Free Until I Say Good-Bye by Susan Spencer-Wendel

the perfect cover story.
    â€œWell, Mom,” I told Tee, “if I am already in California, I may as well meet her.”
    â€œYou do what you want,” she said. “We will support you. Just please don’t tell your children.”
    â€œOkay, Mom, I won’t.”
    So I wrote Ellen the letter. I told her that, yes, she was my birth mother, and that I was coming to California.
    Because life, when you least expect it, is perfect like that.
    I went to California in June 2008. I am tempted to say this was a year before my ALS, but I don’t know if that’s true. The ALS could have been with me already, but unnoticeable. It could have been with me always, since the moment of my birth.
    Suffice to say, I suspected nothing. I spent a week at the Loyola Law workshop, where the keynote speaker was the lawyer who had just won the court battle overturning the ban there on same-sex marriage. “The world is changing,” I kept hearing. “The world is changing.”
    And the future so unknown.
    Afterward, I visited a dear college friend in Los Angeles, Cathy, whom I had roomed with and traveled with while studying in Switzerland. We talked about old times, broke out photos of the Alps and the Hofbrauhaus and Carnevale in Venice.
    I thought of all my parents had given me. They had sacrificed so much to launch Stephanie and me to college. I thought of Ellen. My thoughts pinged uncontrollably back and forth.
    I have had such a good life. Why am I doing this?
    This is part of you.
    What will she be like? What if I don’t like her?
    What if you do like her?
    God, I hope she doesn’t lock me in a bear hug and start gushing.
    If she’s anything like you, she won’t.
    Ellen lived five hours north of Los Angeles, in Sonoma County. My wine-loving self marveled at my geographic fortune. I was raised by teetotalers, but I have always loved to drink.
    A friend hired a driver to take me to Sonoma. Nancy offered to fly out and meet me for the drive. Nancy and I went everywhere together, talked about everything, supported each other through every major life event. This time, I declined. Not wanting any distraction. Wanting to be absolutely alone.
    Just me, my thoughts, and Ellen. A onetime meeting. To hear details. Thank her. And leave her behind. That was my plan.
    In the end, I opted to ride a crowded bus. Now that I was here, I didn’t want to be alone. I put in my iPod earbuds and played one song over and over, Kate Voegele’s “Lift Me Up.” Her sparrow voice rose and fell in tandem with my heart.
    This road
    is anything but simple.
    Twisted like a riddle.
    I’ve seen life and seen love.
    So loud
    The voices of our mad doubts.
    Telling me to pack up and leave town.
    I arrived in Sebastopol and holed up in a hotel a few miles from Ellen’s place. I had requested that we not talk beforehand. I’d simply appear at her door at the appointed time the next morning.
    I walked halfway to her house, judging the distance, working off nervous energy. Then I hung around the Sebastopol town square, watching barefoot women with long hair and tie-dye shirts nurse their children while long-haired men smoked pot.
    I bought dinner at the Whole Foods Market. The store had an odor of overripe people or overripe food. I ordered a tofu Reuben (tofu!?) and returned to the square. As I bit into the rubbery Reuben, the thought dawned on me: Ellen’s a hippie!
    How cool.
    I gave the rubbery Reuben another bite, hoping the next one might be better. It wasn’t.
    A hippie. How . . . cool?
    An older man approached me, looking as if he hadn’t changed clothes since the 1970s, and smelling like he hadn’t bathed since then either. He asked me for a cigarette.
    My God, I thought, I hope she’s not like that.
    Now, don’t get me wrong. I love the hippie spirit. And I enjoyed a little Maui Wowie back in college, notably one hazed-over semester as I lusted after a gorgeous