s personality. Of the tapes I’ve listened to so far, a favorite tale is the origin of the Pink Depression Glass. She recorded this memory in 1990 while living in her trailer on the Oregon Coast.

Four plates, four saucers, four cups, a sugar and creamer, and a platter. My brothers, when they were very young, used to do canoe tilting. And you’ve probably never even heard of that. Two guys would get in a canoe. One would paddle. The other one stood in the front of the canoe with a long pole with a padded end on it and they went up against two other guys in another canoe and they tried to knock each other out of the boat. So a lot depended on the paddler to keep the boat in the right position and the other guy had to be really strong and steady. God, I can’t remember which of my (six) brothers it was but it was probably … Gene and Tom. This set of dishes – this Pink Depression Glass – was a first prize they won and they gave them to my mother. A lot of years ago, one time when I was visiting her, she gave them to me. And I love those dishes. I’d like to be able to eat off them every day. Of course, I don’t know why I couldn’t, but I love those dishes. So whoever gets them, cherish them. They’re very special. Anyway, they’re probably worth a little bit of money. I mean, Depression Glass is considered a real collectible now and these date back to … well … Tom just died at 81 … you can see it must have been more than 60 years ago when he was a young boy. All my brothers were real good swimmers.

Mom handed down the Pink Depression Glass to my sister several years before she passed away. My sister didn’t need the story to persuade her to hang onto this treasure. But that, I believe, was the purpose of Mom’s tape recordings and inventory binder. Perhaps if we knew where certain things came from, we might be more apt to understand the sentimental value and keep them in the family.

These days I love browsing through second-hand stores almost as much as Mom did, but now when I walk through the maze of this-and-that, I find myself wondering how century-old family photos wound up on a shopkeeper’s shelf or who might have sipped tea from a delicate, old china cup. Was that Depression Glass in the display case a prize in a canoe-tilting contest? Did that vintage birdfeeder once hang outside a homebound grandmother’s window? The mystery intrigues me

All right. I know that every room in our big house and too much space in our multi-car garage already are devoted to storing a lifetime of Mom’s things, my husband’s things and mine. I know I don’t truly need one more thing. I also know that the stuff in those second-hand stores represents someone else’s life; someone else’s stories. But I can’t let go of the notion that maybe, just maybe, if I keep looking, one day I’ll find …

The Perfect Thing.

Mom and granddaughter Rhianna looking for the perfect thing among her late sister, Fay’s, vintage costume jewelry.

Prelude: Don’t Hold On To The Dogwood Tree

Posted on March 29, 2015 by Laurie Samsel Olson

Last week while writing about the grandmothers and mothers who helped to shape my character, another story emerged from the synopses of their lives. It would seem irreverent to blithely skip past the brief but stunning notations that two of these four, resilient women buried children. Every parent knows there is nothing more tragic or impossible to bear. Those who have experienced it can attest to that truth. Those who have not will agree that losing a child is their greatest fear.

Paul Daniel Samsel

Paul Daniel Samsel
January 30, 1914 to October 14, 1914

Imagine holding your firstborn baby boy in your arms, smiling down at him with more joy than you ever dreamed one person could feel. It’s January 30, 1914. In Europe, World War I is beginning to brew. In America, Henry Ford starts mass producing cars and Babe Ruth is about to sign his first minor league contract. None of that matters to you. Everyone and everything else in the world could disappear like snowflakes in summertime and you wouldn’t notice. You no longer own your heart. It now resides in that baby boy’s beautiful eyes and in the grasp of his tiny, perfect fingers. The only thing you know is love. Your only expectation is that he will grow and learn and play and ever after be the greatest source of your own rapture.

Less than nine months later you are standing in the surreal landscape of a cemetery, staring at that baby boy’s gravestone. He has died horribly of a mysterious condition that stole his strength and turned his skin dark and scaly. Because it caused hideous lesions to erupt in his tiny mouth, doctors called it Black Tongue Disease. No one would know for decades that it was actually just a niacin deficiency easily addressed with a diet change.

