Begin “Our Long Goodbye” Here

Thank you for visiting “Our Long Goodbye.”  I began my blog in July of 2012 and ended it in November of 2012, a few months after my mom died of Alzheimer’s.   I used the blog genre as a way to organize and make sense of the nearly nine years of notes I kept while my family and I cared for my mom throughout her illness.

In just those five months of blogging our story, I was lucky enough to have thousands of readers from over 50 countries around the world, perhaps a testament to how this disease is universal: people of all ethnic backgrounds, classes, and religions must face the difficulties of Alzheimer’s.  In the four-plus years since I stopped writing this blog, it has been read in over 90 countries.

You can skip around and read my individual blog entries—in fact I wrote them as “stand alone” pieces—but if you’d like to know the story from the beginning, please start here:

https://ourlonggoodbye.wordpress.com/2012/07/30/what-the-hell-is-our-long-goodbye/

You can then read each post in sequence by clicking on the next post (a link is found just above and to the right of the current post’s title).

Our story is just one from the millions of families around the world who are caring for a loved one with Alzheimer’s. Though I can only tell our story, I believe my family’s experiences with my terminally ill mother and my 87-year-old father may be similar to those of other families, stories that may or may not ever be told.  As I writer, I realize that I sometimes speak for those who cannot or do not record their life events, however mundane or momentous.  Please read on.

Goodbye at Last

I was not prepared for all of the people in my life—close friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and strangers—who rest a hand on my shoulder or pull me into a sometimes awkward embrace and ask, “So how are you doing?”

“Good,” I say in public.  “Sad but good.”  I smile.  Like everyone, I have public and private faces.

To those closest to me I say, “I am exhausted.”  My grief wears me down.  I sleep twelve hours on Friday night, and I could still take a nap on Saturday afternoon.  I learned from my parents to “buck up” in any situation and do whatever needs to be done.  Some days I come home from work and lay under a blanket on my couch.  My husband makes me dinner.  I eat a bowl of Special K and go to bed.  My grief is ineffable.  I ache.  I don’t want to talk about it.  What else is there but, “My mom died.”

Sometimes I say to acquaintances, “Her death was expected but still sad.”  It’s not an invitation to hug me.  Still, I am hugged in the women’s restroom, in the classroom, in a University Senate meeting, on the campus mall.

Anyone who has lost a parent realizes the melancholy that comes from feeling “lost.”  I get good advice: “For every sad thought replace it with a happy one.   It doesn’t hurt to cry, either.”   Sounds like something that might be found on a gift shop refrigerator magnet, but it truly comforts me.

I crave time to sit and look out the window.  Time to lay on the couch with a book.  I buck up.  I put one foot in front of the other.  A friend warns me that grief is like walking through a swamp.  I might add with cement shoes. Everything is heavy, as if I’m carrying another body on my back.

Some days, all I can think about are the times I was mean to my mom.  This is irrational, I know.  I realize I had to separate from my mother in order to build my own identity.  The more she disapproved of me, the more I avoided her.

When I was a little girl, Mom called me her “reporter” because I told her everything about anything I witnessed, from play-by-play details of my long days at school to evenings with my brothers and sisters when my parents were away.  I feel terrible now about the years —twenty?!—that I said so little to her.  I know, intellectually, that we had a fabulous third act: I took care of her these past seven years.  But when I consider my teens till I was about thirty-five, I see that I did not value her.  Did she notice?  I was one of eight children, so there’s a chance that my lack of interest in her didn’t show in such a crowd.  Or perhaps she knew I would eventually come around.

Mom and me on her last birthday, her 82nd. April, 2012.

A month after her death, I awaken early in the morning and contemplate how Mom and I fell in love with each other twice: once when I was born and again after she got sick.  Alzheimer’s took away her memory, but even when she didn’t recognize me she looked into my face and I was sure she knew what we meant to each other.  Her groggy last days, I believe she felt my presence.

I wasn’t always the daughter I could have been; my mother was often critical.  This is an ancient and intricate story.   Perhaps it was a defense mechanism on my part that for all of those years she was sick, I didn’t allow myself to think about what my mom used to be like.  For nine years, I simply embraced who she became with Alzheimer’s: like a frightened then goofy then helpless child in need of constant care.  I never mourned who she was before her illness.  Through her death I have been released to contemplate her huge, huge heart and her sharp, sharp tongue.

Now I am a daughter without a mother and therefore without an anchor.  I feel lost, but I also realize that for the first time in my life I am free to float wherever I choose.

Wear in Good Health

About three weeks after Mom’s funeral, Geralynn and I meet at Dad’s to clean out closets.  Ger brings along her grandson, Denim, who entertains Dad while we make “keep” or “give away” piles of  Mom’s clothes and shoes in the living room.

