February 2020.
I recall a fog of a moment walking. The bathroom door partway open. My step mom slumped over the toilet. She died that night, maybe right after but I know not before. They said when she fell over from there she hit her head. I don’t know. That room was nothing but military hard brown tile and a fearsome steel dragon toilet paper holder. It’s a pretty badass holder my dad made and mounted right in front of the toilet so you had to study it.
Maybe I should have done more but I had tried many times before, this was not a new position for her to be in and I was still a real asshole. Shit like this probably helped me grow out of that but it takes a lifetime to change from ourselves. This is, perhaps, the root of the intellectual and artistic study.
Life and booze had transformed her into a pitiful, frail, bitter version of herself. She lashed out in the most oddly piercing ways and stayed withdrawn in her last realms of intoxicated comfort. Judy was a woman who did not believe that she had reached her station based upon what she knew she was capable of. I know so very little of her past but she grew up in Memphis in the middle of the rock and roll scene. It was a unique time and space that created her. Her friends were all nuts from Vietnam, drugs, and riots and she fell into the art world so they were avant-garde crazy. Somehow, she ended up at the museum and became the assistant director and my stepmother. It never really mattered to me to figure out why since it was life as it was presented to me. The drive to get work done and disregard of self care let her follow the busted route to a mean self destruction. It was a long slow death that I didn’t enjoy; I had some great people around to help me along.
My last real good memory with her was riding down to pick blueberries at a farm in Mississippi. It was a good drive on a warm day when the air felt clean but she always rolled with the windows up, AC cranked, and a long menthol. She wore the heaviest glasses and decided at some point it was best to go with it. Thick frames and big dark lenses to go with a black helmet of hair that she battled grey with constantly. My girlfriend at the time was with us, Judy adored her.
The big oaks of Northern Mississippi were fully dressed in green to catch the sun and shade our way. The air wasn’t dripping yet and so the lines weren’t blurry. It still had the strong contrast to mean something. My dad’s second wife was content on the drive and that was all too rare through most of my time knowing her. She took the two-lanes down as much as possible roaming through the land in such a more natural pattern. We got there and she went to a little trailer hut and got us all buckets and so we set off around toward the patch. The first times I ever picked berries were in the Northeast and you get tasty little morsels from scrubby brushes making it a corner somewhere. Here were huge beautiful bushes with berries hanging in bunches like grapes. you could eat handfuls and fill your bucket at the same time. We stayed there for and hour or so and had so many berries. We got in her Toyota station wagon, meandered our way back, stopping at a gas station Baskin Robbins for malts.
