Over the Rainbow Bridge: Mom’s Passing

 In March of 2014, less than three weeks from her 103rd birthday on the 26th, her mom passed on peacefully with Joshua and the little girl who could standing by as first her feet, and then her body, turned blue. They knew and called the coroner who confirmed “her heart gave out” diagnosis. Since her mom had paid for her own cremation in 1985, and did not want a funeral, they only held a small memorial in the Art Depot, where her mom, at 99, during a woodworker’s exhibition, got to sit on the same seat she sat on as a child of nine when it was a working train station, still memorialized, like Aunt Jenny’s mural with her two big salmon, when she won the 1938 salmon derby, and used her picture to advertise the 1939 derby by the Chamber of Commerce in the Anacortes Mural Project, whose creator, Bill Mitchell had been one of her best and only friends in her mom’s hometown where she had once, for one month, worked as an assistant city engineer under the CETA Program that paid half your salary while being trained. Back then, almost $900 a month was great pay! She had worked a civil service job between sophomore and junior year in college in 1971-2 at the Venice PO when she got 98 out of 100 on the civil service exam.

    That was way back in January 75 when her new husband demanded she quit so they could be together and so they both got a job picking tulips for about $2 bucks an hour. The colors of the tulips would fly through her head when she went to sleep every night, like a color mandala of birdsong and light. In fact, one of her first songs, called Father Made the Flowers, was sung to her by the robins while picking tulips near the trees at 6 AM. She had also picked daffodils one year as well, before the tulips.

     Her mom, who had taken care to write a living will many years before, had put the house in her name years before she passed and had told her what to do. She called the funeral parlor where her mom had invested 1K in her own cremation many years before. They came and got her body after the coroner and police had left, but they failed to tell her she had to sign another form, so she found out later that her mom’s body was still frozen in Marysville where many bodies from the Oso flood wound up. Her mom dreamt of this flood two weeks before she passed, but it did not happen until two weeks later! Life after death, anyone? Her mom woke from a nightmare, crying, “There’s a flood coming. Get the kids out. Get the kids out!” Telling this story to an Irsh grl on the free SKAT bus one day, the girl said “My brother heard her. He was a first responder and also got the contract for cleanup at the end and found a living baby buried in the toxic mud.”

     Then these people her mom had paid for her cremation flunked again; on her mom’s death certificate, they said her maiden name was Seriff, not Senff, and that she had only lived in her home 2 years when she lived there as an owner for 33 years! And the Olympia government refused to fix it, saying the funeral parlor had to do it. What a comedy of errors miscommunications create!

     Being mostly Irish, her last daughter had a grandfather on her abusive father’s side who was full blooded Sisseton Dakota, except for one Irish grandpa in the woodpile, so to speak. He was a three time in Nam Green Beret Sargent who refused to be promoted, saying to his young son, “They’re sending those boys over there to die and i’m the only thing stopping them.”

     After her son moved upstairs into her mom’s bedroom with his big bed, she decided to eventually sell the house. There were too many problems and too many memories, so, when Dakota Creek, who owned most of the block anyway, offered 142,500 cash with $20K advance for moving expenses, she took the deal, eventually buying a fixer and two lots in rural Oregon near the Salmon River and her beloved ocean. Surrounded by horses and elk on occasion, she got two lots with a couple of sheds and her kids helped her rebuild the old 1970 manufactured home. There were beautiful trees and even a bonded maple tree with 12 separate trunks providing shade and humus for the whole south facing yard. It was not until she sold this property 3 years later, that she had to agree to clean up the back lots, hoping the new owner would not cut the old trees down there at the bottom where there was a little creek. It was quite a chore but she got half in advance to pay a lot of people to work who were also able to take all her tools and building materials to their property that had acres of reusable stuff and junk. It worked out all around and she and Josh moved back to Washington, where her White Buffalo Calf Woman still lived, Roseheart, whose name was given to Felicia by an angel in a dream of bowers of roses in a large garden, all shaped like hearts, but refused to acknowledge Jessica, the young child nursing in front of her, but said, I guess I will have a daughter someday and name her Roseheart! Our little girl’s heart sank, then, for even the women did not recognize her!

