Eileen’s Last Beach Party

BY RICH SEELEY

I am standing on the beach at Paradise Cove in Malibu. The sun is out and the sky is so clear I can see the southern reaches of Santa Monica Bay all the way to Palos Verdes. I can see Catalina Island.

The wind, which clears the air on this late Saturday morning in mid-February, is gusting and chilly. I am with a group of maybe 60 people gathered around picnic tables and open pit barbecues on the edge of the asphalt parking lot near the Sand Castle restaurant.

A CD player with large speakers is set up on one of the picnic tables. The deep tones of the Phantom of the Opera soundtrack vibrate in the cool air. It is not exactly beach party music.

With the wind, this is not a good day for a beach party and this is not exactly a beach party and not exactly not a beach party.

My mother has driven here from Leisure World in Laguna Hills. She picked me up at my apartment in West L.A. to help her navigate north on the sometimes treacherous Pacific Coast Highway.

Now, sitting at a picnic table, we clutch our sweaters against the cold, looking out of place at a beach party.

But, as I said, this is not really a beach party. It is a memorial service for a young woman who loved beach parties and Paradise Cove.

The mourners, dressed in blue jeans and sweats, try to stay warm against the chill. They are mostly young friends of Eileen. Eileen died last week from the complications of alcoholism at age 32.

I did not know her. She was the daughter of my mother's best friend from grade school. My mother did not know Eileen, either. My parents lived in Hawaii during the years when Eileen was growing up in the Valley and spending summer days at her mother's mobile home in Paradise Cove.

Attending a memorial service for someone you don't know is a little like looking at those framed computer images that appear at first as meaningless color patterns but if you stare long enough, the 3D image of a dolphin appears.

The young minister, officiating in blue jeans and a denim jacket, asks friends and family members to offer anecdotes about Eileen.

What emerges is a portrait of a California beach girl who could have been a model for a Malibu Chamber of Commerce poster. Tan, blonde, perfect nails, exquisite figure shown off in a French-cut bikini, she must have turned a lot of heads on the beach at Paradise Cove.

The mourners tell stories of this beautiful young woman with a sweet disposition who was fun to be with at parties.

But the picture I get of Eileen seems incomplete. What nobody on the beach explains is how someone who symbolized the California dream could be dead from drink at 32.

I am wondering how there could have been so much time for parties and so little time for life.

Nobody answers my unspoken question. Maybe nobody can. Alcoholism is a mysterious disease and no respecter of beauty or dreams.

Midway through the memorial service a plane flies over sprinkling Eileen's ashes on the waves of the bay. At the end of the service, family and friends walk out on the little fishing pier in the cove and drop flowers and wreaths into the water.

Returning to the picnic tables, the music is upbeat as Jimmy Buffet now sings of good times and old friends. It is beach party music. There is food and drink as there always is at a beach party. The wind calms down and the afternoon sun is warmer. But the gathering remains somber.

As the afternoon drifts toward evening, the flowers and wreaths wash back to shore, decorating the dark rocks exposed by the erosion of the white sand.

The winter sun is sinking. The chill is returning. Friends and family members say goodbye. Eileen's last beach party is coming to an end.

Published in The Outlook, Santa Monica, Tuesday Feb. 15 1994