For the rest of your 93 years, you will rarely speak of the little spirit who entered and exited your life in a shockingly short span of time. Oh, you will be a mother again. You will smile, laugh and love again. But shards of your broken heart will forever reside in your firstborn baby boy’s closed eyes.

Marsha Ann Olson

Marsha Ann Olson
October 21, 1957 to April 19, 1971

Now imagine you are a young mother in the late 1950s. Your fourth child has come along unexpectedly but your delight in this happy little girl’s presence is not diminished by the surprise. About a year of normal childhood milestones comes to a screeching halt one day when she is scrambling up the stairs in yet another gleeful attempt to explore the uncharted territory of her siblings’ second-floor bedrooms. In the single tick of a clock, she can’t remember how to climb. Soon, any words she has learned are gone. Her hands are compulsively clenched, often with fists raised as if poised for a boxing match, and her siblings gently hold her arms down for family photos. Seizures grip her without warning. Eye contact is increasingly rare. She understands little except perhaps the fact that she is loved.

At the time, you are a Christian Scientist who puts more faith in God than doctors. Yet, you still consult them. They are clueless. You accept the reality and continue to love your sweet, unusual child with all your heart and soul. Your other children are protective when neighborhood bullies tease her. They periodically sing to her, “I love you a bushel and a peck.” You sometimes buy her little hand bells to see her eyes light up in momentary enchantment. You help her walk and eat, take her to a special school, change her diapers and put her to bed at night for almost 14 years. Then one morning you go into her bedroom and find her precious body lifeless and cold.

Doctors still have no answers for you. They shrug and state the obvious; that she slipped away in her sleep. More than 40 years later, your other children come across a website that indicates she probably suffered from a rare genetic condition first identified as Rett Syndrome by an Austrian doctor in 1954 but not widely recognized until 1983. Even if you had known, what could you have done but exactly what you did when your little girl was mercifully freed from her mortal prison? You would pray, carry on, and plant a dogwood tree in her memory.

Don’t Hang On To The Dogwood Tree

Joan’s Original Manuscript

“Don’t Hang On To The Dogwood Tree” is the title of a story my mother-in-law, Joan Millard Olson, wrote six years after the awful morning she walked into her daughter’s bedroom and had her heart ripped from her chest. As only a bereaved parent could, she describes with painful honesty what it’s like to suddenly lose a child and then be confronted with the need to move forward in life. My mother-in-law has been gone 27 years this May and is hopefully dancing on some ethereal plane with her sweet, unusual daughter. Here on Earth, I am blessed to have her manuscript in my possession. It’s a different kind of “Note From My Mother,” and one I will be most proud to share with you next week.

Until then, I will leave you with one particularly poignant line from her story that, curiously, she red-lined. Why she wanted to delete it, I can’t say. Perhaps she thought it unoriginal or too esoteric. I, however, find it achingly hopeful in its eloquent simplicity.

The broken heart is the open heart.

Marsha and Joan in a rare moment of connection.

Be a Good Girl

Posted on March 22, 2015 by Laurie Samsel Olson

Not every note my mother left me was on paper. Some messages go so far back that they are part of who I am. Over the course of 60-some years, I’m sure that I heard today’s four-word lesson literally tens of thousands of times.

Be a good girl.

That reminder followed me out the door every day when I was a child. Whether I was heading off to school or to a friend’s sleepover or to visit one of my grandmothers, that was Mom’s fundamental rule. Becoming an adult didn’t alter her parting words. Becoming her caregiver didn’t change the ritual either. In her last years, I began to tease her that she had ruined my life with that phrase. What if I had wanted to be a bad girl every once in a while?

Alas, with sugary nicknames like Pollyanna, Goody Two-Shoes and Mary Tyler Moore, it’s no secret that I have, indeed, been a good girl most of my life. When I was about 5 years old I tarnished my reputation by putting gum in my sister’s hair, forcing an unwanted haircut. In high school I got caught parking with my boyfriend on a dark, quiet road and then made things worse by lying about it. But, compared to serious problems like drug addiction, alcohol abuse and criminal mischief, my transgressions were ridiculously tame. Bad … really bad … just wasn’t in my genes.