     It was at that Unity Festival that she finished carving the saddle of a healing flute, while many tribe’s prophecies were fulfilled, including the birth of Miracle, hundreds of miles away in Wisconsin, while she kept the peace in her old green Rambler American, driving back and forth to town while her school bus conversion held the edge of Kid Village and Felipe’s bus held the other end. Once she had to rescue a guy who ate the wrong mushrooms and wound up airlifted out naked to Flagstaff. Since she had young children, she was always running errands and hauling drinking water or doing laundry in Flagstaff anyway.

     Her youngest daughter had lived for over a year with a very abusive and dominating boyfriend over twice her age. They found the deal on an Oregon fixer upper and lived there while they made repairs, such as new foundations, replacing a whole wall that had rotted out, and, meanwhile, they raised crops. She came to visit, then returned to Washington, leaving her car there. While she was gone, a big wind came and a branch flew into the windshield and she had to fight her insurance company to repair it. The local repair shop took three weeks instead of three days to order the windshield (they ordered the wrong one without rain sensor, but she didn’t care). Meanwhile, she had a rent a car they were supposed to cover, but it was many months later that she finally received a check.

     So, wanting to spend Christmas with them, she caught a Greyhound Bus to Portland and sent her daughter $100 Western Union for gas for them to drive her car to pick her up. While on the bus, she was texting the violent boyfriend, who lied to her about everything, saying they were coming to get her, then saying he was almost to California?

Something was up, but she had no idea what, until, thanks to Greyhound Internet access, she was able to contact her daughter, who told her he had taken the gas money to buy heroin because he was unable to get the morphine he needed for his many aches and pains, and that, that very morning, he had attacked her, smashing a hard piece of pottery over her head and hitting her legs with a big wooden chair, and that her friend working with them had called the sheriff to no avail. Shocked, she called the young man Connor, who had worked with them on the house while our little girl supplied the money for the building materials, and he said, call the police again, maybe they will listen to you. Trying 911, she was told it was a different state, so call someone else. The Sheriff also did not seem concerned, so she finally called for an ambulance and told them to take protection because it was a domestic violence incident. Then the ambulance came with the local police from Lincoln City, and, finally, the local sheriffs, who arrived too late to see Jessica leave for the hospital, but did arrive in time to arrest the violent offender. He handed them his cell phone, showing that he had been communicating with me, but all that did was convict him further, since it was apparent he was lying. That was Christmas Eve. Christmas Day was a lot better, as she told the sheriffs when they came to take pictures of her daughter’s injuries. Because he had taken the gas money and also thrown her car keys into the berry bushes (she never found them but did have a spare set with her), he eventually was called before a grand jury and charged with kidnapping and sent to prison for five years with no parole. As he was the son and grandson of two of Anacortes’ most corrupt cops, he had never suffered for his many crimes. Connor said he had even boasted to him about people he had murdered. Of course, we never knew this until much later, after her daughter had joined up with him at 19 years old when he was 42 and lived in his Grandma’s house in Anacortes. He lost that home to creditors, and they moved to several different locations before the Oregon home.

     Unfortunately, Christmas Eve saw her stranded. After taking the trains and buses as far as the closed mall in Beaverton, she sat for over three hours with a santa hat on her head, waiting for her friend Crystal and her 5 year old son to give her a ride home to the other side of the coastal range. She had just enough gas money to give them for the ride, but just before they were almost there, she lost touch. Waiting patiently for over two hours, she was very happy to see them when they finally arrived. On her way, Crystal’s friend had gone into labor, so she had had to go to the hospital first. Our little girl’s best friend, whom she had met in Anacortes when they both had three girls, had a boyfriend when they met who played sax. He became later like an Uncle to all the girls. It was not until he passed away, that Crystal found out her was her dad, whom she had never met. Her mom lived in Oregon, and she moved there eventually from Anacortes, where our little girl had rescued her from homelessness when nasty neighbors told her mom in Oregon that she was dealing drugs. It was the two time a week food bank delivery to the house, where many teenagers wound up, that the neighbor’s judged as drugs! So Crystal got to live in our little girl’s RV down the street from her mom’s house. This RV lived in her mom’s backyard and both her and her daughter Hope lived in it over the years. Hope eventually got back to California, where she had never wanted to leave, but had to due to harassment by cops working against any poor people who stood for peace by taking away their children using CPS and corrupt justices.

