My mother died on a fine autumn Saturday in 2008, not long after I’d started an assignment in my newspaper’s Beijing bureau.
She blew a stop sign near her home in Ocala, Fla. Who knows why? My father always said she was a reckless, inattentive driver who once made a hair-raising turn on two wheels instead of four. Mrs. Andretti, he called her. Months after my mother’s death, my niece said her grandmother spoke to her in a dream, offering an explanation to finally solve the mystery of the tragedy, so a young woman — and the rest of us — could get on with life:
Simply, my mother had to go to the bathroom.
The driver’s side door of her Honda Accord was struck broadside by a car driven by a man in his late 30s. He was going the speed limit, 50 miles an hour, and the collision drove both vehicles through the intersection and into a grove of trees that separated the road from an adjacent housing community. He survived; she didn’t.
My mother died instantly, the crash investigator said, and didn’t suffer. I never read the autopsy report. Who wants to know such details? We knew all that we needed to know. She was here with us, and then she was gone. Poof, a light that shone bright over our family, now extinguished.
Jean would have been 81 the following month, on Nov. 14, the date of her birthday now a pass code to several of my personal accounts. Each time I enter those numbers I think of her; girlish, laughing, a lifelong waitress who still wore her prized wigs in public, proud of her seven children, always the life of the party at the card games she hosted for her gray-haired girlfriends.
When she left the house that morning, she was in a hurry to get her errands done; to stop to pay this bill, return that blouse to the store, buy some stamps at the post office. So many places to go. One of her stops was located near the salon where my wife and me bought her an all-day spa package for her 80th birthday.
I still have on my telephone her recorded message of how great she felt after a day of pampering. On that day, she would have negotiated that stop sign, obeyed the law, have come to a complete stop. But not this one.
“I’ll be right back,” she told my father John as he sat reading the morning paper. “Do you want to go?”
“No,” he said. “I’ll stay here.”
She kissed his cheek.
“Be careful now,” he warned, like he always did.
A few hours later, the officer knocked on the front door. He told my father that his wife had been in a terrible, accident.
“Is she going to be OK?”
No. Sadly, the answer was no. And it would stay that way forever.
My father, who was five years older than my mother, was suffering from the initial stages of dementia. He no longer drove a car. My mother had taken over most chores, paying the bills; making sure the right people were called to make home repairs. Now, my father couldn’t stay in the house alone. Decisions would have to be made. He hadn’t only lost Jean, his wife of more than 60 years, but his way of life.
News spread via the phone lines. A neighbor made a call to my sister Pat in the Bahamas. Then word hit Buffalo, Rochester, Los Angeles. Reaching me, 14 hours ahead of Ocala time in Beijing, would prove more difficult.
I talked to my mother on the morning before the last day of her life. I had just joined the newspaper’s foreign staff, assigned to the bureau in Seoul, South Korea. But first, there would be a few months in Beijing.
Becoming a foreign correspondent had been a long-time goal. But there was always this nagging doubt: I would be living half a world away from my aging parents. Ours was a typical modern American family. Not one of the children lived in the same state as my parents; Instead, they were spread out across the country. But the world? China? Korea? Japan? That was just too far from home.
I had lived in San Francisco for the past eight years. On the telephone, I would inform my mother of an occasional temporary work assignment abroad. Word at the paper was that all roads to foreign lead through Baghdad, that you had to do at least one tour of duty in that perilous place before even being considered for a permanent gig.
Jean knew Iraq was no place for her eldest son. She watched the war unfold on CNN, my mother the news-hound would frequently call me with bulletins of disasters, both here and abroad. The first thing she did each morning was turn on the news. And she didn’t want me to go to Baghdad; so I never put up my hand.
Once, though, I had an opportunity to go to Pakistan. I called my mother and assured her that it was safe; everything would be fine. Then someone, one of her friends ,maybe, showed her the current issue of the Economist. On the cover was a hand pulling the pin on a grenade, under a headline that read “Pakistan: the World’s Most Dangerous Country.” She wasn’t pleased, but I went anyway.
China, however, was different. I’d taken my parents here years before. They’d met my wife’s parents and her brother. They’d walked along the Great Wall and visited Shanghai. China was known. China was OK.
In my last conversation with my mother, I’d teased her about one of her habits: Bragging about her children. One of my siblings had sent her a copy of the newspaper’s in-house posting about my joining the foreign staff. It was short, with a brief list of beats I’d covered, along with a description of the challenge ahead.
I’d heard from one of my sisters that she’d been carrying the notice around in her purse, reading it not just to friends, but to store clerks and waitresses, apparently anyone would would listen. For all I knew, she was stopping strangers on the street, rolling down her car window at intersections.
