So this is the diary I always knew that I’d probably write, but I never wanted to.
Born December 1, 1937, Vivian Williams Walton passed away yesterday from cardiac arrest. She was my mother, and she was hell on high heels.
She grew up in a shotgun shack with an outhouse just by the side of what would become Interstate 20 in Shreveport Louisiana. Her father was a hard man who — in today’s vernacular — could be called prone to child abuse. “Corporal” punishment they called it? Yeah, ok. Her mother, Emma Lee Wiliams, was a kindly soul but with a determination to forge her own fate and the fate of her children. All told, through multiple sets of marriages, my mother’s immediate family included 13 siblings. As you can guess these days our family reunions are more like a large convention. Today only 3 of the original 13 survive.
Now it’s one less.
Emma eventually divorced that mean man, and she went on to save enough money at her housecleaning job to put a down payment on her own house in Shreveport. She was one of the first women in town to do such a thing. Vivian grew up with her sister Audrey, and brothers Lee and Charles in that house. She got a job in a sandwich shop and went to a segregated high school which still has their own reunion/conventions.
Eventually, she moved out west, to Los Angeles and got a job at a sewing shop. She was tall and thin — what everyone is told to like by the ad agencies — so she modeled. Lingerie even. She met a man and got married. Unfortunately, that man had a tendency to drink. And hit. Sure, that was acceptable in the early ‘60s, and she didn't really mind in her own case but by now she was pregnant and she decided to divorce that man. Then she bought her own house in South Central Los Angeles with Lee and Charles.
She was pregnant with me. She had left her marriage to protect me — from him. From Fred. She was divorced before she gave birth.
Eventually, both Lee and Charles got married and left. Emma, my grandma would stay with us and take care of me while she worked.
She doted on me, her only son, I know it. She supported (almost) any damn fool thing I decided to do. Ice Skating. Snow Skiing. Competitive Diving. Gymnastics. Trumpet in the orchestra. Science Fiction. Fantasy. Comics. Dungeons and Dragons. Nerdy shit. Whatever it was. [She drew the line at being a stuntman for some reason. but I woulda loved that. Dar Robinson was my jam! You can see him doing the high fall with the suicidal guy in the movie Lethal Weapon] Usually, we’d hardly see each other during the week as she was now working the second shift in the computer room at Sears Roebuck.
Cold, previously cooked dinners were my life growing up. Cold grits for breakfast. But I knew why and I didn’t complain. “Latch key?” — I was that kid. We had an alarm on the house, and after losing my key time and time again — I learned how to break back into my own house without setting off the alarm. (Of course, then getting out again was the problem.)
We were a little team. We’d together drive cross-country back to Shreveport to visit my grandma. She’d drive, and I’d navigate. Calculating our gas mileage to pass the time. Playing tapes of my collection of pop 45 records as the miles whipped by. Pat Benatar. Stevie Wonder. Journey. Luther Vandross. Judas Priest. When she got upset and had a conniption fit — I’d stay even and calm. Somebody had to even if I was just 12.
She didn’t bat an eye when I decided I didn’t ‘want to go to high school in South Central Los Angeles, essentially because Locke High School didn’t have a gymnastics team. I’d had to quit gymnastics during Jr. High as the stress of taking me to practice in Glendale while working on the second shift at Sears was just too hard on her. She’d fall asleep while I was on floor exercise. I cried when we drove home from my final practice.
So for high school, I opted instead to go to school in the San Fernando Valley where they had a gymnastics team which meant getting up at 5 am every morning to catch the bus at 6 am, then usually staying after school for marching band or gymnastics practice until 6 pm, to get home at 8 pm. And then you do it again. And again.
After having to take three years off, I didn’t get a gymnastics scholarship. It took me one year just to get back into decent shape, while people I had competed against 4 years before were whipping my ass. I did get 1st place All Around in the LA Sophmore Invitational though, so there. I wasn’t named MVP of the orchestra for being head 1st Trumpet in my senior year either. I did get accepted into UCLA, but I couldn’t afford it so I went — for a while — to Cal State Long Beach.
While going to school I worked in the computer room at Northrop Grumman, a job at the same company she had moved to specifically because she knew they were likely to hire family members. While there I gained a Top Secret/SCI clearance and a lot of experience with mainframe computers and computer automation.
Working at the same company, although not the same building, as your mother, is a strange thing. You end up hearing — rumors.
“She’s loud.”
“She’s brash.”
“She’s in your face.”