I find Mom’s pink brush and pull out her strands of hair.  I can’t help myself.  I tuck her hair inside a bag of items we’ve put aside for Juliann.  She’ll see this hairball next to an angel-print blanket and an apron, and she’ll understand.  Juliann still has a lock of my hair that Mom sent to her after my first “big girl” haircut in kindergarten.  Strange that Mom sent it, and stranger still that Juliann kept it forty-some years.  I should talk.  I have a mouthful of my son’s baby teeth saved in my jewelry box.   Someday when cloning is a viable option, we will be ready.

Ger and I try on Mom’s coats and blazers.  Mom’s weight fluctuated throughout her adult life, and she never got rid of her “skinny clothes” or her “fat clothes.”  “Smells like Mom,” Ger says. I nod.

“Look—her Smurf hat,” Ger says.

I suck in my breath.  She holds up Mom’s floppy blue knit winter hat, the one she always wore ice fishing.  “Oh, look” I say.

We called her Smurf after the blue cartoon creatures.  Today neither of us takes the hat.  We add it to a pile that our siblings will look through before donating to Saver’s.

Denim runs around the livingroom, playing with the trucks and cars my dad has handy for his great grandkids.  He visits here often enough to know exactly where Great Grandpa keeps his toys and his graham crackers.  Dad sits in his recliner watching Denim and smiling.  Who can be sad around a two-year-old?

Denim carries around Mom’s brush.  “Finger,” he says, as he puts his forefinger in the end of the handle.  This brush becomes an extension of his hand, a big pink finger with bristles.  He brushes his own hair and then his grandma Ger’s.  I startle myself each time I say Grandma Ger.  I still think she should be 29, and I’m 19.

Denim climbs up on my dad’s lap and brushes what little hair Great Grandpa has left.  Dad sits perfectly still and lets his hair be fixed.

When I try on Mom’s trench coat, I smell her more than ever.  Hairspray and Freedent gum, maybe.  I can’t name the scent; it’s just Mom.  The tag inside the back collar reads, “Wear in good health”—part fortune cookie, part message from beyond the grave.  I put the coat on my “keep” pile.

We discover that Mom wrote her name across the tags of most of her dress coats.  “Like summer camp,” Ger says.  Or the nursing home, I think.  I suspect Mom did this because of the many nights she and Dad spent retrieving their coats from dimly lit supper club coat racks.  She wanted hers clearly marked.

After Ger and Denim leave, Dad lets out a long sigh.  “Oh ya,” he says.   I’m no good at asking how he’s doing emotionally, so I say, “What did you do since the last time I was here?”  That was 48 hours ago.  He no longer has his twice-daily visits to Mom at the nursing home to organize his day.   I want to know if he’s getting out.  He tells me a play by play of everything: the grocery store for a senior discount on Monday, then the bank on Tuesday to take Mom’s name off of their joint account.

He seems sadder than ever tonight.    Perhaps it’s that in the back of a dead loved one’s closet, we face our own mortality.  Or it’s less complex.  He has always been the organized one to balance Mom’s clutter, and now it’s all gone.  The only items left in this closet are his too small suits.  I suggest he offer them to some of his grandsons.  “Suits like this never go out of style,” I say.

At home I sort through my bags of Mom items.  I pull a hidden pair of folded gloves out of her trench coat pocket.  My mom’s hands never seemed small to me until she was dying.  They were tiny in her casket, wrapped in a Rosary.  This final Catholic pose always strikes me as odd.  I’m no expert, but I think no one says the Rosary with it wrapped around her hands like that.  When my mother prayed in the car on long road trips, she most likely held her rosary in one hand and smoked a cigarette or drank a Tab with the other.

In bed she held her Rosary in one hand, close to her heart, as she curled on her side and faced the door.  As a girl, I awakened her on many early mornings in this same position.  Often her nightgown was on inside-out or backwards or both.  She always told us kids that happened because she dressed in the dark after coming to bed so much later than Dad.  We believed it till we were adults.  One night out at the bar with my brother, I told him why I thought Mom’s nightgown was really on backwards.  “Sex,” I said quietly.

“No way,” he said.  “It’s because she dressed in the dark.”   Why I think of this now amuses me, part of my daily rush of family memories often in no particular order, as if my brain is in constant word-association mode beginning with Mom, Mom, Mom.

Mom’s hand with mine.

Now I look carefully at this beige pair of Isotoners, stained at the fingertips. “Oh, Mama,” I say to no one.  I cry alone in my laundry room. These are not a treasured item, just an old pair of gloves forgotten in a trench coat she hasn’t worn in maybe a decade.  But they were hers.   I put my hands inside: my fingers where Mom’s fingers used to be.

