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Monica
Tribute to a dear friend
Circa 1958, Monica modeling one of the gowns she designed
After a lengthy (and briefly, severely painful) struggle with metastatic breast cancer, my mother, Monica B. Morris, died last night. She was 86, and a truly remarkable woman — multi-talented, feisty, witty, ambitious, caring and generous. Throughout her life, she was my friend and confidante and, as moms go, she was close to perfect.
I was sitting on a leather couch beside her hospital bed in the study of her Hollywood Hills home. She and I were the only people in the room at that time, shortly after 8 p.m., though the house had been filled with friends and family bearing lamb pies and daffodils and bottles of wine throughout the past few days – all of which she enjoyed with them. Only three days earlier, she’d been sitting up in her reclining chair and speaking cogently, but then she started to withdraw deep into herself, and now she was lying in that bed, heavily sedated, her breathing now unobstructed and steady after a bout of alarming congestion. At 8:08, I heard a slight murmur from her, the first sound she’d uttered in 48 hours. That’s when I noticed she’d simply stopped breathing, and that was that.
Holiday card that Monica created in elementary school
Monica Semus was born in London on November 27, 1928 to Lewis and Renee Semus. Monica was the granddaughter of Jewish immigrants to Britain from Eastern Europe. As she described our lineage in the impeccable English dialect she maintained throughout her life: “We are descended from Romanian horse-thieves.”
She grew up in London’s poorer quarters. She described her eccentric father one day bringing home a large horse that he’d just bought, in order to help haul goods that he was trying to sell — one of his many itinerant professions. He planned to stable the horse on the street outside their apartment building. According to Monica’s story, her mother Renee took one look the horse just as the animal unloaded a geyser of urine down the street, and ordered her husband Lew to return it, which he did reluctantly the next day. Before doing so, Lew took his young daughter Monica for a ride on the horse. The beast took off at a brisk canter and Monica often described the wind whizzing through her hair as the horse clippety-clopped on the cobblestone streets of London’s east end, her father seated behind her holding her secure, and the feelings of euphoria derived from that early highlight in her life; she enshrined it in a short story she wrote much later.
Monica, 1936
Her teen years were defined by World War II, when she – along with thousands of schoolchildren — were evacuated from London to the countryside in order to be safe from German bombing runs, while her older brother Frank served behind enemy lines in the British Army. In her later years, she wrote a book, Goodnight Children, Everywhere (The History Press, Ltd.) capturing the experiences of her peers who were evacuated during those years. She remembers leaving with a vague sense of excitement, embarking on an adventure, and being perplexed by the sadness in her parents’ eyes that she saw from the bus pulling away, as they stood on the street outside.
Evacuation of London schoolchildren, 1939
She ran away from two of three billets: from the first, she returned home to London from Northamptonshire after feeling homesick. When the Blitz rained steel and shrapnel down on England’s capital, she was again billeted, this time to an anti-Semitic family from whom she also fled. She felt better with her third billet, a family that encouraged her to read. (Like many evacuees, she suffered academically from an education disrupted by the war.) She read excerpts from Goodnight Children on L.A.’s F.M. radio station KCRW, as well as on BBC radio.
Wedding photo, 1948
On December 15, 1948, having just turned 20, she married my dad, Manning Morris of Hackney, a jazz band conductor, composer, emcee, crooner, string bass player and green-groceries deliverer. Neither bride nor groom had completed high school. She says they never spent a New Year’s Eve together, since he was always working a “gig” that night. (I remember him, on occasion, pushing home a mid-size cream-colored van that had broken down during his grocery deliveries.) Manning was a mostly uncomplaining, cheerful guy, with a temper that would flare and recede just as quickly. There was some shouting, much laughter and considerable eye-rolling in our house; my dad was the author of terrible puns.
“Please don’t encourage him,” my mother often said when one of his cracks elicited a wayward guffaw from his children.
“One in ten gets a laugh,” he’d remark, chirpily. “Not a bad average.”
My parents’ union pretty much defined the meaning of partnership. They were tenaciously faithful to each other through their 42-year marriage. He encouraged her every ambition, which included starting a knitwear-design business.
She also helped out in her own father’s catering business. I don’t know if her experience in catering led to her masterful skills as both a baker and a cook, and her fastidious dining etiquette.
In 1951, she gave birth to my brother Michael, and three years later in 1954, to me.
In 1960, Monica and Manning bought a house in Shoreham’s Falcon Close, on England’s south coast, and a quarter of a mile from her brother Frank and his family – his wife Iris and their then three children, Peter, Carol and Stephanie. Shortly after, Monica’s parents bought the house next door to theirs on Falcon Close. It was a clan, to be sure. It was in that Shoreham house that my sister, Barbara, was born. There’s a photo in my mother’s album in the back garden – a snapshot of four generations, captured in a fleeting window of time: My great-grandmother is holding the infant Barbara, while my mother and grandmother sit on either side of them.
