part0038

Over the weeks of early autumn, our mother’s condition steadily deteriorated. All her chemotherapy and radiation treatments had led her inevitably to that depressing threshold when the doctors say, “There’s nothing more we can do.” We all knew that was coming, even our father, who hadn’t wanted to admit that the end was near.

The message arrived on a gray and drizzly day in late October, delivered to my door by a fellow CU student from Paonia. I didn’t have a telephone at the time, so her parents asked her to pass on the word that my mother was sinking fast. It was time to get to St. Mary’s Hospital in Grand Junction. I’d been expecting something like this, but it is one thing to expect and another to hear. I remember staring out the rain-streaked window. “Everything is dying,” I said to Deborah, “Mother will be dead soon.” There was little she could say to comfort me as I gathered my things and left for the airport.

By the time I landed in Grand Junction, where my father met me, it was late evening, around nine or ten. We went directly to the hospital and were ushered to Mother’s bedside. The lights had been turned down; in the shadows I could barely make out her tiny form huddled under the covers. I was appalled to see how shrunken she had become since I had said goodbye to her in Paonia before returning to Boulder. There is nothing pretty or uplifting or in any way inspiring about a death from cancer; it ravages the body, and eventually renders the victim into a hollow husk. This it had done to Mom, my beautiful mother, the prettiest girl in all of Paonia. When I approached the bed, she opened her eyes; she had been sleeping or dozing, it wasn’t clear which. She could not speak; she was too far into an opiate fog to do that. I covered her withered, shrunken hands and kissed her gently on the brow, whispered something meaningless to let her know I was there. I don’t know if she was even conscious enough to know I was there; she made a whimpering sound but no wordscame out. I was crying; I tried through my tears to tell her that I loved her, and that I was sorry for all the ways I had hurt her.

She managed to say something like “humph” or “oomph.” I don’t know what it meant. It sounded to my ears, and in my grief, like a rejection of what I had expressed to her. It was too late now, too late to fix those wrongs. I was overcome by grief, and guilt, I begged for her forgiveness; but all that came back was “humph” or “oomph.” I broke down, all efforts to hold back the tears were abandoned, and I had to be led out of the room. That was the last time I saw her. By this time it was late. I was tired from the trip, and Dad took me back to the hotel room that he had rented a few blocks from the hospital. He suggested I try to get some sleep; he was going back to the hospital to be with Mom, and would come and get me in a few hours. I could not fall asleep. Images from childhood, images of Mom and the times we had shared kept appearing behind my closed eyelids. Finally I must have fallen into a troubled sleep, for the next thing I knew Dad was shaking me awake, saying, “Mother’s gone.” And so she was, and so she has been, gone for more than forty years. The day dawned. It was October 25, 1970.

It was bad enough for us to endure the tragedy of Mom’s death at the young age of fifty-seven, but our grieving was complicated by another drama. While Mom was on her deathbed, Terence was keeping vigil, in close touch via telephone from Victoria, British Columbia, where he had relocated after my visit a few weeks earlier. He was prepared to risk crossing the border on his false passport in order to reach her bedside, and by the time Mom passed he’d already begun the first leg of his trip and was airborne somewhere between Vancouver and Los Angeles. Dad feared the law was tracking Terence and would pounce on him the moment he got off the plane in Grand Junction. Now that Mom had passed, there was no point for him to complete the journey; we needed to get word to him to abort the trip and return to Canada.

Back then, before the cell-phone era, this was a considerable challenge. What followed was a series of frantic long-distance calls, first to the airline in Vancouver, who confirmed that he had boarded the plane and would have a layover in L.A. before he flew on to Salt Lake City and then Grand Junction. If possible we needed to get word to him on one of his stops and tell him to turn around. We succeeded in contacting the airline literally as the plane was pushing back from the gate in L.A. Our message was clear: “Do not let him leave on that plane!” Remarkably, they complied, directed the plane back to the gate and let Terence disembark. Even more remarkably, they didn’t ask many questions. In those days, security was almost laughably lax. Today, not only would the airline have refused to divulge any information about a passenger; the mere fact that we were inquiring would have focused attention on Terence, blowing his cover and turning things very ugly, indeed.

In retrospect, I think my father’s paranoia about Terence getting caught was overblown. In the overall scheme of things, he was small potatoes; yes, he was a fugitive, yes, Interpol probably had him listed somewhere, but I doubt they had the time or resources, or even the interest, in following him that closely. The whole drama that played out just after our mother passed may have been more about taking our father’s mind off that fact than about warning Terence. Still, I have to credit Dad; even in his hour of deepest grief he still cared enough about Terence, despite their differences, to take extraordinary steps to protect him.

The four or five days following Mom’s death were a blur. We packed up and checked out of the hotel and headed back to Paonia. “Some doors you never want to open again,” my father said as we left the hotel room. It was true; this was the end of a long and sad chapter in our lives. At least Mom was no longer suffering. It was a cold comfort.

The funeral was held at the Catholic church in Paonia. Relatives came from near and far for the funeral, including my Aunt Amelia, my father’s sister, who drove from Denver, where she was a pastoral counselor at St. Joseph’s Hospital. Many in the community loved my mother, and her funeral was well attended. She had done much for the town’s elderly and sick, checking on shut-ins and widows, simply because it was the right thing to do. Now her friends and those to whom she had been kind came to pay their respects. Only Terence was missing. It was a time of great sadness and grieving for me. I was depressed and felt helpless at the loss. I was nineteen, a little more than a month shy of my twentieth birthday, but I didn’t feel like a young adult. I felt like a child who had lost his mother, which is what I was. I was utterly bereft.

