It’s taken me a month to finally write this. I’ve been avoiding it, not because of my usual procrastinative tendencies, nor out of fear of expressing sorrow in a public forum. I’ve been avoiding it because no matter how eloquent my words are composed, no matter how gently and beautifully I portray the subject, I won’t do her justice.
Anita Rae Morgan, my mother-in-law, passed away on May 18.
She’d been battling liver cancer for two years. She was diagnosed in mid-2007 and was given six months to live. She outlived that grim prognosis by four hundred percent and, while she certainly experienced varying degrees of discomfort during that time, she more or less maintained her daily routine up until a few days before the end. She cooked and cleaned, she took care of her husband (who suffers from a host of medical issues himself), and babysat Kendyl for us almost every day. Even when the end was imminent, and she was more or less uncommunicative, she still managed to hold on long enough for her son Terry to make it home from Korea to see her one last time. She’d promised Teresa that, no matter what, she wouldn’t die during that weekend. And, true to her word, she held on till early Monday morning. Everyone had the opportunity to see her, to say their goodbyes, me included.
I was asked to write the obituary:
Anita Rae Morgan, 62, passed away on May 18, 2009, at Providence St. Vincent Medical Center in Portland, Oregon. She was born on September 17, 1946 in Tacoma Washington, the oldest of three children.
She graduated from Grants Pass High School in 1964 and, the following year, she married Dwight Calvin Morgan. She attended the University of Oregon, where she became a lifelong Ducks fan. She taught Sunday school for 27 years; additionally, she worked in human resources for Asante Health Systems and later, Regence BlueCross BlueShield of Oregon in Portland.
She was a devout Christian and a devoted wife and mother. She lived in Grants Pass for most of her life; however, she relocated to the Portland Area in 2007. In 2007 she fulfilled her lifelong dream of visiting both Disneyland and Disney World.
She is survived by her mother, Jewel Allene Dino, her husband of forty-four years, Dwight Calvin Morgan, her siblings Donna L. Proctor and Michael D. King, her sons Dwight Terry Morgan and Jerry Calvin Morgan, her daughter Teresa Anne Beam, nine grandchildren, and many nieces and nephews. She was preceded in death by her father, Charles Terry Miller, and her granddaughter Jordan Brooke Quinton-Morgan.
Memorial services will be held on May 22 at Parkway Christian Center in Grants Pass.
Very dry, matter of fact, black and white (like the newsprint it was published in), evocative of the facts but in no way illustrative of the soul behind the name.
Anita was kind, gentle, selfless. She worried about others; more than that, she denied herself in deference to others. She was the type of person who somehow enriched the lives of everyone she knew. She had a heart of gold, the demeanor of an angel. She leaves a hole behind, in our lives, in our hearts. It’s a hole that cannot be filled by time, or surrogates, or the endless distractions that life in these modern times offers. I could throw in more clichés, but clichés are clichés because they’re true. And if nothing else, she was most certainly true.
I’m sermonizing. I don’t mean to. I’m just not good at this. I don’t know how to deal with people dying, nor do I know how to encapsulate my feelings on the subject.
I’m sad. But more than that, I’m angry. Angry that she had to suffer, when she so clearly deserved a life without suffering. Angry that she was cursed with the indignity of dying on a hospital bed with tubes sticking out of her. Angry that somehow, for reasons that continue to elude me, I was apparently never once photographed with her. There are family pictures, sure, but not a single shot of just she and I. How the hell is that possible? We’ve taken literally thousands of pictures over the years! Here’s the best one I could find:
...at least I'm standing near her...
Anyway, I’m mostly angry with myself, for criminally squandering the eight years that I knew her. I could’ve learned so much from her, simple things that have somehow eluded me my whole life: how to be selfless, putting the needs of others ahead of my own selfish wants. How to suffer with grace, instead of complaining and taking my frustrations out on others. Simple lessons, there for the learning, if I’d only pulled my head out of my ass long enough to realize it.
Now it’s too late. I’ll never know the secret. She was a Christian, so other Christians would undoubtedly say that the answer is Christ, and that His light radiated through her (which was also said about my grandmother, who Anita reminded me of in many ways). I’m a blasphemous agnostic bastard, so I don’t buy that explanation. I do believe that she was a rare, pure soul, one of only a few that I’ll ever be lucky enough to encounter, and hopefully will again someday, perhaps in another life, in another time.
She was amazing. And the gifts! She gave me Hitchcock’s To Catch A Thief on DVD one year for my birthday, and another year, the ultra-deluxe DVD set of Forbidden Planet. She gave me a giant margarita glass one Christmas, filled with lemons and limes. She sewed a cat comforter for Sierra because she knew Sierra loves cats. She took Teresa and Kendyl to Disneyland. The list goes on. And on. But gifts are just things. The real treasures are the memories, bursting with color but paradoxically tinged with gray, gleaming like sunshine but moistened by tears.
The hole she leaves behind is incalculably deep. Bottomless, I imagine.
She deserves a better eulogy than this. It took me a month to finally write this, and this is how it turned out? I hope she understands.
I love you, Anita Rae. And I miss you.