“She scares people.”
This is the kind of reaction you get when you’re a woman, and single mother, who has had to scrape and scrabble to cobble together every little thing you have. This is what you get when you have the guts to directly confront both racism and sexism that’s blatantly in your face, and you don’t flinch. She did that in the ’60s, the ‘70s and the ‘80s. You bet she scared people, those people deserved it. When you have to go out and take night courses to learn how to operate a machine that the managers won’t show you — then you run it better than the men — you grow tough. This is how women from the Civil Rights Era got shit done, they wouldn't tolerate this “Woke” and “Canceled” bullshit — they were getting surveilled by COINTELPRO for speaking their minds. They were getting killed by the FBI and the LAPD for being “uppity” but they didn’t back down. This is who my mother was. She was tenacious like her mother, and she was tough and mean when she needed to be — like her father.
Eventually, we got a new house in a nicer neighborhood. Then I moved away — got my own place. Then I got my own wife. I took up guitar and started playing loud raucous rock and roll — my ancestral music — and moved to Sacramento for a bold new career as a government IT contractor and Rocker. It was a wild open welcoming world.
She would call me up incessantly. Droning on and on about this thing happening in my extended family or that thing. But I was doing my own thing, I barely listened. Sometimes I put the phone down when she talked, and just let her prattle on. She didn't even need an audience, or any responses, she’d just go and go and go. She was so proud of our family, how we started with almost literally nothing and built careers and lives all around the country. I hardly heard those little stories being so absorbed in my own.
While In Sacto I got a hard rock band, a good one. We were shopping record deals even, we ultimately put out a record independently. But after four years, things went plaid and we broke up. After that, I got into a newer even better band using the drummer and bassist from the previous band. Everything was going fine until my dreams of climbing high in the government contractor world crashed, burned and smoldered like a sad crumpled cigarette.
Enron happened. California’s budget went belly and tits up. Contractor jobs dried up. We got evicted. I got a job working for a dot com startup. (Yes, I know!) That company laid half the staff off when one of our biggest clients, the World Trade Center Marriot, got crushed by the debris from Tower II landing on it. Then we got evicted again. And again.
Of course, my mom offered to take us in back in Los Angeles. I’d have to leave my band, which was going great, I’d have to leave the new life I was building. I’d have to move back to that fucking town. With the God damn fucking hyper-pampered LAKERS. Oh, Jesus H. Christmas.
I thought about it long and hard. Really hard.
Eventually, tearfully, I did it. Years before the housing crisis that forced millions of kids to move back into their parent's basement — I was already there. And I was kinda broken by the experience. I was bitter. I was pissed off. I had fought my ass off to make that life work, we scrambled and hustled like crazy— living off frozen mac and cheese, I sold my comics collection on Ebay to pay the rent, my X-men Giant Size #1, my Daredevils, my Issue #1 of Star Wars, we pawned our guitars and amps, somehow stretching one dollar to make seven for years — but it didn’t work. It took me a long time to get over the feeling of being crushed. The depression was massive. As was the self-hate for being a “failure.”
She welcomed us back. But she didn’t make it easy. She was harsh. Rude. Haughty. Dismissive. The worst fucking intrusive roommate ever. Seriously. But we had a home.
So I started writing here and my depression got better, a little. I worked as a graphics artist at a small black-owned business in South Central, yet another job that she got me. It was about 1/6th of my previous salary as a contractor, but it was money. It was a job. Hopefully, I made a difference back in my original community. A little one.
About 2008 I recorded my own solo hard rock album. That went ok, considering I recorded it in our living room, then sold copies to people as far away as Brazil. A couple of years ago I retired and took my pension from Northop a few years early. And now, this year, I’m finally starting to work on a new solo record. 14 Basic tracks were finished a couple of months ago, and I’ve just started on lyrics and melodies.
Like a lot of black mothers, she had this truly annoying habit of always asking me whenever I left the house: Where was I going? When would I be back? Who was I going with? [And I’m not talking about when I was 16, I’m talking about last week.] But then again, we all know why don’t we?
And so her health started to deteriorate. She had problems with her knees which were arthritic. Walking was murder. She moaned and whimpered with every step. Finally, she couldn’t get upstairs to her bedroom, so she took to sitting in a reclining chair in the living room downstairs.
Now, despite the previous contentious times, we were able to have some good heartfelt conversations. It was really nice. We would laugh. I was actually glad I was still here to take care of her. I worried I wasn’t doing enough.
