You'll Die Alone

This Hub is not so much about Death, really, as it is about the interesting miscommunication episodes we so often find between parents and children. The title, as it happens, came directly from a comment made by my own mother in 1980. Deeply concerned about my second divorce, she told me in her best advice-giving tone:

If you keep this up, you'll die alone.

Years later, Mom did not remember having said that. Of course, she didn't remember her comment to Carolyn, either. When my new ex-sweetie (still a close friend to this day) heard I was in parental trouble, she tried to help out by telling Mom that she had learned a lot from Fred. My sweet mother's question about that?

What could you possibly learn from him?

I was 36 years old at the time. Maybe it really is a Mom thing, although I suspect it might also have been a gender thing. That she cared deeply about me, and I about her, I never doubted. Why she never seemed to consider me a serious, responsible human being, I never understood in the slightest. Not that it bothered me greatly; it was just Mom being Mom to the very end.

As it was, she lived to the age of 89, and her doubts regarding her son's sanity never lessened. Often, when Pam (my seventh and till-death-do-us-part wife) and I were visiting her after Dad's passing, I would make a statement she was sure had to be total nonsense. Then, as soon as I was out of earshot, she would ask my wife,

What Fred just said can't possibly be true, can it?

Pam invariably assured her that it really was true. Then and only then, Mom would believe. If Pammie said it, it was Gospel. If Fred said it, it was a tall tale. Go figure. Still, Lucy Howe Baker had a lot of positive qualities. If we were out of visiting range, we wrote each other weekly for just about every week of my entire life until she left the planet. A retired English teacher, she taught me to read and write well prior to school age--which was 6 in that era, first grade; we had never heard of kindergarten or preschool.

Thus, when it came time for me to write my song celebrating women, Mom definitely made the list of my Ten Good Women....even though it seems highly unlikely at this point that I will fulfill her worried prophecy by dying alone (except in the sense that in the end, we all do that):

Curiously enough, although Mom became terribly nervous every time I moved, changed jobs, or changed women, she always seemed uplifted by my truck driving jobs...especially the over the road dry van hauling I did for about 18 months prior to her passing.

The reasons could have been simple enough: My Dad trucked, so she understood the job to some degree. It was familiar territory. Not like some of my less traditional ventures, such as the practice of astrology during 1973 or dropping out of college to go sell livestock feed on straight commission in 1966.

Hmmm...material for three more Hubs in that paragraph!

She did have a superstition or two about trucking, though: It was (and I guess is) supposed to be bad luck to watch a trucker's taillights as he heads on down the road. One evening, however, she watched our close family friend Bruce Colver as he left the ranch after a brief visit. She remembered thinking with admiration that he had become a really skilled, smooth-shifting truck driver....

Bruce was found dead in his truck at a Las Vegas truckstop just days later. His heart had blown up. Since my long haul job was after that time, I'm quite certain she never watched my truck leave her driveway. Wouldn't want to jinx her only son, you know. I definitely counted in her life, even though my college degree in psychology had been sidelined in favor of a life as an Asphalt Lizard:

Mom's concern about a loved one dying alone may have reflected her own ambivalence about the Hereafter. Quite frankly, she simply was none too sure there was a Hereafter. About 18 months after her death, a dream showed me she still hadn't quite figured it out. I saw her in a dream, in a house that seemed to be the old log ranch house where my sisters and I grew up.

In this experience, she looked good--maybe 40 years old, not 89, strong, healthy, and kicking her cowboy boots at a number of young men who were out of line and giving her a problem. I beat up one or two of them, the rest took off, and then I turned to Mom...and the following words just sort of spilled out of my mouth:

You do realize you died, don't you, Mom?

With a stunned expression, the mother with whom I was so clearly still connected...asked her own question:

CAN IT BE TRUE?!?!

I woke up at that point. No doubt some of my readers will be thinking, yeah, what was this guy smoking? That couldn't have been reality!

But to me, it was plenty real. Not only that, but it carried an important message: It might have taken my birth mother a year and a half beyond her own death to accomplish, but she had finally realized that just maybe her Number One Son did know a thing or two...and she didn't even have to ask his wife to verify his statement.

Thanks for reading,

Ghost32