At times, I’ve wondered why Mom routinely told my sister and me to “be a good girl,” but she peppered her farewells to our little brother with a fairly large repertoire of less constraining phrases like “have a good time” and “if you can’t be good, be careful.” Perhaps being a girl herself, she knew what kind of childish shenanigans or youthful escapades we could engage in and the potentially devastating consequences thereof. I prefer, however, to think it was really because she wanted to continuously instill in us the extraordinary character of the women in our family.

Carrie Elizabeth Heasman Metzger

No woman in my family lineage was more amazing than my mother’s mother. In the early 1900s, she toiled tirelessly with her husband to cultivate unforgiving homestead land in Montana. World War I, the military confiscation of horses for the overseas cavalry and the Navy’s strong “invitation” for my grandfather to build warships in Washington’s Puget Sound interfered with their plans. When the war ended, they found themselves living nomadically in the valleys of Northern California, much like the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath. Ultimately, they migrated south to the Los Angeles harbor area where my grandfather took up ocean fishing. Soon he wanted their six boys to forgo school and work with him. My grandmother objected, the two separated, and my grandfather was later killed in a violent storm at sea. Shockingly for the times, my grandmother lived openly with another man out of wedlock, helped to take care of his elderly mother, and determinedly continued to raise her children and some of her children’s children. When she died in 1979 at the age of 90, she had 10 children, 25 grandchildren and 56 great-grandchildren. The fact that there was standing room only for her memorial service was a testament to the love she so richly deserved.

Beulah Ann Todd Samsel

My father’s mother was equally tenacious, although not as beloved as my maternal grandmother. She had no children except for my father. Her firstborn son tragically died as a toddler of a vitamin deficiency hideously called Black Tongue Disease in 1914. My grandfather was a drinker and, although family references to him were always vague, I suspect he was abusive. Sometime after my grandmother divorced him, he was struck and killed by a truck while walking intoxicated down a country road in Tennessee. Meanwhile, my grandmother was bravely raising my father and working in a café at an aircraft manufacturing plant in El Segundo, California. She somehow also found the wherewithal to take care of her aging mother in her last years. Life wore my grandmother down and, by the time my parents married, she had become a somewhat bitter, critical, meddlesome presence. In hindsight, I know that she was doing her best, in whatever misguided way, to ensure that her son was loved and her grandchildren would someday find a place at God’s knee. Sadly, she denied she even had a family just before she died in a nursing home at the age of 93. That doesn’t change the fact that she was courageous and strong when she most needed to be.

Joyce Maxine Metzger Samsel (Joy)

Although I didn’t give her enough credit while I was growing up, Mom’s inner strength is solely responsible for our family’s survival. Back when it still wasn’t generally accepted to be a working mother, she kept the books for medical doctors and raised three children while my father traveled the world as a Merchant Marine. She was forced to finally and forever become the head of the household in 1970 when my father had a late-life diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia coupled with bipolar disease. His breakdown while alone and far from home destroyed the family emotionally and financially. Yet, somehow Mom found the will to rise from the ruins and rebuild a stable life for us. At first, I don’t think she believed she could do it. Decision-making was never Mom’s favorite task, but she pulled up her proverbial bootstraps and marched ahead into the unknown. When she passed away in 2013 at the age of 89, she had little to show for her efforts in the way of material possessions, but she enjoyed the priceless devotion of her children and grandchildren.

Betty Joan Millard Olson (Jo-Anne)

When I was 20 years old, I was lucky enough to marry into a family with another remarkable maternal presence. She wasn’t my mother by blood, but she became my second mother by heart. She was a traditional housewife in the 1950s and 1960s; raising three children and unexpectedly losing one to a mysterious genetic condition. By the mid-1970s, though, she had evolved into a dynamic, free-spirited woman whose circle of friends ranged from laid-back, mountain-dwelling hippies to driven, progressive yuppies. Breaking free from mid-century expectations was not easy since her husband was the quintessential ruler of the roost with staunchly conservative values. Regardless, she went back to college and earned a master’s degree in religion, converted to Catholicism when she fell in love with Mother Mary, and became a compassionate spiritual counselor. For several years she watched over her elderly, widowed stepmother who, by all accounts, was not a particularly warm and accepting substitute for the mother she had lost as a child. Yet, it was not in her nature to feel anything but love for the tiny, straight-laced, Christian poet we called Grandma Millard. My mother-in-law died of lymphoma in 1988 at the age of 62. It’s hard to believe I knew her only 16 years. Her example of love, kindness, forgiveness and spirituality has followed me every day since we lost her. In difficult situations, I often find myself pondering, “What would Joan do?”

