A Forever Ocean View

In honor of my mother, Maudie Weidman, who passed away fourteen years ago this week, here’s a reprise of a piece published in Chicken Soup for the Ocean Lover’s Soul. She was a salt-of-the-earth Midwesterner who told great stories, played a mean piano and always kept a supply of Snickers bars on hand. She loved a good joke, the color red and hot fudge sundaes for lunch. She was the best Little Mommy ever, and I still miss her every day.

A Forever Ocean View

My mother and I longed for an ocean view, the kind that went on forever just like the real estate ads boasted, where we could be swept up in the sea’s changing moods. Neither of us could afford a house on the ocean, but dreaming was free so we did plenty of that. Still, we hoped someday at least one of us would realize the dream and share her good fortune with the other.

In the meantime we took every opportunity to be near the water. Each Friday we had a standing date and usually managed to fit in lunch at a seaside restaurant. We ate our way up and down the coast of Southern California, seeking new ocean view spots to savor. We even joined a beach club because it had a great restaurant on the sand. We could lunch to the sound of waves licking the shore, watch the sea birds swoop and soar or track the progress of the California gray whale migrations. It was, we decided, the closest we would ever get to owning any part of an ocean view.

We would talk at our whitewater lunches, but words weren’t always necessary. Sometimes we would just watch the ocean in silence, perfectly content. Once I asked my mother about her wistful look, and she said she was imagining herself a gull flying free over the water, becoming part of the seascape. We agreed that would be a perfect way to spend time.

One Friday at the beach club her voice broke a long comfortable silence, “Next Friday I need your help choosing my niche.”

“What’s a niche?” I asked.

“It’s where they put people’s ashes at the cemetery,” she said as a wave crashed into the sand. She’d been on a mission to get her affairs in order since a recent hospitalization for congestive heart failure.

“I always thought you’d want your ashes to be spread at sea.”

“Oh, no,” she said, a hint of a giggle in her eyes. “You know I can’t swim.”

She had me laughing, breaking the somber mood that had overtaken me at the mention of cemeteries and ashes. I preferred to ignore the subject, but she was an undertaker’s daughter, practical about death. She wanted to be cremated. There would be no viewing, no funeral and no arguments. I wasn’t anxious to spend our Friday at a cemetery, but I couldn’t refuse my mother.

“Where’s the cemetery?” I asked, resigned to a gruesome day.

“Corona Del Mar,” she said. “Pacific View Memorial Park.”

Of course, I thought. She was going to have her ocean view if it was the last thing she ever did.

We met at Pacific View where the “counselor” showed us available niches. We narrowed it down to two locations in Palm Court, which resembled a giant stucco planter with marble-faced niches on all four sides and palms growing in the middle. It sat atop a hill with a panoramic view of the Pacific. That day the ocean sparkled azure blue and Catalina Island rose up from the horizon.

One niche faced the ocean, the other looked inland. But even ocean view niches are more expensive than ones looking away from the sea. My mother’s face fell when she learned this. She probably could have afforded the view niche, but it went against her practical grain. She regrouped and began to assess the virtues of the inland niche.

“Look,” she said. “It’s right on the corner. You can sit here beside the niche and see the view when you visit me. I can just peek around the corner.” She was teasing me again, easing the tension. “Why should I plunk out all that money to be on the view side?”

I could see she had made up her mind. She was buying the niche on the corner, without a view.

Eighteen months later she died. My sister and I placed her ashes in the niche and watched the attendant secure the marble plate with mortar. We held onto each other, eyes straining through gray haze to see the ocean our mother had loved to watch.

My Fridays were free, but I found myself at Pacific View often. Like my mother had instructed, I sat down facing the ocean. Sometimes I looked at the view, but mostly I closed my eyes and turned my head skyward. I’d see a kaleidoscope of red, yellow and orange swirls pulling me inside the changing design and wrapping me up. It felt warm and sustaining, like a hug. When the colors subsided, I would leave, hardly glancing at the view.

After a year I was still aching and empty, crying at odd moments. A college friend came to visit and as a lark we went to a psychic. I was stunned when she said, “Someone has recently passed on. They are worried about you and can’t be free until they know you are all right.”

Days later, at the niche, I thought about the psychic’s words. I normally took such pronouncements lightly, but I couldn’t shake this one. I sat at the niche, eyes closed as usual. I was edgy, though, and the colors faded almost as fast as they came. Hearing a bird’s call, I opened my eyes to see a gull circling above. I felt the words come before I said them, “Don’t worry, Mommy. I’ll be fine.” As if in response, the gull dipped a wing, circled once more and flew off toward the ocean. My spirits lifting with the bird, I watched until it was out of sight. And there before me was that beautiful forever ocean view my mother had bought to share with me. I sat for a long time absorbing every part of it.

Copyright 2002, Liz Zuercher