Wednesday, October 05, 2005
Sail On, Mom
Mom's chair was empty, and her beer unopened.
We're back from Mom's little gathering down in Rockport, TX, and everything went really well. It's tough to describe, but it made me happy and very sad at the same time. Mom is back where she started - on her beloved Texas Gulf Coast where she was born and raised. We spread her ashes in Little Bay, just a matter of blocks from the house where she was born on October 3rd, 1924, exactly 81 years before we all accompanied her on this, her final voyage.
It seemed the perfect spot for her. We all drank a beer in her honor as Walt spread her ashes, the last vestige of her physical presence into Little Bay. It was very hard.
Then, as the boat began to pull away, we all saw not one, but two Bottlenose Dolphins break the surface at the very spot where we left Mom. The Fetching Mrs Crime Dog told me they were Mom and my stepdad, whom we all just call "Cagle," and who has been buried just up the hill in the Rockport Cemetery since 1985. Walt was Mom's husband at the time of her death. They loved one another deeply and he took wonderful and devoted care of her, but everybody, including Walt, knows that Cagle was her original soulmate and the love of her life.
On the way out of Little Bay, we happened across a gentleman fishing off the jetty. He was locked in combat with a large fish, and we all watched as he finally netted a redfish that must have gone 26" - a real beauty. Mom loved to go fishing for redfish and speckled trout around Rockport, so there was a happy kind of symmetry to the stranger's catch. Everyone one our boat broke into applause as he hefted it from the water.
We got a tiny bit of rain along the way back. Even the sky cried a little, but knew that more than that would not be what Mom would have wanted. After we said our goodbyes on the dock to the rest of the family, TFMCD handed me a poem she'd been working on for a while. It was alongside a picture of Mom, against a backdrop of a sea shell on the beach, and couldn't have been more beautiful. I'll share it with you.