     Right after that, her oldest daughter Olalani told them she had a wedding package for New Years Eve in Vegas, so we all tried to go, except Joshua, who was still living in Ballard, WA with his friends. There she broke down, getting a new alternator that the car would not recognize because it was not a GM part.

     Three years later, after her son had come to live with her, not being able to get a good job in WA, she eventually sold the home and paid back all her children for their help on making the old 1970 manufactured home that no one had lived in for quite a while, livable again. Although she had many building materials left, her son was too busy playing his computer games to care about repairs, although he did get a good job at the local Safeway in Lincoln City. They were going to make him a manager, but another manager did not like him so he jinxed him by never sending in the papers, and then lying and saying he did not come to his last day of work, which kept him from ever being hired by the chain that owned Albertson’s, Safeway, and other supermarkets. He is currently only getting six hours a week as a home care worker, and has applied with Fred Meyer’s for a night job so he can keep helping Jessi babysit Olive Blossom while she works at her shipping job at Sea Bear, a local salmon packing and distribution site. We are all praying for his success. He has had terrible luck with jobs, getting diabetes and winding up in the hospital too sick to call in just after he was given a position as a supervisor where he had worked for years at the Shell refinery in the safety division. They fired him and unemployment was denied him and he did not fight for his rights. At that time, he was making over $45,000 a year, but that also resulted in a poker problem that made Grandma Clara decide to change her will from leaving him everything to just leaving him her stocks in GTE. so his work history went downhill from there. Before the refinery job, he worked at Fidalgo Internet and everyone said what a great help he was and how pleasant his phone manners as he helped solve computer problems at a distance. With his best friend as his boss, he really enjoyed the refinery job and worked 10-12 hour days 6 days a week at times. Then their company was underbid by Whatcom environmental, who knew nothing about the plant. His best friend, Matt Dolman, was promoted to be in charge of the safety of all Shell refineries all the way to Texas. They fired everyone else, just keeping on Josh, who had to train them in the plant’s safety measures set up by his previous employer, Summit Inspections. Then, once they knew everything they needed, they were more than happy to fire him as well and deny him his unemployment benefits that he had earned with hard work and sweat over many years. Then, a year later, they sent out a newsletter boasting of their safety record, which was really Josh’s safety record. 

     The Texaco plant next door had a lousy safety record that resulted in the deaths of some of their employees. When the families sued, they won, but Texaco appealed and did not pay a cent! It was outrageous: the corruption and awful neglect toward those poor families! The city of Anacortes in the 50s was told they would always have a cheap gas station if they let the refineries be built there to pollute the whole Fidalgo Bay where generations of Native peoples had lived and dined on the abundance of sea and shellfish that are now poison to harvest. The March Point facility took the most inhabited Native land of the Samish and Swinomish tribes for their own. Anacortes and the San Juan Islands were signed away by the Natives for the promise of health care, and then they took away even their tribal treaty rights and even stole their tribal status, which took over two decades to restore. A general’s wife sold all of Anacortes for $1000 to a developer, who got $500 from the railroad people to let them develop it as well. Then they performed the ultimate rape of the land, setting fire to almost all the old growth redwood trees from inside their trunks, as their bark has a fire retardant that saw them through many coastal fires unscathed. In the movie “A Perfect Port” there is a video of this travesty, and it looks like a scene from Dante’s hell. Then they carved the town into lots. That is why Anacortes had numbered and lettered streets like a grid on a piece of paper. It is also now totally overdeveloped as builders stole away the good standard of living enjoyed by the little people and set up million dollar homes where gardens and trees and mobile homes once sat above the ferry that left every day for Canada and the other San Juan Islands where our little girl’s ancestors once lived. The realtors and developers got away with forcing the prices up artificially.

There is no trickle down economy. Only a trickle up economy is a viable system that works. When the people at the bottom have enough, everyone, not just the top 1%, will have enough to survive and thrive. Everywhere she saw a good standard of living, based not on money or income, but on community safety and survival for elders and children and the poorest among us, it was destroyed sooner or later by those with money who claimed it for themselves. It was not right in the eyes of God and Goddess, but, simply put, the worship of money is the root of all evil and she saw the results in her once beloved country every day now. So she decided to write her first book of her own memoirs.