Something was wrong and I knew it.
Today was the day I was going to go to the Alameda Naval Air Station and visit the USS Enterprise aircraft carrier. For some reason lost to time, it had become a priority for me and she had agreed to it. Despite us being peacenik counterculture hippies of the 70s, this long haired ginger kid just had to go do this tour of the damn boat. This was my second demand to be met in the last few weeks. The first was being allowed to go see the movie Jaws, which ruined my interest in water from bathtubs to oceans for many years. Anyway, this was the day for the visit to the war machine docked in the San Francisco Bay and I was stoked.
But why was Verna knocking on my door and waking me up early? And why, when she entered, was she accompanied by two Oakland police officers? As I recall through the fog of time, basic instructions were conveyed. “Get dressed, you’re leaving with your grandmother shortly.” They departed, and the door closed.
I did something next that surprises me to this day. I opened my window, crawled out, slithered along the back of the house, around the corner, down the side, and peeked into the street in front of our rental home. Police. Ambulance.
“We’ve been raided for growing marijuana in the backyard,” I thought. The ambulance didn’t make sense, but I wove that into the tale without question. I returned to my room and got dressed.
The door opened again to the same police officers, now with my grandmother.
“Everyone looks so ashen,” I thought.
I don’t remember a word being spoken. I just followed them out. No one knew I had already seen what was in front of the house.
I was immediately struck by the blood. Standing at my doorway looking fifteen feet down the short hallway to the other bedroom, the green shag carpet featured a running streak of blood, leaving the room, coming toward my door, then turning through the doorway into the living room and continuing out of sight. We walked, not on the blood trail, but following it.
After going through the doorway into the living room, the metal door that was at the top of the stairwell leading from the garage and basement stood slightly ajar. It was covered in black powder crusted hand and finger prints. I feel like I stared at it for hours, though I know we likely passed by it quickly. I can still see it in my mind as if I’m standing there, in a museum, staring at an abstract painting I don’t understand.
We kept walking toward the open front door, leaving the trail of blood that had next turned into the living room and continued toward the stairs leading to the upper level bedrooms. Passing through the door and onto the narrow wood deck outside, I encountered a “who’s who” of people I knew. My dad was there. All the roommates were there, too. Everyone was ashen. I don’t recall anyone touching me or speaking to me. It was one of the first times I experienced the scarlet letter of being a marker of others’ inability to process grief being stuck on my virtual lapel.
Walking to my grandmother’s car, I left behind whatever was going on at the house we lovingly called Big Pink, and all the hippie partiers my mom and I lived with, knowing something was obviously very wrong. Though I’ve been forced to drive past it over and over again throughout my life, I do not believe I ever stepped back inside that house.
My grandmother took me to her house. We sat on her rather gaudy pink couch. A couch that lived on in the house until years later when I would live there and would have another day like this one, where things were again very obviously wrong. In focused moments like these, objects sear into memory, and this couch, with its shape and color and stitching is hard coded in my brain. While I can’t always recall what my mom looked like, this damn couch is clear as day.
My grandmother was probably already drunk. The next few months spent living with her, as she wallowed in grief and alcoholism, were terrifying. Today was the start of a wild ride on her crazy train. I had experienced this train in short stints for my whole life. It was always wild. I say to this day that no one loved me as fiercely as she did, and that ferocity was both exhilarating and terrifying.
She was ashen, still, and had the biggest job to be assigned to anyone. She had to tell me someone had shot and murdered my 27 year old mother.
It was September 13, 1975 and I was seven years old. I had just started second grade. What settled on my heart in that moment had been slowly building to full realization from the instant I was shaken awake that morning. I was alone now in a world that would punish me for the remainder of my life with fear, doubt and insecurity and never feature the kind of unwavering, unconditional love creatures need to build a strong foundation.
“Your mother is dead.” she said in some form. I don’t recall the exact wording. I do recall exactly what I said in response.
