I said goodbye to my 89-year-old mom, Salye Roufa Stein, on Sunday, July 5 – Independence Day weekend, as our nation turned 250. It’s a tenuous thing, democracy. Few of us understood that until now. Mom did.
The date was fitting and deliberate. A chosen date – and a chosen death through medical aid in dying, approved by Colorado voters in 2016. She wanted people to know it was her choice. When I told her that her medical condition qualified her, I asked how she felt. She said, “Empowered.” Life and death on her terms.
In her last days, she used the word sovereignty – authority over your own body, your mind, your life choices. For six years, she felt powerless, purposeless, anything but free. Dying on the country’s 250th birthday weekend was her choice. Freedom the way she defined it.
She left this physical realm surrounded by family and friends, and was buried July 10 at Greenmount Cemetery in a gravesite gifted by friend Carol Solomon. I name names because these people deserve to be known. The generosity surrounding Mom’s death was extraordinary – a testament to Durango, home to Mom for 10 years and me for 21.
The week between was for arrangements. I walked from Family Craft Memorials, where I ordered Mom’s headstone, to Relove, where I’d taken some of her things. Rounding the corner by the Durango Lodge, the hollyhocks caught my eye – stalks 8 feet high, swaying and popping with color. Dusty rose, white, garnet. I have always loved hollyhocks – I once asked Missy Votel at the Durango Telegraph to give them a Thumbs Up.
Wildflowers, too. Especially hardy types: hollyhocks from alley dirt; columbine, paintbrush and sky pilot blooming from crumbly rock each July.
Friday morning, I arranged Mom’s flowers for the burial: fragrant white lilies and roses, snapdragons and metal roses forged by artist Mike Brieger. Macular degeneration had taken most of Mom’s sight years earlier; her hearing, taste and smell had become acute. She could not see the lilies but could smell them; her friend and caregiver Hope Espinosa made sure of it weekly. We kept Mom in lilies for years – in life. And now in death, her headstone is engraved with them on either side of the Star of David.
I have always found solace and freedom in the mountains – in what Pepper Trail, in today’s column, calls “the nurturing grace of nature.” Friday, after the flowers, I made my annual pilgrimage to Engineer meadows to see the wildflowers.
On the way down, I encountered longtime friends Tecumseh and Chris Burnett. Tecumseh hugged me and did not let go. She knew. Someone had told her my mom had passed. In a town like ours, news travels not as gossip but as care – a kind of communion.
Farther down the trail, I saw Jeff Solon, who lost his beloved Karen Gabaldon to cancer. Nearly two years later, I told him how sorry I was. The delay didn’t matter.
“I miss her every day,” he said.
Before the burial, I asked family and friends to wear colors, not black. Mom’s life was one to be celebrated in full color.
That afternoon, in the shade above Mom’s grave, I recounted Sunday – her state of mind, how she did not waver, and how on Thursday, helping place her in the simple pine box in which Jews are traditionally buried, I added a copy of the Constitution to the small flag I had left under her folded hands. She loved our country. And now it is ours to protect.
We read her favorite poets – Wordsworth, Frost and Mary Oliver’s “When I Am Among the Trees” – among the trees under which she rests.
We circled up around her casket. Family and friends laid flowers and, in a variation of a Jewish tradition, each of us placed a bit of dirt. I laid the final lily before she was lowered.
Mom’s friend Mary Ellen Long gave her a music box on the eve of her death. Her note read, “I wanted to bring you a symphony, but all I had was this music box.” I’ve heard a music box playing in the early morning. Mom is still with me, as I am with her – among the nurturing grace of nature and the people with whom we share this home.
