Portals to Infinity

My mother's Christmas Eve journey to the other side

Solstice-mas Greetings Readers!

In the literal spirit of the season, I share with you something completely different, and longer than my usual posts. This story begins and ends with riding on water rather than snow. Christmas Eve, 2022, my mom passed on the same date she’d suffered a traumatic brain injury ten years earlier. Her last days were pretty hard to witness, as she held onto a body ready to let go. Mom was not a surfer in life, but she may have hitched a ride on a cold water wave in her first day in the afterlife.

Portals to Infinity

By Katie Bausler

     “A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity.”- Kierkegaard

     Through the open window in my parent’s apartment, you can hear waves breaking in from the home of sealions. My father, Dave, marvels over a horizon he imagines, “stretches all the way to Australia.” Just down the street, turquoise water erodes sandstone cliffs on a steep shore break. Wet suited bodies on surfboards transcend the weight of the world. That brief lightness of being makes their day.  

     Confined to her bed is my mother, Bobbie, the love of Dave’s life. My mother is a wisp of her former non-stop and sturdy self, cheek bones taught, collarbones bulging and hip bones pointing.  The blues of her irises visible through translucent closed lids, no longer able to tolerate light. She’s all but lost the energy to speak. But mom clutches my hand, tightly. “Say something Bobbie,” urges dad.  “Stay with us,” she says softly. Those words go straight to my heart.

     More than a generation ago we forwent living close to our families in population dense California for a life with fewer people, on the edge of stunning wilderness in Alaska. While we gained world class skiing and hiking in our back yard, we lost being near our parents as their grandchildren grew up. I missed mom’s big hugs and her zeal for catching me up on the latest family drama or neighborhood gossip. Most of all, I missed her sixth sense of knowing what I was feeling or thinking.

     Not long after she retired at the age of 80, Bobbie began repeating herself, asking the same question you’d just answered. That Christmas Eve, she tottered down the stairs at the last of a fifty-year string of boozy parties hosted by her sister and brother-in-law. She tripped and smashed her head on a marble entry way. The resulting brain damage aggravated those first signs of Alzheimer’s.

     Ten years later, caregivers fed and changed her round the clock. Dave’s initial “job” was to hold her hand, eyes shining with unconditional love, hip to hip on the living room couch. For years they’d end their evenings falling asleep to the TV, mouths hanging open in unison. My siblings dubbed them “kids on the couch.”

My parents slept together every night of their marriage. Bobbie’s caregiver, Marlena, gently turns my mother’s skeletal frame on her side, against the pillows along the guard rail of her hospital bed. Dad’s single bed sidles up to her. “I’m right here Bobbie,” he reassures, taking her knobby hand. “Mmmm,” she whispers.

     I raise my iphone and capture the image of their white-haired heads, face to face as they fall into another night of slumber, holding hands. Despite Bobbie’s precipitous decline, the comfort of connection as they sleep is the one thing left of their more than six decades of devotion.

My five younger siblings and I believed our mother had eyes in the back of her head, maybe even antennae. She always knew what we were up to, her sixth sense on perennial high alert. In our high school years my brothers and I would venture from our suburban home to the coast. Gathered around beach bonfires we’d drink cheap wine and smoke pot. Then wend our way home in the family Chevy van on winding, foggy roads.

     When I crept into the kitchen after midnight, mom shuffled out of the bedroom tying a red synthetic robe around her waist, weary eyes the color of blue easter eggs looking right through me. “You know I can’t sleep until you come home.” And then the zinger. “No one is immortal.”

     For Bobbie ‘life is short’ was more than a philosophy. It was a way of life, triggered by at the tender age of 13, losing her own mother to breast cancer.  From the neighbor kid clutching a pal’s waist on a rickety bike to a race car driver on TV, mom pronounced them, “holding on for dear life.”

At 90, she clung to her motto, despite inhabiting a body longing to let go.  Her caregivers were sure Bobbie was sticking around for Dave. “Your mom won’t leave your dad,” declared Anita in her distinct Filipina accent.

     Bobbie and Dave met in 1960, over pasta in a leafy courtyard in Rome, Italy. It was a group blind date for architects from Boston working on designs for the University of Baghdad. Dave was a single landscape architect dating an Italian girl. But as soon as they met, my parents-to-be fell into a lifelong romance.

     I thought of my parents at an outdoor wedding near our Southeast Alaskan home. Our kids grew up with the couple here in the largest coastal temperate rainforest in the world, and we consider them extended family. The occasion brought together first loves, true loves and loves that didn’t work out. The bride and groom stood face to face, hands intertwined, framed by alder branches shaped into a heart, the backdrop a wave-less jade ocean, home to salmon, whales, and sealions. Conifer covered uninhabited islands dotted the horizon, shrouded in billowing mist. “It’s like looking at a portal to infinity,” declared my husband.         

     I wished for Bobbie’s passing through such a portal. I knew her body would soon weaken to the point that it could no longer sustain the strength of her spirit. And wondered if her soul would rise to the echo of the waves crashing into the bluffs down the street from my parent’s apartment.

     I thought of the values of my mother’s Catholic upbringing that her children and grandchildren would sustain: to love your neighbor as yourself, and treat others the way you want to be treated. Bobbie had the most respect for people she deemed, the salt of the earth, “a very good and honest person” according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary.  The phrase originates from the Gospel of Matthew, encouraging Jesus’ disciples to spread his guiding words like salt.      