Relics

I asked the Horan brothers to save the nightgown they removed from Mom’s body before she was embalmed.  A week later when they delivered our final bill to my dad’s, they dropped off her blue checked nightgown.  My dad came over for dinner, and he walked up my front steps with Mom’s nightgown thrown over his shoulder.  I cringed when I saw him.  “Mom died in that,” I wanted to say.  Then I remembered: it’s Dad.  Things like this don’t bother him.  I washed the nightgown and folded it in my pajama drawer just to have it near.

~

Those last days at the nursing home, when Mom was dressed in just a diaper and a pajama top or nightgown, I brought home some items she’d never wear again: her robe, her aprons (which were used more like bibs these last two years), a few cardigans, and her lipstick.  In the days after Mom died, I hung her robe on a hook outside my closet door so each time I chose my outfit for the day, I could give it a huff.  Smells like Mom.  Eventually I hung it in my closet and just looked at it once a day.  Soon I didn’t notice it at all.  These are my stages of grief.

Mom loved sitting around in her robe.

 ~

I don’t know what to do with the handwritten note Father Victor left in Mom’s room a few days before she died.

Hi Joe,

Fr. Victor anointed Virgiline today 9/18/12 9:50 am.  We will pray for her. 

God bless,

Fr. Victor 

I couldn’t very well throw it away.  After a few weeks, I finally  put it in my Bible, next to the letter Dad sent Mom before they married.  He was twenty-one and working out of town.  She was seventeen and living with her sister’s family, working to make money for their wedding.  They wrote to each other often, and after they married they cut up their love letters and used them to stuff a throw pillow.  Even as a kid, whenever I’d see this handmade pillow in the attic, I could not believe that they destroyed a piece of their history, which meant mine.  I often shook their pillow just to hear the crinkle of the paper.  I wouldn’t have imagined then that I held in my hands the weight of their desire or recognized that the voices in these letters were of a passionate, young couple.

Once I told my dad, “I’m gonna cut this pillow open and tape the pieces of letters back together.”

“Don’t you dare,” he said.  His response instantly piqued my interest about what these pages may hold and how tantalizing it might be to read someone else’s love letters, even your parent’s.  After I divorced, I saved for my son the many cards and notes his dad and I gave each other when we were dating.  He may never want proof of our love, but it’s there just the same.

I don’t remember anymore where I found this one letter of my dad’s.  Perhaps it was mixed in with old photographs in the attic.  All I know is that I ferreted it away in my Bible.  I was seventeen, immature and secretive but well aware of the historic significance of anything written back when Mom was my age.  I’m not sure when I became a collector of such relics, but I suspect I should blame my family of fellow packrats.

At every turn in my home are treasures that used to be my parent’s: kitschy owl napkin holder or antique kitchen table.  My jewelry box is filled with earrings and necklaces Mom passed on to me when she still knew who I was.  My closet holds some of her old blouses and blazers. Still, when she died I craved something she had recently touched; I needed a robe with her scent or the flannel nightgown that lay against her paper-thin skin when she took her final breath.

The last time I experienced this morose longing was five years ago when my first husband’s mother died.  I loved my mother-in-law till the end and desperately wanted something of hers, but I had been divorced from her son for a few years.  I went to her funeral with my parents, then I drove to a discount store to find an item that I might always recall buying on the day of her burial.  I bought a gaudy, fake ruby, too big for my ring finger, so I wore it on my middle one.  It turned my skin green.  I didn’t care.

Signs

Two days after my mom’s funeral, I realize the silver hoop I’ve had in my upper ear cartilage since 1985 is gone. Mom hated the line of six earrings I wore in my left ear. When I was in high school she said, “Talk to your gym teacher about what your ear will look like in twenty years.” It was a scare tactic.

At some point she got my dad involved. “What’s next,” he said, “a nose ring like a bull?” Almost thirty years later, he could not have imagined that nose rings would be fashionable. My gym teacher is a grandfather. My ear is fine. My mother is dead.

As I got older, I removed my tiny studs one by one. Eventually the only remnant of my wild youth was a single silver hoop I wore in my left ear. Before she got sick, Mom would often tell me I was too old for such a thing. You’re a mother now, she’d say. Then, You’re a college teacher. I didn’t think we had the sort of relationship that she’d understand if I tried to explain how this earring represented a fraction of the bold but impulsive and immature girl I used to be, like holding onto those faded jeans from the summer before college even though they no longer fit. I used to remember the story behind each piercing: who I was with, why we decided to do it—always at home. I will never forget the sound of a starter post ripping through cartilage like a scissors cutting cardboard.

Now it’s highly unlikely that this sort of hoop simply “popped out” given that I have to carefully pull it out of my cartilage each time I clean it. I tell my husband about my lost earring. I say that I’ve checked the bed and the area I dress near my closet. He eyes my mop of hair. “And I checked my hair,” I say. I realize that it’s possible a tiny hoop earring could be lost in my tight curls for days.