Laurie Joy Samsel Olson

Every one of these women was strong, self-reliant and had a significant influence on my life. Collectively, they were seekers, doers, fighters, achievers, lovers and believers. All were mothers. And all were caregivers.

I look at their lives and their photos and I see … me.

Next week I’m turning 61. In July, I will have been married to, acrimoniously divorced from, and happily married again to my high school sweetheart for a grand total of 43 years. The descriptors that fit between those milestones run the gamut from joy to hostility, dependence to self-reliance, forgiveness to contentment. In October, I will have been a grateful mother for 40 years and a doting grandmother for 13 years. Sometime this year, though I’m not sure exactly when, I will pass the 35^th anniversary of the day I became a full-time career woman. And in December, I will observe the second anniversary of the day I said good-bye to the woman who cared for me when I came into the world and who I cared for when she made her exit.

My path does not exactly mirror those of Carrie, Beulah, Joy and Joan, but the basic journey shadows theirs in almost storybook fashion. The Brothers Grimm could not have written a better parable about children walking squarely in the footsteps of their forefathers. I am my grandmothers’ granddaughter. I am my mothers’ daughter.

Maybe that’s why Mom didn’t write down the most important lesson she ever tried to teach me. Maybe … just maybe … she thought I had already learned it. The only thing left to do is pass it on to my daughter, stepdaughter, daughter-in-law, nieces and the great-granddaughters’ who are still just a gleam in my grandsons’ eyes. To all of them … and to all my readers of the feminine persuasion, remember to …

Be a good girl.

Grandma Carrie Metzger (about 1930) at Cabrillo Beach, California.

Grandma Carrie Metzger in 1930 at Cabrillo Beach, California.

Here Are My Accolades

Posted on March 8, 2015 by Laurie Samsel Olson

My mother took her first breath in a small, white houseboat floating in the cool waters of Potato Slough on the California River Delta on December 4, 1924. She took her last roughly 200 miles northeast in the big, brown home we shared in the dry desert of Northern Nevada on December 9, 2013.

Nothing of global importance happened on either of those days. No wars were declared or peace treaties signed. No major scientific discoveries were announced or natural disasters reported. There wasn’t even a full moon. Yet, those two days are of supreme importance to me. They marked the beginning and the end of a life that affected me more than any other has or will.

Between those two Decembers, Mom lived 89 years. But, in her mind, she was ageless. She used to tell the grandchildren that she was in Ford Theater when President Abraham Lincoln was shot in 1865 and, while they were young and impressionable, they believed her. She used to lament to me that she was nothing more than an 18-year-old trapped in an aging body and, the older I got, the more I understood how she felt. She professed to everyone that she was going to live forever, and we all wished it could be so.

When I began writing this column last August, the primary purpose was to share the words of wisdom Mom left behind for me in a priceless series of cards and notes she entrusted with family members to deliver posthumously. Week after week, I’ve taken the quotes and catch phrases she preserved for posterity and turned them into stories about her, about caring for her, and about losing her. I would like to believe that, in some small way, these columns have served to support her wistful dream of everlasting life. As my gifted British friend, Chris Bannister, wrote in his lovely song Everybody Knows, what we leave behind is our best hope for immortality.

Everybody knows that nothing lasts for long except the sky. We can’t live forever but we try … by leaving something beautiful behind.

The something beautiful in those lyrics need not be a classic novel, a life-saving vaccine or a celebrated work of art. Exceptional experiences like those happen to so few. What every one of us is able to leave behind, though, is the unique way in which we’ve touched others. Most of the time, we aren’t even aware that the ripples of our lives circle out farther, ever farther, and gently collide with other lives. The impact may be no more than a tap, but it can alter a course, transform a life or simply create a precious memory that makes us smile or provides comfort in times of sorrow.

