My memories begin the day my mom died. Everything before that was erased the day she died. What I know from my childhood I heard from my dad. He tells me stories and I watch home videos, but it’s not like my own memory. It’s like someone telling me a story.
When I was ten and living in Tracy, California with my mom and dad and my little sister, we always loved the water. So we decided to move to the ocean. It was really my mom’s idea. We looked around to different places to move and decided on Oregon. Since my dad was born in Salem and my mom loves the ocean, I think the Oregon Coast and a little town called Brookings, was the compromise.
We didn’t want to just try and buy a house, because we didn’t know if we’d be satisfied. So we bought a small trailer and found some property up in the woods so that we could build the house of our dreams and have room for a motorcycle track, hunting grounds, and privacy. After many months we found a cute little property up Carpenterville Road. It looked like an old windy road on the way up with trees everywhere. Most of the property was on a steep slope except for one flat circle, about fifty yards across, where it would be perfect to build our future home.
The day my mom died, we were doing what we had been doing for months: clearing trees, pulling stumps, topping trees, pulling and burning brush, hauling and cutting logs, and chopping wood. It was a sunny day and my mom and I had gotten in an argument over some little thing. I went on a timeout and she went down the hill with a chainsaw to cut down a tall tree that would be in the way of our view of the ocean.
My mom started the chainsaw and I left my timeout and started working again. She began to chop down the tree. After a while we heard a big crack and the tree began to fall and we heard a big boom. It didn’t sound like a tree falling, but a tree hitting another tree. We were concerned because it doesn’t usually happen that way, and then we heard the tree hit the ground. My mom didn’t have as much experience as my dad in cutting down trees and this added to the confusion and the concern.
My dad yelled my mom’s name. She didn’t answer and he yelled again. You could hear the birds chirping it was so silent. Everything seemed to be going in slow motion even though everything was happening so fast. My dad ran down the steep hill, which concerned me because it was impossible to do this without falling over stumps or debris. Then my dad yelled “Call 911” and I began looking for the cell phone because we were nowhere near civilization. I couldn’t find it so I shouted for help. Some people from a house down the road heard me and called 911. The ambulance came 45 minutes later. Our whole family was crying. My mom was put in a body bag and hauled off.
The whole point to all the logging of the trees was so that my mom could see the ocean from the home we were going to build. Her dream of seeing the ocean ended in the reality of her ashes being spread over the Pacific Ocean, just off the coast of Brookings, Oregon. Now she is in what she was she trying to see. And now my favorite thing to do is to be in the ocean. Whether I am waterskiing or surfing or just walking the beach, I’m always with my mom. And that’s where I always wanted to be.
My mom used to say, “Live your life to the fullest and not worry about other people judging you, because in the scheme of things you don’t really have that much time to have fun.” This why I believe you shouldn’t wait.