“You’re lying,” I quickly and angrily replied.
Some kind of conversation followed. I don’t recall any of the other words. I’m certain I now featured the same ashen face everyone else wore that day. Without a mirror, all I knew was on my face were angry and bitter tears. The salt and sting made that clear. But I was the one who was lying through my bargaining and denial. I knew she was dead. I had known something like that from the moment I saw Verna, followed by the ambulance and the blood and the fingerprints and the lineup of sad faces. There was most certainly something terribly wrong. I would learn to know this gnawing feeling of dis-ease well as my life kept unfolding.
What I desperately wanted to be a pot raid to save me from the truth, wasn’t. What seven year old is aware that his house might get raided for marijuana plants in the yard? Well, I was one. And I had already lived a lifetime on the run by that morning, with drugs, fighting, car crashes, death, and mayhem mixed in with crayons and music and hope for something like stability. In a dream much later in life, my mom came to me and acknowledged that I had lived surrounded by an endless string of calamities that she was sorry for. I remember thinking, in the dream, how odd a word to describe the short journey we shared, but it was the perfect one to capture the experience. I suppose I knew we were living on borrowed time, even as a child. And while in some ways it all collapsed in that moment, it was more like the captain of the airplane coming on the speaker and saying the engines had cut out, but he could glide the plane for a few more years before it would inevitably hit the ground and we’d all perish. Is this good news, one might ask, that I’m not dead right now like she is?
In the Collapse Support realm there is a very common feeling expressed that the knowledge of something being very wrong with the world was understood from childhood. Some pin the start of collapse from overshoot of civilization to the early 1970s, some even earlier. And I often describe our species, which I refer to as Homo Colossus, as being functionally extinct. This means we too are in the “glide path”, with the engines cut. The trip continues, while the end is certain. I trust my inner voice that knew something was off, like I trust the same voice people I meet in support groups heard. And that’s because it’s obvious. Empirical data is comforting, though experiential evidence is a far better guide.
I’ll share what happened before and what happened after as this story continues to be written. This is not because my story is uniquely worth telling, but because everyone has a story worth telling. We are all meaningful and it is all meaningless. Simultaneously everything and nothing. And yet, this is the ride, and while I didn’t buy the ticket, someone bought it for me and snuck me on. I was clearly too short to get on the big roller coaster so early on, but life put me on it. So I’ll ride it out with my hands up.
Her name was Shawn. Her maiden name was Davies. Her married name was Perry. She didn’t have a middle name. She was a singer, artist, and photographer.
She laughed uproariously.
I cannot tell tales of her because I buried all those memories deep down to save myself in some complicated way. But she was my mother, and I know she loved me.
What do I want from telling my story? Not sympathy or special treatment. I know how people treat the kid with the dead mother, when the story is one they just wished had never happened. A fiction of omission is crafted. I suppose I want people to know what work I’ve done. And it has been work. It doesn't make me special, but it does make me a veteran. When I speak of death, loss, grief, and the awesome power of survival after the fact, I’m not projecting. I am testifying. This is my story and I am reclaiming my time.
This is a story about Collapse Acceptance framed through a story of personal loss. I am writing this cathartic piece because I am working to be vulnerable and honest about the unique training and experience that prepared me to be open to and more accepting of collapse. I say some very direct things in my works that are quite disturbing for many. Without this context, it may seem too bold and lacking in humility. I have worked to make sure that I’m not biased toward civilization collapse as a result of my experience of personal collapse and I’m confident I’m clear there. What is true, though, is that I’ve never been as attached to the machine, as wooed by its bright lights and carnival atmosphere. I’ve never quite belonged to it, and that left me free enough to find myself through my experiences rewilding my spirit and finding feral, two concepts central to the Chickenfoot Ranch experiment in living differently. Yes, I was indoctrinated into grief work by force, but I still learned. Through that, I grew tired of waiting for the adults, the experts, to step in and chart the way. I learned the way, because I had to. Now, I look past the same feckless adults and experts, still unable to step up in this much larger context. And again, I make my own way. And so can you. You must be your own hero because only you can. Trust yourself. You were born here with all the skills. Find them inside.