Four generations in a Shoreham garden. The infant is my sister Barbara, being held by her great grandmother Bubba. To her left, Bubba’s daughter Renee (my grandmother), and sitting in the sailor dress, Renee’s daughter, Monica. 1961
My parents struggled financially in the early 1960s, and Britain’s swiftly rising property taxes were a direct assault on saving for the future – a value that they held dear. After accepting an offer of residency sponsorship by cousins from California, our entire family received U.S. Green Cards from the American Embassy in London, and on August 13, 1963, the Morris family boarded the S.S. Oriana, a huge passenger ship owned by Pacific & Orient Lines. It was docked in the Port of Southampton and bound for San Francisco via Bermuda, the Panama Canal and San Pedro, California. Notwithstanding the bravery of their decision to leave, for my mother it was also heartbreaking separation from her own mother, her best friend – and a severing of the clan, which included her mother’s many sisters – Monica’s “aunties.” This was in an era before Skype, or email, or even FedEx. A transcontinental phone call was a Herculean, expensive proposition, and a postcard took 10-days to three weeks to arrive in either direction. I saw for myself from an upper railing the despondent expressions on my grandparents’ faces as the ship slowly creaked away from England, as we slipped out to sea.
After sailing slowly into a new horizon under the majestic Golden Gate Bridge, we arrived in Sonoma County, California to triple-digit August temperatures. None of us could comprehend the idea of such heat. There was no air-conditioning in our house. My baby sister, Barbara, already emotionally unraveled by the eight-hour time difference between the continents, spent most of the time screaming, and my parents dreaded the prospect that they’d made some terrible mistake.
The heat was followed by torrential rains – necessitating my dad to place wooden planks across the muddy swamp that separated the car port from the back door of the wooden bungalow where we lived, situated at the base of my cousins’ chicken farm in the tiny town of Cotati. Rain poured in through various ceilings. There were buckets everywhere, resonating a cacophony of plink-plonks. Eventually, my parents would praise the virtues of mid-20th-century California, the bounty of affordable fruits and vegetables, a place where affordable pubic college education made social mobility possible.
While my mother’s dad sent over antiques from England, which my father then sold to dealers situated in three Northern California counties, my mother – never content to be a mere housewife – enrolled in Santa Rosa Junior College. As a 10-year-old, I saw how the world of academia transformed her. She soon transferred to Sonoma State College, where she majored in sociology, and studied with some of the top minds in that field – such as Marvin Scott and Stanford Lyman, who later, respectively, joined the faculty of Hunter College in New York and the New School for Social Research, also in New York. At the time, my mom was intrigued by the cross-over between existentialism in sociology and the Theatre of the Absurd, then a still current genre on world stages.
When she tried to discuss these ideas with my dad, he was lost, and she compelled him to start taking courses at Santa Rosa Junior College, that if he didn’t, they would grow irreparably apart. He did, and they didn’t. And so they were both working, studying and rearing three children. There was a factory-like efficiency to our lives, directed by my mother: lunch sandwiches made on bread that she baked from scratch – lunches pre-prepared, frozen and thawed the morning of, delivered with fruit and home-baked cake to each of us in brown paper bags that we were directed to take to our respective schools.
In 1968, my mother graduated from Sonoma State and was offered a National Defense Act Fellowship to enter an expedited Ph.D. program in sociology at the University of Southern California. My father continued his studies at Cal State, L.A., receiving a Masters in Hearing and Speech Therapy. He graduated from the antique business to correcting the speech defects of high school students in the San Gabriel Valley. A small cadre of largely Latino speech-impaired teenagers emerged from Rosemead and El Monte speaking fluently in a cockney dialect, and this is how he left his mark on the world, he quipped. The larger point was that California’s public university system took two London high school dropouts, my mother and my father, and transformed them respectively into an academic and a skilled technician.
My mom was hired as an associate professor of sociology at Cal Poly, Pomona and, shortly after, at Pomona College in Claremont, where we lived for a few years. For entirely different reasons, she was thrilled with neither institution. With students protesting on her behalf, she won a wrongful termination grievance against the sociology department at Pomona College, after only one year of teaching.
publicity shot, circa 1990
“She’s an adequate scholar — for a woman,” the department chair actually wrote in her year-end evaluation. Sexist condescension aside, she was the only faculty in that otherwise all-male department who had even published a book (An Excursion into Creative Sociology, Columbia University Press.) The day they re-hired her, she tendered her resignation. For years later, she talked about that gesture as being one of the most gratifying moments of her career. She settled in more comfortably to the sociology department at Cal State L.A. as an adjunct professor. Based on her book and the publication of scholarly and popular articles (in Family Circle, The Los Angeles Times, The Herald Examiner, The Daily News Magazine , L.A. Parent Magazine, Internal Affairs (a publication of the American Red Cross), Bibliophilos, The American Sociologist, Society, Journalism Quarterly, and numerous other professional journals), Cal State promoted her to associate professor – and she taught there happily for years, until she retired. She loved teaching. She was a bit of a ham, a dynamic storyteller. She was rigorous, and animated, and students liked her a lot.