For me, the ultimate example of this phenomenon was embodied in a condolence letter that arrived about a month and a half after Mom died. It was from her old friend “Little Mary” who took the opportunity to share a story that brought my mother’s vibrant youth to life. I paraphrased the tale when I wrote about Mom’s free-spirited nature last fall in the column This Hunt Is Dedicated. While driving a carload of friends from San Pedro to the opera in nearby Los Angeles, the rather unreliable coupe broke down and blocked the Red Car trolley. Mom hopped out in the rain, Little Mary wrote. “She lifted the hood and with her comb she tapped something, got back in the car and we drove off. The passengers in the Red Car applauded wildly. I’ve never heard the name Joyce that that video didn’t play in my head!”

The tap that started the car on that otherwise forgotten day stayed with Little Mary for more than 60 years. Her condolence letter was the ripple that brought the story full circle. When it showed up in my mailbox, the colorful anecdote tapped me with a lovely reminder that the sum of my mother’s life was not wrapped up in her last years of ill health and dependence. It was as though Little Mary was the unsuspecting guardian of a secret that was long ago destined to comfort me in the wake of my mother’s passing.

In 89 years, Mom touched countless people as she drifted from the harbors and valleys of California, to the mountains and beaches of Oregon, and finally to the high desert of Northern Nevada. Some folks she knew well; others she did not. Either way, it was her Joie de Vivre that most of them remember. As I’ve said previously in this column, she was a fan of the weird and wonderful, the bright and beautiful. She loved to explore, wonder, dream and hope. Most of all, she loved to laugh. So much so that, in an unattributed poem she left with her Last Will and Testament, she told us to “remember me with smiles and laughter” or not at all. We honored that by using the poem in her memorial brochure along with a photo of her smiling gaily.

Sometime in her last year, when it was clear that time was growing short, I asked her what she remembered about helping her older sisters take care of their 90-year-old mother in her final days. I wasn’t making casual conversation; I was fishing for advice. She thought about it for a minute and said rather sheepishly that her most vivid memory wasn’t of bathing her mother or changing her soiled sheets or engaging in meaningful conversation. Instead, she clearly remembered sitting in the living room of her mother’s home laughing hysterically at a skit on Saturday Night Live. What made her and our equally unconventional relative, Birdie, giggle uncontrollably, she couldn’t say. Based on the month and year, though, I have a pretty fair guess. I can imagine both of them cracking up over the 1978 Christmas message that Gilda Radner’s recurring character, Roseanne Roseannadanna, shared with viewers as part of her trademark rant on the Weekend Update.

Life is just like a fruitcake. When you look at it, it’s rich and sweet with honey and sugar and spice, tastes delicious, makes your mouth water and everything. But if you look at it real close, there’s these weird little green things in it and all that and you don’t know what it is!

I’ve probably never heard a more perfect … and perfectly hilarious … analogy. Life is, indeed, like a fruitcake. But I would venture to say that the weird little green things in it are not necessarily all distasteful. An unexpected turn of events – for instance, living with and taking care of your mother for the last 12 years of her life – could prove to be just as rich and sweet as the honey, sugar and spice.

Today’s column heading is the last line from Mom’s posthumous notes that I have to share with you all. While that puts a punctuation mark on the foundation for these essays, it doesn’t end them. Mom left so many more “notes” for us to explore through things she often said but did not write down, through tape recordings she made more than 20 years before she passed away, and through scrapbooks filled with intriguing memories. My intent is to carry on for as long as the stories find their way from my immortal maternal muse to the keyboard of the computer she and I shared.

Here are your accolades, Mom.

Here they are – bringing a smile, a tear, a laugh or an insight to every reader who scrolls through these columns. As of this morning, your stories have been viewed 2,162 times by readers in 34 countries. Your body may have returned to ashes, but your spirit is alive and well. Your playful inspiration is the something beautiful you left behind. That and your Joie de Vivre are rippling around the world at this very moment. Someone, somewhere just felt your gentle, joyful tap.