Some clarifications and details to the tale follow.
First, the lineup I encountered on the front porch wasn’t a bunch of people failing to reach out to me by choice. This was the lineup of suspects, waiting to be interviewed one by one by those same police officers who came into my room that morning. My dad was obviously the chief suspect, as the estranged husband with the recent breakup. His name was Jim but everyone called him JP. Another Jim lived in the basement of the home. He and my mom had stayed up until the wee hours that morning. He was the last person known to have seen her alive and he would also have been a suspect.
No one was ever charged with the crime. No one was ever arrested.
Around 15 years after the murder, I decided to dig into the pile of hidden truths and compelled many of the people who were on the porch that morning to participate in recorded interviews with me. The story they told was unbelievable, especially the one from Jim, the last person, likely besides the actual murderer, to see her alive. A retelling of his absurd tale may follow at a later time. And by absurd I don’t mean it was devious or dishonest. Just that it made no practical sense.
I did not ever get to interview my dad, since he died less than ten years after the murder, before I had even been able to piece together the truth that he would have been a prime suspect. We never once talked about my mom, that fateful September night, the long period of police suspicion, or the lifetime of casual suspicion that followed. We never discussed how all those factors may have sapped his will to fight to survive his own maladies.
Who, then, might be the culprit?
Was it some random, meaningless murderer? My mom had been working at a bar as a singing waitress in the Jack London Square area of Oakland at the time and had worked till 2am that night, leaving to pick me up from where my dad was living before heading home to Big Pink. While gentrified now, Jack London Square of that era was one of urban decay, with prostitutes and drug dealing making the scene marginal at best. Few with good intent were hanging around the square at that time of history, and certainly none were at that time of night. Her job would have included working the tables, singing, and flirting for tips. It’s not a leap to imagine someone deciding she might also be a prostitute and propositioning her. A cold rejection might have been enough to compel that person to follow her to her car, along the route to my dad’s house, and then onto Big Pink where he would lurk until the lights went out and come to secure his rejection revenge.
Was it the violent, drug addicted, insane ex-boyfriend Steven? He was a mercurial character who beat my mom up in front of me at the same house my grandmother took me to that day. And, after her death, he broke into that same home to steal back items he had gifted to my mom that he felt belonged to him. He was always the focus of my revenge fantasies. He stayed drug addicted and insane. In an ironic twist, my brother eventually ran into him years later, as the long years of drug use caught up to and killed him. Despite being such an elegant and enticing villain, it probably wasn’t him.
Was it someone associated with the Italian American guy who was apparently “connected” that my mom had gone on a single date with? That date culminated in him drunkenly crashing his VW bug into the guardrail on the freeway, sending my mom through the window and nearly killing her while he suffered permanent paralysis. The murky tale that I only heard years later included his family being enraged that my mom had filed a lawsuit against him over the accident and was seeking monetary damages. This tale even included suspicion about my alcoholic grandmother’s death. She had been the only person to fiercely pursue justice by hounding the Oakland police to follow up on the case. A person I interviewed suggested to me that there had been suspicion that my grandmother’s demise a few years after my mom’s, where she fell down outside her home and hit her head on a rock, dying lying there before being found the next day, wasn’t an accident at all. Because everyone knew how crooked the Oakland cops were then (and continued to be for, well, till today) they might have been more connected to the connected family than they were connected to pursuing justice for a hippie singer living in a flop house. For many, and especially after hearing the unbelievable recounting of the fateful night from Jim, the murder smacked of a hit, not a crime of passion.