“Um, sir, excuse me. Can I read you something? It’s about my son.”
That day on the phone, I feigned impatience. “Mom, please, you don’t have to read that thing to everyone!”
She laughed into the receiver. I knew it was impossible to stop her. I told her I’d call her on Monday. I don’t think I told her I loved her. If I did, I don’t remember. She knew I did.
I hopped into the shower. I remember the hot water running, steaming up the vanity mirror, and suddenly hearing my mother’s voice.
“Mom?” I called out, pulling aside the shower curtain. “Mom?
I’m not sure what that moment suggested, but now I see it as her way of saying goodbye, that our last conversation had been too short, with sentiments left unsaid. She wasn’t there, of course. And soon she would be gone entirely.
That night, I attended a performance near Tianamen Square with a female colleague: a Chinese symphony orchestra playing a series of Broadway show tunes. During a break, we were drinking wine at the bar when we ran into a man my colleague knew. He was gay and had just arrived in China. We talked and I repeated an old joke I told about myself.
Me, I have a radio face, I said.
“Well, I wouldn’t kick you out of bed for eating crackers,” he said. “But we’ve got to do something about that hair.”
My colleague laughed. It became our joke for the evening: What do do about my hair. We went back to her apartment in a gated, foreigners-only compound and drank more wine. I was excited about my new beat in Korea. She had done the job previously and knew the ropes. There was lots to talk about.
When I left at 2 a.m., I walked toward the guard’s gate toward my hotel, located just down the street. A young twenty-something soldier in uniform stepped out and thrust his hand stiffly in my face. He motioned to a bit of construction and pointed toward a far gate that would have meant a 20-minute detour.
To get past him, all I had to do was step over a short chain link fence. I was drunk. So I ignored him and walked on, wincing just a bit, anticipating the crack of a club on my head, or the report of his rifle, announcing that he wasn’t just a paper tiger after all.
A short time later, I was in a deep, alcohol-induced sleep. Somewhere, in the depths of my subconscious, I heard a phone ringing on the surface far above. But there was no way I could rise to answer. I was too far gone. Then it rang again. And again. Then blissful silence.
A few moments later, there was a pounding on the door.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
I stumbled up and cracked it open, leaving the security latch fastened. The hotel was popular with Russian businessmen in the nearby garment district and I rode in the elevator with groups of them, seeing their stone faces each morning, only to hear them laughing and drinking in adjacent rooms late into the night.
“Da dian hua,” the desk attendant barked, “telephone call.”
Awake now, I lay in bed. Then my cell phone rang. I picked up to hear my wife’s voice. She was back in San Francisco. And she was crying.
I sensed the worst.
“My father,” I said. “My father is dead.”
“No,” she sobbed. “Your mother.”
What I remember next was a sense of falling. I collapsed onto the floor like a sucker-punched boxer, like the Twin Towers collapsing onto themselves, pulled down by a terrible weight.
My mother was gone. And here I was in another country, on another continent, too far from home. My worst fears come to pass.
The next day, as I waited for the first flight home to the states, I spent several hours wandering Ri-tan park near my hotel. The ornate urban space houses the Temple of the Sun, built in 1530, and features old-growth trees, fish ponds, a rock-climbing wall and a bonsai market, near the spot where old men do their solitary tai-chi movements each morning.
I had taken my parents here during their trip to China years before. We had drinks at a teahouse that overlooks a picturesque lily pond. I took a picture there with my mother. I returned to the place that morning and tried to imagine her there: just 73 then, laughing, pronouncing my name with her flattened Upstate New York accent “Jaaaahn,” so excited to be finally traveling abroad after a busy life of raising so many children.
A blur of hours later, I joined my sisters and brother in Ocala, ready for the grim work at hand: Cremate my mother, figure out my Dad’s next chapter.
One of my sisters lamented that we hadn’t had the opportunity to give my mother a proper goodbye. I disagreed. Being able to say goodbye would have meant she endured a long, slow and possibly painful death.
This way, she went out quickly, the way we knew her. James Dean style.
I spent several weeks in Ocala before returning to China and my life ahead. The city decided to put a traffic light at the intersection where my mother died. There had been too many close calls, and then her fatal crash. It was a small consolation.
Before I left, one of my sisters retrieved my mother’s purse. There, inside, along with a few pictures and her wallet, was the notice of my foreign posting, folded up, lovingly, ready for display, for another public reading.
“It’s OK Jean,” I thought. “Show that notice to anyone. Anyone you want.”
