Memory 101.

My mother was 15 years old when she met my father. He came home from US Navy boot camp with her older brother. My Mom was popular in school, belonged to a well known family and was well regarded by her parents, liberal Napa Valley, friends. She'd had some junior high romances, and kissed a boy at church camp once and had won a scholarship to a prestigious design school in San Francisco. She was not prepared for my father. He was a tall charismatic young man from the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in South Dakota. He was handsome and polite and carried himself with a serious western swagger. My uncle actually brought him home to meet a girl who had been pestering him, someone he ( my uncle ) had an on again off again romance with. He wasn't interested so he brought his best buddy home to meet her, instead the buddy fell for his little sister. By all accounts it was love at first sight. They were only home a few weeks before deploying to Japan, but it was enough to change the course of my mother's life forever. While in Japan my father bought a bolt of silk, he said, for my mother's prom dress. It was heavily embroidered, and eggshell white. He had other plans for that fabric. They exchanged fevered letters nearly every day for the duration of his 18 month deployment. He proposed when he returned and they were married while she was still in high school. She finished school and they settled in her parents home town. I was born two years later.

There were problems from the beginning, different viewpoints, radically different expectations, youth and money problems all contributed. After his return from the Vietnam War my father's drinking became violent, they were stationed halfway across the country from any family and my mother nearly died from a brain aneurysm on my fourth birthday.

They loved each other with a ferocity that I cannot truly imagine. It's tempting to categorize their life together as abusive, or manipulative, or tragic. It's also tempting to paint them as romantics heroes struggling through adversity. Neither one is accurate. They were both ill prepared for marriage, or parenthood, ill prepared to deal with the traumatic effects of disease or war. They were unable to imagine a world in which they were not together; for better or worse richer or poorer was never more vividly exemplified than in my parents marriage. And my memories can no longer judge them for it.

My father was killed in 1983 when my mother was 36 years old. She never dated another man. There was simply no room in her heart for anyone else. My mother used to say that his ghost came and sat by her bed at night. When I relive the days and nights before her death I can feel exactly when she stopped trying to live, I know the moment she left her body. I was there. My father had finally come back for her and nothing, not me, not my son could keep her from him. I don't think it was that she stopped loving us, she just couldn't see past her love for him and when she was presented with to opportunity to close that gap, she took it. My mother was never a selfish woman and in the last seconds of her life here she reached out and took something for herself, she took my father back and left me with memories.