As he sat on the edge of her hospital bed in the living room overlooking the ocean, we recorded him saying: “Mom, this is your idiot son. Do you remember when Dorrie, Robin, you, and I were driving the car across country? Remember the Ford Econoline van? We were all going to New York to visit Diane. Remember when we spent the night at that crazy lady’s place in New Jersey? It was a real dump. She had that blind Chihuahua named Rickie Lee. She was one weird piece of work, but she loved that Rickie Lee. Remember how she kissed that slobbering thing? Do you? Do you remember any of that?
“New York was quite a place. We went to the Museum of Modern Art, where we saw the Jasper Johns, Picassos, Turners, but most of all those Joseph Cornell boxes—remember? I’m sure you do. Come on, Mom. Give me a wink, just a little wink. You know I’m here, don’t you? Yeah, you do! You’re chirping—see, you’re chirping! Come on! Wake up! Get up. Get up and at ’em.
“Hey, Mom, I want you to know that I’m living in the best place in the world. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I hope to live there till I die. I finally get to do what I want to do. I’m still writing, and collaging. Hey, you should come see my house now. There’s a little living room with a kitchen, and a bedroom and bathroom.”
He kissed her, and that was it. Randy never saw her again.
Mom did not die as expected. She lingered. After a few weeks, Robin, who’d flown in from Georgia, had to go home to Riley, Jack, and her husband, Rickey. Dorrie and I came down on weekends to spend the nights at the house with her. One month later, we got a call from Mom’s primary caregiver, Ann Mayer: “Come soon.” She was near the end.
On the night Mom passed, Dorrie, Robin, and I were with her. After the purple-draped Mom was rolled into a van on a gurney in one of her go-to-dinner outfits, I woke up knowing there would never be another person who would love and care for us Hall kids the way she had. I was going to have to rely on myself. I would never again watch her fry up homemade tacos, or take a walk on the beach, or collect seashells, or feed her crippled seagull before sitting down to hear one of my sad stories of being misunderstood in an unfair situation. She was my once-in-a-lifetime compassionate listener.
Dexter and Duke wanted to know why Gramma had to die. I told them Grammie’s heart had slowed down, her circulation was weak, her hands began to look like beautiful purple plums, and then, without a hint, she quietly stopped breathing. I told them she had left to go on a special journey into an unknown wonderland.
On the drive to Mom’s memorial service at Casa Romantica in San Clemente, I turned the radio up to hear a woman’s voice. In a clipped British accent, she was saying her father had a birdhouse where he kept white doves. Every morning, he would get up early and care for the doves. When World War II came, it changed their lives. There was always a peaceful, quiet quality in the air before the bombing began. People stayed in their homes. They were told not to go out. Despite this, her father still went to the doves every morning. One day, she wanted to go to work with him, but he told her to stay in the house. She watched him walk off in the early-morning light. Fifteen minutes later, the bombs came. Suddenly big men came looking for her mother. They found her at the bakery. She remembers her mother sobbing. She remembers her sinking to the ground in a river of tears. On the day of her father’s funeral, her mother went to the birdhouse and let the doves go, one by one. The girl didn’t understand: why did her mother let the birds her father loved so go? Her mother said, “I had to let your father go. Now I am letting them go too.” At the funeral procession, friends and family carried her father’s casket to his burial ground. And the birds, all of them, followed the casket in their own winged procession to his resting place.
That’s what Mom’s memorial felt like. It felt like we were the birds she’d taken care of, and even though we couldn’t fly, we were following her to her resting place. Randy led the way.
When I dropped by Randy’s a few months later, I asked him if he ever thought about Mom.
“Yeah, I do. It’s hard for me to picture her dead.”
“When you do, what do you see?” I asked.
“I see the end years, when her hair was really white,” he said. And then, “I don’t know, there was something about her. I really never knew much about Mom, not really. I wish I did, but I didn’t.”
For Randy, arranging brutal words into poetry may have been a way to explore his anger, and his self-hatred. In his darkest hours, maybe he used some of his poems as confessional mirrors—places where he felt safe to confront and even forgive himself for his sadistic urges; places where he explored murder, mayhem, and sexual brutality. In such a place, he also wrote about Mom.
I am my mother’s Homunculus;
a little girl with a penis,
running about on clawed feet,
lost to the alchemy of love and emotion,
a bastard thing she chose not to see or hear
or take in hand and lead to an acceptable life.
What do I know about her?
She had a strict, religious upbringing,
her father walked out the door when she was sixteen
later a car accident mangled her inner thigh,
and her mother hated men.
She did not release this information (as little as it is)
until she had enough wine to relax the demons,
her face would soften,
her speech became fluid, her eyes moist.
Out came torn up pieces of her history.
They didn’t always fit and were never explained.
I got the picture of a fragmented woman
trying to fill in the spaces with her own family,
a loving woman who couldn’t quite love,
a caring mother who was never cared for.
If today were my last day on this planet
I would have one wish;
To be inside my mother’s head for an hour.
God the pain and freedom of knowing the core
of one who created me,
kind of like seeing my own future.
But today is not my last day
and human secrets are deep and terrifying.
It is my job to figure out the rest of my life without her.
It will be a maze lacking a center.
But there is satisfaction in testing new paths.
I can learn where I begin and mother ends—