     All my immediate family live along salt water, my sisters and parents in San Diego, a brother in Aptos, California, two brothers in the Hawaiian Islands, and me in the coastal capital of Alaska. Our home is on a forested fjord where alpine mountains rise from sea level. I feel like we live in heaven on earth. When asked our religion I say we attend the Church of GOD, for Great Out Doors.

    A forty-five minute drive north of our house is a place where the Catholic Church meets our Church of GOD.  In the early 1930’s the first Catholic Bishop of Alaska secured the slice of scenic coastline from the federal government for religious retreats. A brief causeway was built linking the land to a verdant island no larger than a neighborhood park. A stone chapel was erected in the middle of the island with rocks from the adjacent coves. The Shrine of St. Therese is now a coveted sanctuary shared with the local community and visitors from all over the world. In the local vernacular its known as the Shrine.

     At the Shrine at sunrise, the light on the peaks on the horizon may resemble a juicy summer nectarine. At sunset, the island might be soaked in hues of blood orange painted with streaks of lavender. On a clear evening you can see the stars and hear the guttural breaths of humpback whales in the coves rising to the surface for a hit of oxygen. The same humpback whales that fast and mate the winter away where my brother John takes his daily swim in Maui, return here in summer.

     At the winter solstice, my husband Karl, son Kanaan and I spent the night in a cabin at the Shrine. My son and I entered the vacant chapel and lit two votive candles at the feet of a simple statue of Mary, mother of Jesus.

“Mom, Christmas Eve is three days from now” I implored, “We lit candles to guide your flight to heaven.”

     The next morning the three of us climbed a bluff to a shelter with three adjoined metal chairs. I imagine the chairs represent the Catholic Trinity, the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. We took our seats and looked out over small swells rolling from the outer ocean into a cove. “Your life span is like a molecule of water,” mused Karl. “You’re out there, somewhere with the other molecules.  Once in a while, you ride the crest of a wave and mingle with more oxygen, then turn into white water and dissipate.”

     At sunrise on December 24, 2022, my mother’s soul left her body near the southern-most tip of California. Looking on as Bobbie took her last guttural breaths was her caregiver, Mari, praying. At her side was my father, sleeping.

     Three thousand coastal miles north, Bobbie’s granddaughter picked me up in her Subaru that snowy morning. Kaitlyn and I made the half hour drive along the coast to the Shrine.

    A few months prior, on our daughter’s thirty-sixth birthday, I lie on my side, spooning my mother’s tranquil shell.  As my head rests on her bony shoulder, I look on the shiny blonde hair and calm eyes of her granddaughter, a nurse practitioner, sitting at the bedside, holding her grandmother’s hand. Bobbie pulls Kaitlyn’s hand up to her own face and holds it there.

I’m crying.

My daughter assures me that it is time to let my mother go.

“I’m not crying about mom leaving,” I reply. “I’m crying because I love you so much.”

     My youngest sister, Kristi, oversaw our mother’s end of life care in La Jolla. She is also a surfer who might sneak down the street for a ride or two when the waves are right.  As our mother’s body and mind were in their final stage of deterioration, Kristi whispered in mom’s ear. “When you go to heaven you can be with us anytime. You’ll be a guardian angel, riding on your grandson’s shoulder as he surfs in a wave.”

    Kaitlyn parked in the wooded lot. We walked along ice encased rocks down to the causeway. To our left, the cove her brother, dad and I had gazed on two days before. It is also the place where a handful of surfers don the thickest wetsuits they can find to ride a swell that only arrives in winter.

   “Out at the shrine,” Kanaan texted that morning. He drove straight out there after working a night shift as a weather observer at the airport. It was below freezing and windy, the right conditions for the wind swell.

     In the middle of the cove we spotted a few people in hooded wetsuits, bellies on surfboards, outnumbered by a pod of local sealions. We waved and quickly recognized Kanaan by his dense winter beard. A smooth wave rose up.  Bobbie’s grandson rode it to the rocky shore with a big smile on his face. “Yeah,” I hooted from our perch on the jetty. He gingerly climbed the slippery bank to his sister and I. My kids shared a tearful hug, Kanaan in his rubbery black wetsuit and Kaitlyn in her royal blue ski jacket and hand knit hat.

    The chilled surfer headed down the causeway to the thankfully heated restrooms to trade the wetsuit for dry clothes.  Then the three of us climbed the gravel trail to the chapel, adorned with a wreath of fresh boughs dusted with snow. We swung open the cold, heavy door to the warm, cozy interior. Again, we had the place to ourselves. Christmas trees gilded with twinkle lights flanked the altar over a creche with the baby Jesus and his parents, the Wise Men looking on, along with candles bearing the names of community members who had passed on.

     The three of us took a seat in the front pew. Shoulder to shoulder with my children under the cedar rafters, we looked up at arched windows framing the tops of spruce and hemlock trees. I closed my eyes, breathed deep, and sensed a calming spirit.

My mother was free.

EPILOGUE

     In his condolence letter to my father, my son described what transpired in the choir loft of the Shrine chapel early that Christmas Eve morning.

     I lay on the floor and closed my eyes for an hour or so. I watched a lot of great memories with you and grandma playing on my eyelids. Then I heard a sealion groan and knew it was time to get in the water. Grandma was there with me, dancing on the board.

Kaitlyn and Kanaan Bausler with Izzy, Shrine of St. Therese, December 24, 2022

St. Therese looks out at the cove of the wind swell, Christmas Eve 2022

Merry Christmas Friends! And thanks for reading and subscribing to my newsletter all year long. Your comments are more than welcome. And if you liked it, please help grow our readership by clicking on the heart. -Katie B.