The Bumbling Mystic's Obituary

1

The End

The editor rushed into the newsroom and crossed off another story on the white board.

Obits? he barked. It was not so much a question as a warning shot.

Coming, I called out.

I had written hundreds of obituaries over the years—but now, after what happened last weekend—trying to condense a stranger’s life into 125 words seemed flippant. Shampoo bottles have more verbiage than that.

An obit is a news brief, a summary of verifiable facts: Who died and when, where were they born, who they married. It doesn’t answer the real questions: Were they happy? Did they become who they wanted to be? Did they have regrets?

Even after the ink settles into the fibers of the newsprint and solidifies into the truth, life is still an exquisite mystery, down to the very end.

I looked at the wall clock just as the minute-hand lunged forward. I double-checked the spelling of Hoquiam, added a comma, and hit Print. 

I caught my reflection in the monitor screen.

My mother was right: I’m a dawdler. Get to the point, she would say, her voice still living in my head.

OK, I’ll just spit it out: Last Saturday, I had a premonition of my death. Mine. As in, holy shit.

You would think writing about other people’s death would prepare you to face your own, but no. Stunned, I lay there a long while, thinking. As if death was something I could fend off with a well-thought-out argument.

I fast-forwarded in my mind to the Threshold of Death—although apparently it didn’t require as much fast-forwarding as I’d thought. There, bracing myself against the doorjamb, I scanned the story of my life. I searched for fragments, loose ends, some unchecked box so profound I’d be filled with regret if I didn’t complete it.

I didn’t have a bucket list. I didn’t want to fly to Morocco. If this was it, the two-minute warning, I could think of only one thing I had to do, one thing that, if left undone, I’d regret for… eternity.

I had wanted to, been meaning to, write a book about synchronicity. Not just one fluke, but a string of coincidences so unlikely as to be otherworldly. Telling them, though, would require rummaging through some long-buried-for-good-reason memories in search of key details, like cleaning out a cluttered garage. You know you’ve got treasures in there, but just moving the boxes sends the spiders running.

It’s the kind of thing you might put off until you had to, or until it was… too late.

Trouble was, I’d never written a book before, and with time running out, I didn’t even know where to begin. I did know how to write an obituary though, and so I began where every obit starts—at the end.

Constance Mears died _______, in _________, from ____________.

OK, so that part wasn’t set in stone exactly, but someday it would happen: a stranger, working on deadline, would fill in those blanks.

After that, comes the beginning—where the whole messy affair got started.

She was born Jan. 24, 1959, in Alamogordo, N.M., to Milton Charles and Mary Genevieve Mears.

It’s what happened in between that’s hard to explain. The facts alone couldn’t tell the story—running away, teen pregnancy, marrying Mr. Wrong. And that was just the ordinary stuff. The synchronicities, the quests, the premonitions—how in the world would I explain all that? 

I’d need more than 125 words, for sure. I’d need more than that just to tell about running away when I was 13, when the real story started.

The police car slowed as it passed me on the other side of the street. My heart pounded, but somehow I resisted the urge to run. I lifted my head and quickened my pace, projecting a sense of purpose. I was walking—no crime in that.

A minute later, I heard a car roll to a stop behind me.

Hi there, an older male voice said.

I turned to see an officer adjusting his baton, his leather holster creaking as he walked around the front of the squad car. He stepped onto the curb in front of me, gaining another six inches.

Where are you headed?

I was pretty sure he didn’t mean in life.

To the end of Katella, I said, maintaining steady eye contact. My class chose Disneyland for its graduation trip, but I just went with my family and didn’t want to go again.

That much was true, and I said it with the conviction of one who followed all the rules—which, up until the left turn on Edwards Street, had always been the case.

I told him I liked to walk (true). I wanted to see where Katella Avenue ended (kind of true). My parents knew where I was (not true at all).

What school do you go to?

Blessed Sacrament.

I couldn’t have made up a better answer.

I’d never talked to a policeman, let alone lied to one, but somehow I pulled it off.

OK, but be careful, there are some tall bushes up ahead, he said, pointing in the direction I was walking. I had nothing to worry about—I wasn't afraid of tall bushes.

I didn’t look like a runaway. I didn’t have a knapsack or suitcase like kids on TV. I didn’t bring food, a map, or a sleeping bag. All I brought were questions—big ones. I knew I needed to follow Katella to the end, then cut north to the San Bernardino Mountains. The rest of my plan was as blurry as the umber foothills in the distance.

An hour later, when I reached the city limits and the four-lane avenue squeezed into a hilly two-lane road, drops of sweat rolled down my forehead and into my eyes.

In a way, my being out in the middle of nowhere was Mr. Olsen’s fault.

Mr. Olsen smelled like chocolate chip cookies. He wore a caramel-brown corduroy jacket with leather elbows. Dreamy and tall with a dimple in his chin, he would clear his throat and toss back a thick crop of chestnut hair before asking us to open our books to chapter four. His first name, which all the cool girls knew, was Randy. Someone said he was twenty-two.

This was Randy’s—I mean, Mr. Olsen’s—first year teaching, so he surpassed the nuns in enthusiasm as well as good looks. We would have skipped recess to study algebra in Latin under Mr. Olsen, and spent the better part of class writing notes to that effect.

That had been the gist of my note that morning, intercepted mid-handoff—by Mr. Olsen.

Wait outside, he said.

I stood up, all eyes on me as I walked to the door. A wash of queasy unease spread through my body, flush with an anxious shame. I stood outside for at least ten minutes, waiting for what, I didn’t know. I’d been in trouble only once, in sixth grade, when my mother had called me too big for my britches.

