My mother Virginia loved running
foot races. Even towards the end of
her life, she kept talking about
how she wanted to run another race.

The Sutter Street Grill is gone.

The Sutter Street Grill was a diner in Folsom, California that went out of business last year. I only recently learned of its demise.

My mother Virginia and I would eat there once a year.

Nearly every year for more than a decade I have run the California International Marathon, every first weekend in December from the city of Folsom to the city of Sacramento in Northern California. On the first Saturday in December my mother and I would go to the CIM expo in Sacramento to pick up my running bib, then drive to Folsom for lunch at the Sutter Street Grill, and then check out the Christmas Arts and Crafts fair. The Sutter Street Grill was one of those down homey breakfast places where you could get piles of hash browns and stacks of pancakes and hot chocolate with big piles of whipped cream. Even on those few odd years when I didn’t run the CIM, we would still go up on the first weekend of December and have lunch at that restaurant and check out the Christmas Fair.

My mother at yet another race, running a 5K a
and acting as my support team when
I was running a marathon.

My mother passed on unexpectedly exactly two months ago. I say unexpectedly even though she was quite old. Even so she had not been outwardly ill or in any apparent physical discomfort. She simply left this world all at once.

Even though she was in her eighties, and even though in the past few years she was starting to have trouble with her memory, I never thought of her as an elderly person. She was always active and vivacious in a way that made her much more alive than most people you would meet.

There is no one in my family that I was closer to than my mother. That was not a difficult feat however. I am not very close to much of my family, and my mother was the only direct relative for which I had a good relationship.

My mother and my father had a very contentious marriage, which was apparent to me even when I was very young. There was a lot of tension and strife between my mother and father, and they frequently fought. It wasn’t hard to figure out part of the reason for the strife. My mother and my father were very different people, so different that I wondered why they ever got married in the first place.

They divorced when I was about fifteen years old, and I was overjoyed. They were such an awful couple and home life was so stressful that their separation was a great relief for me.

I only have one sibling, a younger brother. He is very much like my father, and I am very much like my mother, which means me and my brother are quite different from each other. When they divorced, I started drifting away from my father and brother, to the point where I completely stopped talking to or associating with either one of them. And I have no regrets about that. In fact, I regret that I did not burn my bridges with both of them much earlier.

When I was a child I thought of my parents as adults, but they were far from being adults when I was growing up. They were still just kids and they were still trying to figure things out, something I did not fully realize until later in my adult life when I really looked back on that time. My brother and I were subject to a great deal of abuse: emotional abuse, virtually non-stop verbal abuse, and terrible physical abuse at the hands of my father. Case in point: He split my head open when I was just five years old. And not once did he ever apologize or take responsibility for that act of violence. If there was one thing my father never, ever did, is ever admit that he ever screwed up or ever did anything wrong, even when it came to something as vile and reprehensible as attacking a helpless child.

Years later, years after my mother and father had split up, my mother told me she was sorry that I had such an awful and stressful childhood. She also told me she wished she had taken me and my brother away from my father. It would have been really rough if she had done so, as my father was the breadwinner, and she would have had to rely on her own meager finances to bring us up without him. Even so, she confessed that she wished she had been able to muster the courage and the will to do so.

One of my favorite pictures of my
mother when she was young. Way
before I came into the picture!

It was also around that time that my mother told me a lot of things about her younger self when I was growing up, how she felt about trying to maintain her marriage, how she dealt with the whole situation of trying to raise us with such a toxic father around, and details about my father that I had not previously known. Even though she was emotionally distant as a mother and sometimes even abusive herself, there were many things that she did for me when I was young. She taught me to read at a very early age so that I was miles ahead of all of the other students in my first grade class. She exposed me to music at a very young age, and I was wearing out Elton John and Beatles LPs when I was only six years old. She always encouraged me whenever I tried to do anything creative, such as art or writing.

My relationship with my mother really grew as I became an adult. She was always encouraging and supportive of me. When I started running long distance races she would oftentimes come with me, and eventually she ended up running foot races herself, running mostly 5Ks, but occasionally a 10K now and then. My mother, far more than anyone else, was my biggest running supporter, and she was frequently my support team during many of my more than thirty marathons, multiple half marathons, and so many other races that I’ve run in the past dozen years.

We even started a tradition: Running the Nitro Turkey Trot at Point Pinole every year. I even delayed flying to Calgary with my partner a few times for her annual Thanksgiving family visit, taking a later flight than herself, just so I could run the Turkey Trot with my mother.

She was also supportive in other ways. When I started writing novels, she would not only read them and encourage people to buy copies, she would even help me edit them. She would also help me out when I was in a jam financially, when I fell on hard times by loaning me money or helping me out with a place to stay. Eventually I started returning the favor, loaning her money and occasionally paying her bills when she was in financial tight spots.

Like I said, we had a lot in common. We both could spend hours browsing in a bookstore, and we were both addicted to Peet’s coffee, going by Peet’s for lattes and stopping by our favorite bakeries. One Valentine’s Day, when I was terminally single and didn’t have a Valentine’s Day date, I took my mother out for lunch, and then we went to see the movie The King’s Speech, a wonderful film that was just the kind of movie my mother enjoyed. (Anglophile she was!) That day is one of my favorite memories of my mother.

I mentioned that I sometimes paid my mother’s bills. That happened a lot more frequently later on in her life, when her memory started to go. I ended up paying credit car bills and vehicle registrations simply because my mother would forget to do so.

Even with her failing memory I still talked to my mother often, and took her out for coffee and book store outings. I even took her out to Disney World back in 2019 when I ran the Walt Disney Marathon. Before I invited her out to Florida, I wondered if such a trip might have been a bit too much for her. I am so glad now that I did. It was definitely worth it for her and myself.

Andy Warhol said he could not handle the concept of death, that it was too abstract for him. It was not as if the person was gone, it was as if they had just gone somewhere and hadn’t come back yet. That’s the way death feels to me as well. They’re just hanging out somewhere, around the corner, at a store still trying to decide what to buy, or just on really long trip. My mother’s passing has not fully hit me, even two months after her passing. I sometimes even catch myself, absentmindedly thinking “I should give my ma a call.” My grief is a very slow process, probably because taking in the enormity of this loss all at once would just be too overwhelming.

Basically my two overriding feelings are guilt and loneliness. I do feel guilty, that I was not able to do more for my mother when she was struggling financially later in life. It is true that much of her financial problems had to do with her mismanagement of her finances, as well as her failing memory. The pandemic as well as other circumstances made it impossible for me to really help her out, other than pay a few of her bills now and then. The other overriding feeling loneliness. She was the only significant family I’ve ever had, the only family member I could ever rely on, and one of the very few people in my life who have ever really encouraged me in my endeavors. A significant part of my support system is gone, and with everything else that’s happened in the past couple of years, I don’t think I’ve ever felt as alone in my entire life as I do now.

My mother and I at Disneyland
for a Disney race.

This month I will run the Point Pinole Turkey Trot for the first time without my mother. And also, for the first time ever, I will be going to the California International Marathon by myself, all alone.

And I won’t even have our place, the Sutter Street Grill, to go to, to remember all of the good times me and my mother had up there in Folsom. It’s almost as if she had to take that place with her, because she did not want me to go there without her.

And I don’t know how I will handle it. I only know that I have to go, and I have to run that marathon, even if it means having to do so without my support team.