End of a Vera

 

It's a photo of a photo, so kind of blurry, but there she is.  Vera Ruth, senior in high school, 1963. 

She died 12/30/2022, 3:55 pm.  All this week I was in Elizabethton, Tennessee, taking care of things.  Funeral home, burial site, all of that, but also when I first got there on Monday I was by myself for a day and got so lonely I had to go to the Mall of Johnson City.  Johnson City is a big city compared to Elizabethton, and when we lived there back in the mid-80s I used to go to the mall to buy records, get an Orange Julius, etc.  Hung out there with some friends from where I worked, Bonanza Steakhouse.  

So I went to the mall, and it was beautiful.  Somehow the Mall of Johnson City has survived and even flourished when most other malls have died.  Hardly any empty storefronts, a big food-court, anchor stores with escalators inside them, all of it.  I walked and walked around that place, just to be around the life inside there. I could hear East Tennessee accents as I passed, clocked those faces that seemed familiar, felt somehow soothed and comforted by just the existence of people here. 

Mall-walking made me realize that the end of Vera is the end of an era.  I don't have a lot of reasons to return here now.  I used to dread coming here.  I even fled back in 1985 from it, afraid I wouldn't make anything out of myself.  But now I've got this huge hole in my heart, and the only way to fill it was to be around strangers in the familiar place. 

This place, this universe, has always been about Mom, about her crazy Baptist joy and simultaneous hillbilly meanness, her love for everyone and her scorn for everyone else.  Her happiness burned out of itself by loving someone who probably never really loved her.  Her intense and meaningful connection to us, Robbin my sister, and me, as we journeyed through a lot of crap together, as we tried to love each other any way we could.

Now somehow it's turned into a sense of place for me.  Robbin, Bill, Derek (Robbin's husband), and I rode around places she used to live the day of her grave-side service:  a trailer and a little house tucked inside mountain valleys, gorgeously nowhere envrionments so grand and old you feel speechless in the best way possible.  It was a sunny, crystal clear day.  We drove to the Wilbur Dam near there, got out and saw fierce rushing water, blocked off from that calm serious lake.  All those bare trees, mountains, shadows...

We went to the last house she lived in with her husband Mark, in Black Bottom near the Doe River in Elizabethton, and it was filled with her:  knick-knack angels and knick-knack crosses and artifical flowers and paintings of daisy fields and lots of photos in frames, some just scotch-taped to paneled walls.  She loved to shop, to find bargains, to fall in love with decorations and bring them home and put them up.  It was a cycle of life for her.  Buying outfits on sale at Kohl's, Penney's, wherever.  Cute shoes, make-up, blouses, skirts, dresses.  Her bedroom was full of all of it, all those clothes in bags, waiting inside drawers and closets.  A museum about how she survived, about where she found temporary joy but also made it last somehow.

I've never really been completely mad at her.  I have always wanted to protect her to be honest, both from my own meanness and the world's.  I never wanted her to be a joke I told to people.  Robbin and me in her last house made me undertsand that.  I took no pictures of this last place because it was sacred.  

She's buried in Happy Valley Cemetery in Elizabethton, Tennessee.  Next to her lovely sister, mom and dad, and other relatives.  Those mountains surround her, protecting her.  

I don't know what else to tell you.