I heard the classroom door open and then footsteps. Yep. Chocolate chip cookies.

This note shows a lot of intelligence, he said, holding up the contraband.

Please tell me he didn’t read it. Please tell me he didn’t read it.

It took discipline and imagination to encrypt it the way you did.

Oh, gawd.

After that all I heard was the teacher’s voice in Charlie Brown movies—Wah, wah, wah-wah, wah, wah—that is, until he used a word I didn’t know. I was a straight-A student. A spelling bee champion. I wrote poetry. I knew all the words. But stagnate? I knew its cousin, stagnant, but that was used in reference to water.

Was he calling me pond scum?

Stagnant was an adjective; stagnate, a verb—as if he was saying I had chosen to be like pond scum. No adult had ever implied I had a choice in how my life unfolded. 

He stopped talking, and I thought I was off the hook, but that night while washing dishes, I overheard my mother on the phone. Oh, hello, Mr. Olsen, she said, twisting the black curly-cue cord on the wall phone. She said uh huh about ten times and yes, thank you, once. She hung up the receiver, glanced at me, then called my father into their room at the end of the hall.

From the living room, I could hear their muffled conversation. First her high-pitched murmur, rising and falling with emotion, followed by my father’s low retort. It was parental Morse code and my ears strained to pick up every intonation. The murmuring turned to footsteps, and suddenly my mother stood right in front of me.

We want to talk to you, she said. Never a good sign.

I followed her into the room and sat down on the bed. My father shut the door.

For being stagnant? Why hadn’t anyone warned me about this?

I expected my mother to whip out the wooden spoon, but no.

Mr. Olsen is recommending you skip seventh grade and move into Sister O’Dea’s class, she said.

I was a sharp one, but I hadn’t seen that coming.

At the time, I didn’t know one choice could change your whole life, but if I hadn’t moved to the eighth grade the Monday after Thanksgiving, I never would have made friends with Stacy and Kathi. They never would have given me a copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. And I probably wouldn’t have run away.

2

Where Ya Headed?

Iheard something rustle in the knee-high grass at the edge of the asphalt. With no sidewalks or curbs, the foothills felt a little wilder. I inched my way closer to the center line to avoid startling a rattler or who knows what else. By the time I heard a car drive up from behind, I was walking in the middle of the road. I turned this time to see a station wagon with a perky mom in a blonde ponytail rolling down her window.

Where ya headed? she asked, as if we were already friends.

Big Bear.

That’s seventy miles, she said, sounding more like a mom.

Explaining seemed too complicated.

Here, hop in the back, she said, offering me a Dixie cup of apple juice.

In a split second I had to decide. Taking a ride from a stranger was not something a Mears kid was allowed to do. Neither was running away, mind you, but I wasn’t running away exactly. And riding in a car with two kids and a smiling golden retriever seemed less risky than limping to the hospital with a rattlesnake dangling from my leg.

I climbed into the backseat. Thank you.

She asked me where I lived, turning the radio volume down.

Westminster.

I waited for her to ask the next question, but instead she turned the radio back up. She may have had more questions, but she didn’t want any more answers. I sensed a kinship, though, as if maybe she wanted to run away, too. Or, maybe she had, once, and met a boy, and now they had two kids and a station wagon. At any rate, she dropped me off at a gas station on the other side of the hills and pointed me toward the mountains.

Inland, sheltered from the coastal breeze, the air felt hot and dry. The dirt and hills were a soft tan, unlike the row of green rectangle lawns on my street. My thoughts swirled on the breeze as I waited by the onramp, hoping for another ride. The quiet soothed me.

At home, the only place I could be quiet was the aqua-colored bathroom of our four-bedroom rambler. Long before I could slip into anything close to contemplation, somebody would pound on the door in a panic.

My mother, who had been a buck sergeant in the Marine Corps, had a shout loud enough to rattle your bones. Any gains I’d made toward inner peace would shatter with the pounding of her fist on the door.

Constance Ann, you open the door this instant!

The Mears clan spanned an entire pew. Four girls, two boys, and the parents—we piled into the white Ford Fairlane every Sunday headed for Mass. A residual malaise of grief and guilt lingered in the rafters. Incense mingled with the potent perfume of widows in furs.

The glow of red and amber candles held magic, but felt tragic, like a long-shot negotiation. It cost a dime or a quarter to light one, and in good times, we did—but you hardly needed the prayers then.

After Mass, we’d squeeze back into the car, not caring anymore if our dresses got wrinkled. We stopped at Stater Bros. so my mother could perform her weekly shopping: five loaves and frozen fish sticks. It was always the same miracle.

My father sat with us kids in the car, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. He fiddled with the radio dial hoping to catch an Angels’ or Orioles’ game, while we wrestled with impatience and eventually each other. He’d fish through his repertoire of games, tossing them into the back seat like candy. I Spy kept us guessing for a few minutes, but his favorite and mine was Who Can be the Quietest?

I could. I did. I learned to leave and return like the eye of a needle, disappearing, emerging, weaving threads of participation, baste-stitching myself to this world.

The nightly family sit-down meal was a verbal free-for-all of wisecracks, crosstalk, and interruptions. My sister could rattle on for twenty minutes about the run in her nylons. I sat silent for most of it, diving below the surface somewhere after she’d found the clear nail polish, because that’s the only thing that will stop a run in its tracks and—glub, glub, glub….

I submerged into a private, murky world, poking into the teeming reef of Mystery.