Trip answers ‘Where did I come from?’

It was a solemn walk.

The blue of the stained glass filled St. Anthony’s church as I followed the casket in slow procession. A final goodbye; an end to a life. The church doors cracked open. Outside, palm trees danced to the music of California’s winds.

Tall and slender, a John Wayne lookalike many would say, my father-in-law was a Navy lad on the lookout for young lassies while stationed at Oxnard, Calif.’s Seabee base in the early 1940s. He met his match in a young, determined and gorgeous Ventura gal. They married in Reno, Nev. They had two boys and 67 years of memories – some good, some not.

He was crackerjack-smart and agile, fluid in his moves until age slowed the body and destroyed the memory. Coming from a generation where children were seen and not heard, his gift to his sons was hard work. Rising with the dawn, returning well after bedtime left little room for connection. His remarkable mind knew the functions, schematics and pneumatics of hydraulics as if pumps and cylinders were of his own flesh and blood. The hydraulic field defined the man he was, and he reveled in its oily O-ringness, embraced the intricate combinations of torque and volume, relished the familiarity of oil fields and the people who worked them.

He died in January, screaming at walls foreign to him, angry at people he never met. Dementia, the death certificate read.

And so we returned to put him to rest in the California city where farm fields still boast of equipment bumping and grinding to a steady beat and oil drills still rise and fall because of the mechanical inclinations of a man who took pride in his work. I’d known him for 40 years, but in the end he had no recollection of me, his sons or grandchildren.

My husband and I met our two adult children at LAX and began the trek on scenic Route 101 to the seaside city where we started our own family so many years before. In the midst of despair, a rare opportunity was pointing its finger at us: “Here’s your chance,” it said. “Give them their history; give your children their roots.”

And so, we did.

The cities of Ventura, Oxnard and Camarillo held poignant, life-altering events of graduation, marriage, birth and death in the short five years we lived there. Our children and several of their cousins were born here. St. Anthony’s, where the funeral took place, was where our daughter was baptized. At San Buenaventura Mission we marveled at the ancient altar and grew silent at the font where our son was baptized. We drove by our alma mater, Ventura High School, and cruised by the Vons grocery store where in 1971 my father and I found our last Christmas tree together.

We drove to the cross above the mission and marveled at the spectacular view of the Ventura coastline. We visited old haunts of homes, parks and pizza joints, walked a beach that brought serenity at a time of heartbreaking loss. As the sun set with its magical orangey-yellow glow, we walked the pier my father fished from so long ago.

The widening of eyes, the oohs and aahs, the rapt attention to back-in-the-day stories as we journeyed through their history and ours made me catch my breath and wipe tears from my eyes.

It was a time of goodbye, a time of hello, and a time we’ll never forget.