When I learned all this as a young adult, I honestly decided to drop the whole thing, taking the hint that no one was going to be found guilty and that the pursuit itself might end up hurting me and the family I was trying to start. I also heard the voice of my mom in my head, telling me to just go live my life and what’s done is done. For what it’s worth, and despite the tasty intrigue carried in this sordid option, I don’t claim this version of the tale is likely the truth. And if it is, I honestly don’t care. Crooked cops and mob murder-for-hire fireworks are just a distraction.
Alan Watts famously said about psychedelics that “when you get the message, hang up the phone.” I talk about one of the benefits of collapse acceptance being ceasing the rubbernecking of civilization’s maladies. At some point, and semi-required of reaching acceptance of anything, you move past information gathering and into synthesizing that accepted truth into your world view. You don’t quit being curious or stick your head in the sand, but you interact with uncertainty differently. Learning that the years of curiosity about who was guilty prevented me from acceptance by running me through a maze of cyclical questions that, if answered, would not have solved the root dilemma, was a true gift. Staring into the abyss of analyzing civilization & culture & history to pin the blame on the right donkey similarly prevents movement into acceptance. It’s the shift to living forward, replacing the twisting of the neck to look behind for an answer that only lies ahead through the next present moment. Who cares who’s to blame when the world is on fire?
And yet, the elephant in the room of guilt and suspicion was always the question of whether it was just my dad after all? He had an electric temper that included fists and fury directed at me. Not a lot, but just enough to make me afraid. After the car accident, he had moved back in with me and my mom at Big Pink to help her during the long road of recovery. I don’t remember this time, but I must have been excited to have them back as a pair. I also assume whatever drove them back apart again wasn’t calm and careful decisioning. The first break up is bad, the second is often worse.
I don’t fish much in the pond of regret. There are too many fish and not enough time to clean them all, even if I could catch them. But I sure would have liked enough time to allow me to have this conversation with my dad. If only to let him know that I knew what my mom later conveyed to me through a psychic: That it wasn’t him. I’d also tell him how I realized how hard both losing her as a wife, and the family he was trying to start, but then as a partner in raising the kids they had authored must have been. It’s in my poems about him, and them; how certain I am that he lost the will to do the work to stay alive in that unforgiving transaction that September day in 1975.
Randomness. Bad luck. Spurned lovers. Roommates. Murder for hire. It could be anyone. And it might as well have been anyone. There’s no there there, Gertrude Stein famously said about Oakland in general. And that was true about suspicions over this Oakland murder as well.
For what it’s worth, the betting odds never hit on my dad as a primary suspect. No one I interviewed felt that he was the murderer by the time we spoke. I doubt the stain of suspicion ever washed off his spirit though. He was both broken hearted and labeled by her demise. Everyone seems most settled on the mob hit scenario, which is just so delicious a cherry on top of the morbid tale. I will say that one thing this whole experience taught me is the myth of revenge, the myth of justice through courts. Nothing known or unknown, proven or unproven, can change the part of the story that is meaningful. In a very true way, I’m glad I never had the final part written. It would only have stolen the stage from the first and second acts, the ones that carry the truth of the person’s life, not the distracting details of their demise.
In the realm of Collapse Awareness much time is spent considering our demise, the end stage of this ride. And here too, that demeans both the present moment, as well as the living past. Believing that the end note is the defining piece of the symphony is folly. When I say I learned about this through my mom’s death and that I see the same arc in the larger story Homo Colossus is experiencing, I am speaking rather specifically. Moving from awareness to acceptance focuses on what’s right here, right now. Strict attention is needed in collapse, not wandering into the future of fear and projection.
Twenty four years after the murder, my lovely and beloved daughter was born. Her name is also Shawn. Because I had spent my life with my mother being a background object, there was no tradition of acknowledging her birth or death day. Somehow, over time, I had placed her death date around the 25th of September, but never took the time to confirm that. Annually as that time of year would arrive, I’d check to see if it was a milestone year (5th, 10th, etc.) and otherwise just move on, working to keep the memory sequestered as I had been cultured to do. Around Shawn’s first birthday, I decided to try and figure out my mom’s actual death date. Imagine my shock when I saw the same date: September 13th, on both my daughter’s birth certificate and my mother’s death certificate. Queue the spooky music.
