Yesterday I went to visit my friend Martha Locke. So many years have gone by since I last saw her, that I wasn’t even sure if she was still alive or where she lived. I first met “Marty” about 30 years ago. She had curly red hair and sang in plays at the Art Center. My son was young, my daughter not yet born, and I was teaching yoga at the Women’s Club, the Art Center and the Gables. I was also working as a home-health care provider and had an affinity for older people. Back then anyone over 50 was old. Marty was lively and fun to be with and I knew I could drop in on her anytime. I would bring my various boyfriends up the stairs to the tiny apartment where she and her husband Charlie lived, and we would have tea and toast at a sweetly set table by a window that overlooked what was back then a green field with beautiful oaks. I would return a few days later, by myself, to get the scoop on what they thought of my latest beau. They tried to set me straight but I was in a hormonal coma and only saw what I wanted to see.

The years went by and our pleasant visits continued. Politics, e-mail, writing and selling books had not yet consumed my Life. Marty and Charlie grew older, as we human beings are destined to do. One day I came over and Charlie had died. His body was still resting on his bed, but you could tell right away that it was just a shell, that the breath, the spirit, the life-force, was gone. I was happy to see that Charlie had managed to die at home, that he did not linger for years in one of the local facilities, as so many of us do.
I knew Marty’s only son, Johnny, (John Locke) a musician who played with the Ojai group Spirit, also died a few years ago, because I had read it in the OVN’s obituary. (I went to school with Randy California, but that is another story) I knew she had to move out of her much-loved upstairs apartment and that there was no way she could afford to rent another one. And that by now she must be in her 90′s and no longer living on her own. In the back of my mind was the fear that life’s sorrows had become too much to bear and that even if she was still alive she might be all alone tucked away in one of the local nursing homes, no longer able to see or hear or recognize me.
I was so relieved when I found Marty living with a family in Meiners Oaks, in a lovely clean room with her bed right by a large window where you can always see the open sky, without the smell of urine and other odors that are typical of places where elders spend their last days on earth . Marty sat straight in a chair, looking thin, fragile, and much older but very well-cared for. She told me that she had her hair cut a few days ago, and she explained that the beautician had braided her hair before cutting it. At first I did not understand but then she handed me a bag. I opened it and there was her beautiful long silky braid. She explained that her hair was getting thin and becoming too much to take care of. She looked good with short hair framing her face. Her eyesight and hearing semed perfect. I sat cross-legged on her bed and we began telling each other everything that has happened these past years.
She told me how her son had found her this room, had helped her move her things, just before he died. She said, ” It is too painful to think about Johnny’s death, but I find joy in little things. I can look up at the night sky and see the moon and venus. The neighbors bring me roses. And there are children and cats in the house…”
There is a hummingbird feeder right by the window and as we chatted the sweetest hummingbirds would flit into our vision and linger for a sip. As it came time for me to leave, Marty said, “I would like an easy death, without pain. My only worry is that I might have to leave here before I die. I don’t want to go into a nursing home.”
There is much more to this story, to be told on another day…As I was leaving Marty gave me one of her poems.
War
My heart still weeps
Although my eyes are dry.
In my awful dreams
I hear young soldiers cry
From the fields of war;
“Am I going to die?”
Rows of coffins lined up
As far as one can see.
In which of them
Can my own child be?
And my heart cries out
“They all belong to me!”
— Martha Locke, born March 11, 1914