(Desiring to give credit where it’s due, I want to note that the poem “Remember Me” may have been written by Laura Ingalls Wilder or by Michael Landon when he wrote the script for a Little House on the Prairie television episode called “Remember Me.” Mom probably heard it on the television show since I know she didn’t read the books. )

Live Long and Prosper, Revisited

Posted on February 28, 2015 by Laurie Samsel Olson

Last November, I wrote about Mom’s passion for all things Star Trek and how the epic space franchise played into birthday and Christmas traditions in our household. Mr. Spock’s most famous line, “Live long and prosper,” served as the foundation for the story.

A couple of days ago, the man who embodied Mr. Spock for nearly 50 years permanently beamed off this planet to explore strange, new worlds in ethereal dimensions. Actor, director, photographer, writer, global icon Leonard Nimoy died Friday, February 27, at the age of 83. When his gentle spirit arrived on the other side, I would like to think that Mom was among the crowd of friends waiting to greet him.

Mom always had a soft spot in her heart for the half-human, half-Vulcan who nobly struggled to maintain a logical decorum even in the most challenging situations. One of the quintessential moments for Mr. Spock was written into the television episode called This Side of Paradise, one of Mom’s favorites. It took several, increasingly inflammatory insults by his space cohort, Captain James T. Kirk, to raise his ire and free him from a mind-altering alien spore. “You belong in a circus, Spock, not a starship!” Kirk shouted, “Right next to the dog-faced boy!” It was hard not to feel sorry for Mr. Spock when he was jolted from utopia and compelled to sacrifice romance for duty.

Mom’s soft spot grew to embrace the real Leonard Nimoy when she, my two children and I had our photo taken with him at a jam-packed fan convention in Sacramento in 2006. Event staff were tasked with quickly herding dozens of people in and out of the banquet room where Mr. Nimoy and his Star Trek co-star William Shatner stood in front of a gold backdrop, smiling on cue through flash after flash. In the few minutes we shared with the two men, we at least were able to thank them for three generations of unparalleled entertainment. Mr. Shatner was suffering from a cold that day and, understandably I suppose, was not particularly engaging. Mr. Nimoy, though, treated Mom like a person instead of a prop. Unhurried, warm and welcoming, he leaned in toward her wheelchair and rested a friendly hand on her shoulder for the souvenir shot. She often recounted how special this simple, sensitive act made her feel.

I’m sure that brief moment did not impact Mr. Nimoy in the meaningful way that it did Mom. After decades of photo shoots, the parade of fans he touched must have been a blur. However, when I read the last comment he posted on Twitter four days before he died, I was amazed by the way his powerful words seemed to reflect on moments just like that one.

A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP.

Preserved in memory. Through this weekly column, I am the guardian of my mother’s memory and the storyteller entrusted with commemorating her life and experiences. Today I am also privileged to be one of the many guardians of Mr. Nimoy’s memory by chronicling his small act of human kindness toward my mother.

I can’t help but be reminded of Admiral James T. Kirk’s eulogy when Mr. Spock died at the conclusion of the film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. “Of all the souls I’ve encountered in my travels,” Kirk said, “his was the most human.”

Kirk’s voice broke during that monologue. Poignantly, he struggled to keep it together to appropriately honor his friend. Today, in real life, there are millions around the world struggling to do the same as they remember Mr. Nimoy. He was truly our friend, if only through television, film and photo opps. If he could speak to us, perhaps he would repeat the dying words of Mr. Spock as he slowly succumbed to radiation poisoning after saving the ship and all hands on board.

Don’t grieve, Admiral. It is logical. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one. I have been and always shall be your friend. Live long and prosper.

One of Mom's favorite axioms, commemorated in a posthumous note.

Mom’s favorite signature line, commemorated in a posthumous note.

Notes From My Mother

Nothing left unsaid … and other words to live by

Tag Archives: Caregiving

Quiet Sleep and A Sweet Dream – Revisited

Fat, Fat, the Water Rat

Quiet Sleep and A Sweet Dream

Life Is Just A Bowl Of …

The Dead Cabinet

The Perfect Thing

Prelude: Don’t Hold On To The Dogwood Tree

Be a Good Girl

Here Are My Accolades

Live Long and Prosper, Revisited

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