She also worked for a while as a legislative advocate at the Exceptional Children’s Foundation, a service organization for physically handicapped kids.
After my dad died suddenly from a bizarre allergic reaction to medications he was taking for a rare form of leukemia he’d contracted and that had been kept under control for years, my mom, in her early 60s, entered the world of dating in L.A. She regaled us with horror stories of suitors who wanted to flip a coin after a dinner date for who would pay the tip, and of one guy who rushed her out of an eatery after a first date.
“What’s the problem?” she asked him. “You didn’t leave a tip?”
“No, he replied. “I didn’t pay the bill.”
She insisted that she was enduring all this for the purposes of researching a new book, Falling in Love Again: The Mature Woman’s Guide to Romantic Fulfillment. And though she was indeed conducting research for her book, the underlying reason for the research got by nobody who knew her.
On Valentine’s Day 1998, she married Clark Crites, with whom she later traveled from the poppy fields of California’s Antelope Valley, to Norwegian fiords, to China. With Clark, she enjoyed a partnership to the end of her life that was one-third exasperation leading to fury, and two-thirds devotion.
Monica completes the L.A. Marathon at the age of 78
She was an avid walker, circling the 3.3 mile perimeter of the Hollywood Lake Reservoir every dawn into her mid 80s. (Her long-time last home was situated near the Lake, in the Hollywood Hills.) At the age of 78, she completed the L.A. Marathon. She was also active in civic affairs, volunteering for the American Red Cross, and as a docent for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.
She was for a long time a season subscriber to the Mark Taper Forum, until she began to find their artistic choices wanting.
with Rachel, 2012
Throughout the tenure of her myriad accomplishments, she envied the Semus clan, who remain a tribe to this day. Her brother Frank, now 91, and his children and grandchildren all dwell in Shoreham-by-Sea, and its environs. In contrast, our family scattered across the American plains like tumbleweeds. I was her only child who remained nearby in Los Angeles. Years ago, my older brother, Michael, landed a job with the Department of Energy in Washington D.C., while my younger sister, Barbara, has worked in Houston for decades, as a social worker. There are photos of Barbara’s daughter Rachel all over my mom’s house, on the mantle and taped onto the fridge, and on her computer. Monica would visit Rachel every March for her birthday, and each summer, Rachel would stay at my mother’s Hollywood home for a week or two. Rachel was among the later lights in my mother’s life, and they adored each other.
Clark and Monica, December 2014
After being held at bay for a year and half after the initial diagnosis that her breast cancer had spread to her liver, the pain grew swiftly, and she fought the disease with a blend of defiance and philosophical resignation. One day, when she was sitting in her study in a reclining chair, massaging her abdomen (which was the primary source of her pain), I was trying to get her mind back to the outside world. I told her the story of Brian Williams, the NBC News anchormen who stepped down after he admitted inventing a story of being in a U.S. Army helicopter over Iraq that was shot down by enemy gunfire. She hadn’t yet caught up with that breaking news.
“Turns out he was in a completely different helicopter,” I explained.
“Well,” she nodded sagely. “He’s got his problems, and I’ve got mine.”
During a night of bad pain, which had sent her into a delirium, she emerged from incoherence for a moment of lucidity: “I don’t want to die,” she told me, “but I do want to leave this world.”
In her last month, I found her crying in the kitchen, frustrated that she couldn’t figure out which medications she was supposed to be taking, and when, because the meds kept getting moved around. I offered to take each bottle, place it on a large piece of paper in her bathroom, and label each sheet of paper with the name of the medication, when she was supposed to take it, and how much she was supposed to take. She said she liked that idea.
When I returned the following morning, I discovered that Clark, himself 85-years-old, had commandeered all the medicines, insisting that he had been, and continued to be, in control of the medications. (That very insistence vexed my mom, but she was too weary to argue.)
“Mum,” I complained. “Every time I try to help around here, it’s like pissing into the wind.”
“I know dear,” she replied. “Why don’t you try pissing in a different direction?”
Soon after, remaining at home under the care of Hospice, she slipped into a morphine-induced, inner world of her London childhood.
“If you go to the right, you’ll find all the historic roads,” and “If we can survive this, we’ll be all right.” – referring to the London Blitz.
She said she wanted to leave this world with the people around her who loved her; she didn’t want to die in silence, in pain, or alone. She got her wish. The morphine finally did its job. A stream of friends and family came to visit, and to say goodbye, as she swiftly slipped away.
This time, it was we who stood on the dock. Perhaps she saw our despondent faces as she stood on the upper railing of S.S. Oriana, as the ship creaked away from England, sailing out to sea.