Then starting last year there was this weird rash on her feet. She started seeing bugs everywhere, crawling on her, on the floor. I took her to her doctor — who she hadn’t been to in 8 years — and he gave her cream for the rash. Not so much on the seeing things. Since then though she had been lucid, mostly. Occasionally she’d go a little off the rails, but it wasn’t super concerning — just seemed to be short-term memory loss mixed with a vivid imagination. Being 84 years old can do that to ya.
Last week she stopped being able to walk on her own, her knees — or the rash — had gotten too bad. The cream wasn’t working (or she wasn’t using it I suspect). I was having to fight to get her into a walker to get her back and forth from the bathroom. (But we did it.) I noticed she had developed bed sores from the chair. Trying to keep it clean was becoming problematic. We used “piddle” pads and adult depends. I called her doctor and left a message to call me back. I talked to her brother Lee and we both thought she needed a trained caregiver to help her with things.
This was the day before yesterday.
Yesterday morning about 4 am she was on the floor in the living room, mumbling about being outside on the porch and needing to “get away.” We opened the convertible couch in the living room into a bed and got her into it all safe and sound.
I woke up at 11 am to hear a crash. I found her on the floor again, non-vocal, grabbing at things. knocking over the lamp. I called 9-1-1, and paramedics took her away. I followed and gave them all the information I could, then since they told me I’d have a long wait I went home to charge my phone. I called Lee. I called her doctor.
I got the call back from the ER at about 2 pm. The doctor said that when she arrived she was “very sick.” They tried CPR but it didn't work.
!!!
So, that was a thing. I don’t really know how to react, or feel. Yet. Lots to process. I have one thought: I kinda wish I’d sat and listened to all her little stories a bit more. Just a little. Too late now.
I got lots to do for putting together the funeral and whatever else is involved in this… process. And yet, since she told me the insurance company had canceled her policy because of her age, there’s not really any money to do it with. I don’t know, my cousin — who lost her mother Audrey a few years back — tells me that “aging out” means the policy is fully vested, or something. That needs to be figured out, but not right now. Not today. And I was just calling insurance companies last week to set up something new. Again, too late now.
How did that insensitive racist asshole from Qatar during the World Cup put it? “Death is a natural part of life.”
Not to the families of the dead it isn’t.
I can’t really think about what all of it means just yet. I know that we all only have a limited time on this earth, there is a beginning and therefore there must also be an end. Debates rage on what lies beyond. I feel a little more alone, without my safety net, without my rock. She’ll never hear my second solo album. She never had a chance to meet her step great-grandson, since he lives in Seattle. I got a million memories playing full-bore competitive table tennis in my brain. I got a chill in my chest, but then that just might be because I took a walk in the cold night air a few minutes ago. I can’t tell.
I can’t ask “Hi, how're you feeling?” one last time.
I’m leaving the TV in the living room on even though no one is there to watch it anymore. She’d sit for hours watching reruns of that stupid show Two and a Half Men. Everyone on that program was hateful and petty. Spiteful and mean. On the surface. In reality, one brother who was down on his luck was welcomed, along with his son, into the home of his other brother. One brother saved the other. Like she saved me and my wife when we were in trouble. Family is weird. She’d watch it for hours. I can’t turn it off. I can’t rest. I can’t sleep. God, I hate that show.
It feels like my childish penchant for procrastination has finally caught up with me. Why put things off until the last minute when you can put it off until one minute after the last? Time to grow up. Be the adult. Do the adult stuff. Whatever that is. Carry the weight.
Sigh.
Exactly what she always protected me from doing, because she was already doing it. Effortlessly. Time and time again. I’m not ready.
We've had over 1 Million Americans die of Covid in the last two years. One million families have been torn apart. Grieving. Ripped to shreds. It doesn’t seem like we really feel any of that. It feels hollow. It feels distant like it happened in a fairy tale. In some far-off land to some people far away. A million separate little tragedies. Sound and fury, signifying — almost nothing.
We don’t make it real.
But It is real.
Anyway, just wanted to put down my thoughts. PM me if you want direct contact.
Thanks for listening.
UPDATE: Thursday, Dec 15, 2022 · 1:47:06 AM +00:00 · Frank Vyan Walton
Thanks to everyone for your contributions, it’s going to be a great help. I just got back from the cemetery and they’re full right now — but we should be able to get things moving in the next couple of days. You’ve given enough to get over the initial couple humps which is great.