In the first and second parts of this multi-part posting, I described the effects of my mother’s death when I was four and a half years old on my life. After I had found my mother’s biological relatives and my wife and I went to meet them, I felt there was something still missing. I spent the next year thinking alot about my Mom and trying to remember as many things as I could from the time before she died. I found out who her friends were (after she died and my father remarried we moved away and I never had contact with her friends or family or anyone who knew her).
I had previously written the History of the Bremner Family, but from my perspective there was one half missing, which was my mother. And so I wrote a website where I put up her history that I was learning from her friends and family. One fortunate discovery was that someone had a typed copy of a transcript of the memorial service at her Unitarian Fellowship after she died. I also started to read more about the effects of parental loss on kids, books like Never Too Young to Know: Death in Children’s Lives, by Phyllis R. Silverman. In it I learned that going to the cemetery, attending the funeral (I learned by reading the transcript that I wasn’t there), and having momentos can help children with their grief.
I learned that many of her friends had been members of the Olympia Unitarian Church, and that at that time it was not officially a church but a fellowship, since they did not have a minister. The individual members of the congretation would take turns talking about a particular topic of interest. I think back then the topics were as often about Vietnam as Jesus, but I see no problem with that. I contacted her still living friends and the children of her friends, many of whom had experiences they shared with me. Like one whose father died when he was two and he imagined that he “lived” in an electrical transformer outside his room, or another whose both husband died when he was 42. Since he was wasting with cancer in his bedroom and his son never saw him leave and since noone ever talked to him about it he thought that his father “lived” under the bed in his room after he died. That son also died at the age of 42, but his mother is still alive.
I could go on, but in our society obsessed with happiness and America’s top model, or idol, we ignore or look away from pain and suffering to our own detriment, to the sacrifice of our souls, and the abandonment of our emotional beings. I think we should take a page from Sicily, where the women traditionally wore black for a year after someone died.
I used to be ashamed of my grief, but I am not anymore. Too much of psychiatry has become about giving medications to people when their primary problem is grief. I think that unresolved grief is to blame for much of the woes of American society, and medicating it with psychotropics is not the answer. I know, I lived with unresolved grief for 43 years.
Anyhoo back to my story. As I was reading and thinking I started to wonder… where was my Mom? I mean at first I thought I was on a spiritual journey, that I was finding her biological family because that’s what she would have wanted, or because there was some answer to a riddle that would be revealed, or maybe they would fill a missing piece. I also felt that she was driving me to do these things. She was showing up in my dreams when I had hardly thought about her at since my college years. Then it occurred to me that maybe she didn’t want me to find her spiritually, but…
physically…
I started to wonder what had happened to her physical remains. I had this idea from my childhood that her ashes had been spread over Lake Chelan in Washington State, and one of my sister’s thought there were no physical remains from her cremation. So I got her death certificate and looked up on it the name of the funeral home and gave me a call. They informed me that it isn’t possible to completely get rid of remains (!).
Somebody forgot to pick up Mom from the funeral home!
They said that she was in the “community crypt” or something like that and they would have to get back to me. I didn’t really understand what that meant (this scenario was starting to feel familiar!). But when I called back the next day it became clear that when noone picked her up (after twenty years) her urn was buried with other unclaimed remains.

Grave site of Laurnell Bremner, August 2008
I asked them to dig up the site to identify her urn, but the names were too worn so they recovered the site (you can see the grass is just starting to grow back).
They said my mother always had an affinity for the poor. I guess she was keeping them company!
So that put me in the odd situation of arranging for a funeral for my own mother who died when I was 4 1/2 years old.
Although I was a super competent doctor with dozens of publications, I had no clue what to do. I started searching around on the internet. I found a place that advertised selling granite headstones. When I drove out there it was a small white house that looked like it had been closed for a couple of years. I found another place that was way on the other side of town. With four million people in the city of Atlanta shouldn’t there be some place where you can buy an f-ing tombstone?
I finally found a place, got a design which I sent out to my siblings, and, amazingly, they all chipped in (and paid up!) for the tombstone and flowers. We had a ceremony for her on October 4, 2008, where all her children came as well as several grandchildren and her adoptive sister, and we placed the tombstone over the resting place of my mother and her “friends”.

Headstone of Laurnell Bremner, Tumwater WA
Here are her flowers her children bought for her:

gladiolas, birds of paradise, roses, lianthius
Afterwards we had a nice party out on Steamboat Island Road in Olympia.

View from Steamboat Island Road, Olympia WA
After the ceremony someone wrote to me to tell me that a local psychic had commented on her after her death, a story I told in “Doctors of different disciplines put their heads together for an interesting case.” He also told me that an 800 mile long spaceship was scheduled to arrive over Alabama on October 14, 2008, which I wrote about in “We Come In Peas”. I thought maybe they would bring my mom back. Alas…

This spaceship didn't bring my mom back
Oh well. Maybe she’s having too good a time whereever she is.
In one of the many examples of synchronicity involved in this story, the day I was in an evening art class I took with my wife painting the dream of seeing my mother which I described in Part 1 of this series, they were playing the same song (”Caring is creep” by Cold Play) I heard when I first decided that I had been beaten around enough and that I was going to find my mom no matter what it took and not worry about who got pissed off about it.
I also felt an urge to see the house where we lived. An old friend of hers and neighbor told me that he felt that her astral shell was in the house. Whether it was this or her spirit driving me on, I got a hold of the owner of the house who said she was planning some remodelling (the house hadn’t been changed since I left 43 years ago, and I had never been back even to the general area) and she had just asked her architect if it was possible to disturb spirits with remodelling, as she had heard that a woman had died there many years ago. Anyhoo as I described in Part 1 of this series I went back to the old house and had several memories come back. I also discovered that there were sheep (!) living on the property (as I wrote back then in this post) amidst a nice apple orchard with grape vines (!). Since my mom was a Buddhist I wondered if maybe one of the sheep was a reincarnation of my mom! The owner gave me some yarn from the sheep and my wife made me a nice scarf! Not the same as the little bear my mom made that she didn’t have time to put in the eyes, but… somehow similar…
See a response to this series here.