Naming my daughter after my mom was a more complex choice than I realized at the time. I suppose I imagined healing some of the deep wounds, honoring the person, and moving forward more resolved with the situation. It wasn’t that easy at all and you can’t heal those wounds with a shortcut like that. Because I had no practice of making my mom part of the conversation, this awkward appellation kept bringing that issue to the surface. Even trying to force her into the story made me feel out of place in my own story. Saying “you’re named after your grandmother” made no sense because this woman had died well before even solidifying her living role as my mother, much less becoming a grandmother. I always felt like I was referencing my grandmother and that’s the image that would appear in my mind’s eye when I’d say it, causing me a brief palpitation remembering her dynamic and unwieldy presence in my life.
Add to that the reality that I can’t say things to my daughter like “Oh you’re doing that just like your grandmother,” or any literal reference, thus causing me to confront that I didn’t remember anything about my mom. I don’t know what her voice sounded like. I don’t know what her hugs felt like. I don’t know what she used to sing to me as I fell asleep. I don’t know how she would reprimand me for bad behavior. I don’t know what she liked to cook for me, or even if she did. I can’t hear her telling me she loves me no matter what. I also know when things go bad, I can’t call her up and hear that same reassurance. I know, again, what I realized that day: I am alone in this world, now and forever. Those holes in my soul cannot be filled in with the putty of invented history. Those potholes are forever.
I have come to terms with much of that now. My daughter is closing in on being the age my mom was when she died. A few years ago, she turned 19 and passed the age my mom was when she gave birth to me. I can sort of see how young my mom was through my daughter’s eyes at each of these milestones, and that is the meaningful healing that I get by having connected them with a name. Based on a psychic reading I had, I know that insofar as the spirit world exists, the voice of my mom came right through and I tell myself that the connection in spirit between all of us is intact. I don’t need some pragmatic skeptic bashing those fantastical notions. It’s real enough for me. I accept the gift.
Returning to my core question of why to tell this story. At a base level, we should all tell our story. Every tale is worthy. But beyond that, I trade in the realm of Collapse Acceptance and face the question of what that means for people. In this realm, grief often takes center stage as the primary, and often exclusive, response for one to have to face the predicament of the collapse of global industrial civilization and the death of most of the community of life we are a part of. I am quite outspoken about rejecting what I call the “cul-de-sac” of grief and I’ve taken criticism for that stance from a group of people who claim to be the expert class of grieving. My retort to the endless grief, offered by the peddlers of the same, is that grief leads somewhere.
For me, like the person who survives some challenge in life and then is able to move forward and thrive, I carry deep learning with me. I have what I call experiential expertise. When I’m challenged over my positions on grief, my only defense is my experience, but it's hard to convey my resume in short form. And, as will become clear in future writings, this singular event on this singular day was preceded and followed by a cavalcade of calamities. A punishing and relentless string of tragedies, each holding my inner child under water for just a little bit longer, until I learned to hold my breath and heal on the fly. Developing that skill let me survive to be here now to testify on behalf of my connection to the real world - the thing I call the community of life. And, make no mistake, I am a survivor. An undaunted free agent in the world. Relentlessly empowered to speak radical truth to power. And I'm not here by myself or on my own. A whole bunch of people sacrificed themselves to put me here, on this stage, with this skill set, at this time. And I will never relent. I owe them that.
I am reclaiming my time by living my one wild and free life like it matters. Because it does. There is much life in the letting go…I won’t be dragged.
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There is not now and never will be a request or option to pay for this content. There is also no space for comments. That’s not because I don’t care what you think. It’s because if you have something to say, I encourage you to write your own commentary somewhere. And leave the comments off. I’m not a pinata, and you shouldn’t be, either.