After Mom had been lowered into her final resting place, I returned to Boulder, driven back by Amelia and her companion, a nun who had accompanied her to Paonia. More drama! I was petrified that they would stop and come up to the apartment and discover Deborah there. Until then, I’d kept Deborah’s presence in my life a secret. On the way back, I placed an urgent phone call to Hans and Nancy in their apartment downstairs from ours, asking them to keep Deborah in their place until I arrived, which they did. In the end, Amelia let me off in front of the house and didn’t come upstairs. I have to wonder if perhaps she knew what was going on and didn’t want to make a scene. We were all exhausted from the stressful days just past and tired from the trip over the mountains, so she may have just wanted to get home.

I remember little about the remainder of the semester. I was depressed and sad, and Deborah’s simple and undemanding affection did little to lift my spirits. Terence was still in Victoria, and our plans to go to South America remained on track. His recent love interest had by then moved on, but he’d been joined by his friend Vanessa, a fellow student in the Tussman program whom I mentioned earlier, and “Dave,” a “gay meditator” from upstate New York, as Terence characterizes him in True Hallucinations . Dave had been living on the margins in Berkeley when Terence met him one day while both were hitchhiking. He arrived in Victoria with a newly minted degree in anthropology from Syracuse University. The three of them had rented a clapboard house in a quiet neighborhood and had settled in to plan the expedition. They had shared a mescaline trip a couple of weeks after our mother had died that Terence described as “full of elf-chatter.” Swept by intimations of the adventure ahead, Dave and Vanessa were almost as much in thrall to the notion of our quest as we were. The brotherhood now numbered four.

It was a time of rapid change for all of us. With Mother gone, I felt I had no reason to remain in school. Terence and I had been discussing the ideas that were behind our quest for well over a year. John Parker’s visit to Boulder the previous fall had only fanned the flames of curiosity. If ever there was going to be a time to set out in search of the Secret, it seemed, that time was now. Somehow, we convinced our father that it would be OK for me to go off with Terence to the Colombian jungle on what we presented as a butterfly and plant collecting expedition. Even today, I have no idea why he let me go, given that Terence had proven such a loose cannon, but for some reason he did. My father also agreed to continue sending me the small stipend I’d been getting while in school; this would be mailed to me monthly in care of the American Embassy in Bogotá. He was either incredibly trusting and open-minded or so depressed by Mom’s death that he no longer cared what I did. In some ways, I think he was also a little jealous. As a youth, my father, craving adventure, had been too sickly to act on his dreams. Then the war started, and his combat experiences had afforded him more adventure than he’d ever bargained for. After that he became much more cautious in life, but perhaps his regret over missed opportunities, and a certain nostalgia for how things might have been, still tugged at him. I think he understood, on some level, that this was my chance; I was due for my rite of passage, and this was going to be it. I was grateful to be setting off on this adventure with his blessing.

There was still the matter of what to do with Deborah. We were still very much in love. I did not want our relationship to end, but clearly she couldn’t come with me. She was still a runaway, and our situation was very shaky. We had discussed this several times over that autumn, and finally I convinced her that she should return home and get back in school. For her to remain on the lam, loose on the streets even a place as civilized as Boulder, was not a viable option. She had been lucky to meet someone who had taken her in and protected her. There was no guarantee that whomever she met next would treat her as well. I swore that I loved her, that I would wait for her to finish school and that we would get back together; but for now, going home was the best thing for her, and for me.

I sincerely meant it all; I did love her. But I also felt I had no choice but to pursue the adventure that beckoned. Finally, with some help, I persuaded Deborah to call her older brother. Without disclosing much, she told him where she was and that she wanted to return. Her brother agreed to drive out and get her. When he and his wife finally arrived, the meeting proved unexpectedly pleasant. They were decent folks; her brother was simply grateful to have his little sister back, and happy to see she’d been well cared for rather than exploited or forced into prostitution. They gave no hints of being angry with me. They could see, for one thing, that our affection for each other was real.

And I did care about her. I was sure we’d get back together once she had finished school. As it turned out, that did not come to pass, and in the years that followed I paid a steep price for loving Deborah. When we finally bade farewell on that snowy day in December my heart was bleeding.

Christmas that year was a cheerless affair. Dad and I were both still grieving over Mom’s death, and the last place we wanted to be at Christmas was in Paonia. We ended up going to spend the holiday with Tru and Iris, Dad’s old war buddy and his wife, in Lancaster, California—the couple who had taken Terence in for his last year of high school. They suggested that I take the bus to Disneyland for an overnight trip. I immediately agreed, but Disneyland was the last thing on my mind. I saw it as an opportunity to go visit Deborah, by then resettled in her hometown. I managed to time the bus trip just right to spend a few hours with her and make it back on schedule so no one in Lancaster was the wiser about where I’d actually been.

The trip gave me a chance to meet Deborah’s parents, which was necessary if I was serious about my commitment to her. Like her brother, they, too, were surprisingly friendly, almost more so than Deborah herself. She wasn’t unfriendly, exactly, but I think she’d had time to reflect on her adventures and was sobered by them. The cracks in our relationship were already forming, which I sensed but didn’t want to admit to myself. As things turned out, I would have been far better off had I realized that and moved on. But the Secret lay ahead, and I didn’t spend much time mulling over the uneasiness I felt after the two of us parted.