I tell him, “So the only explanation must be that my mom came and took it out when I was sleeping.”

Last remnant of my wild youth . . .

“Only?” he says. He’s not usually a doubter. Bruce reads Ann Landers each day like I do, and he’s seen her columns featuring readers who write in with their “Pennies from Heaven” stories. Loved ones find pennies in the strangest spots—a car dashboard or sock drawer or displayed on a pillow like a mint—and believe these oddly placed coins are messages from their recently departed. I believe signs are everywhere, and we have to pay attention. Is my lost earring one of them? Maybe.

“You better watch out,” I say to my husband. “My mom never liked men with long hair. You might wake up without a ponytail some morning.”

Bruce and I both know the love story of Wisconsin’s famous magician, Harry Houdini, and his wife, Bess. Like many lovers, this couple believed they shared a body and mind meld, and Harry promised to send a sign to Bess from beyond the grave. After he died of a ruptured appendix at age fifty-two—fittingly on Halloween and perfectly timed, from an entrepreneur’s perspective—Bess did what any dedicated wife might do. She waited to hear from him.

The Houdini’s backstory is not so well known. After Harry sought help contacting his own mother from the spirit world, he spent much time exposing these same mediums who took advantage of grieving loved ones like himself. He wrote books on how to reveal mediums’ fraudulent tricks, including Miracle Mongers and Their Methods (1920) and A Magician Among the Spirits (1924). Though he wanted to believe in spirit-communication, he was unable to find a medium who could offer him a message from his own mother with their pre-arranged code, “forgive.” This word is fitting for any parent and child, whether transmitted from the spirit world or simply spoken during a long distant phone call.

Harry also planned to send Bess a message after his death, and she originally reported that a medium relayed to her their pre-decided code, “Rosabelle, believe!” Harry’s pet name for his wife was “Rosabelle,” after the love song she sang to him in their first show together. She later retracted her statement, but experts and historians claim that this was, in part, so her social circle would not think her “a nut,” and so she could hold yearly séances on the anniversary of her beloved’s death. If Harry had not yet contacted her, Bess could continue to be in the limelight as Houdini’s grieving widow and reap the monetary benefits. The “true” story of Harry’s spirit-communication may never be known, though those of us who believe know that if anyone might do it, Houdini could.

I might easily wear another hoop earring. I don’t. Two weeks go by. My left ear feels bare, but I think that if Mom is dancing on the edge between this world and the next and she’s “talking” to me, then I won’t interfere.

One morning as I am getting ready for work, I look down at the floor, and there is my silver hoop earring. These past fourteen days I’ve swept and scrubbed and shook out clothes. No lost earring. I’ve walked by this very spot for days and didn’t see anything. Yet here it is, right in the middle of the room, waiting for me to find it.

I go immediately to the bathroom and guide my hoop through cartilage and secure it in my ear. I look in the mirror.  Mothers and daughters share an ancient and intricate story told over and over.  There is nothing to say; my earring was lost and now it is found.  Still I can’t help myself.  I whisper to my reflection—to my mother’s eyes and her crazy hair—“Oh, Mama.”  It means everything I could never say to her.

Aspergillum

I am what my mother would call a “non-practicing Catholic”—a nice way of saying that I don’t go to church regularly.  Truth is I practice my faith daily: I like to think I live the Catholic doctrine of social justice for all; I talk to God every morning and lately all day long.

During Mom’s funeral mass, Father Victor reads a few lines about her from the obituary I wrote.  He only knew her slumped in a wheelchair or in bed.  Silent.  He chose details I suspected he might: she had great faith in the power of prayer, and she shared part of whatever she had.  Because of his accent, Mom’s name sounds like “Wirgie” not Virgie.  She would love this Indian priest transplanted in the middle of Wisconsin.  She’d laugh and laugh at how her name sounded in his mouth.

Father’s message is clear: everyone dies.  He tells as that through death, Wirgie was recently born to eternal life, and we will see her again.  My husband puts a hand around my waist.  He has no way of knowing that he’s holding me up for most of the mass.  Though funerals honor the deceased, they serve the living more than the dead.  Today I belt out these church songs like I mean them, though I’m more of a “One Toke Over the Line, sweet Jesus” Christian than the “Old Rugged Cross” type.  We chose Mom’s favorites, and I owe it to her to sing them loud and proud, even if I’m too sad to sing, even if I’m a terrible singer.    Who knew there are five stanzas to “Be Not Afraid”?  Today each one is heartbreaking.  Blest are you that weep and mourn, for one day you shall laugh.

After mass we pile into cars and head for the cemetery.  Juliann jumps in my backseat and nibbles on the bagel she pulls out of her purse.  Horan’s polished white hearse leads the way.  My son says, “You don’t have to stop at stop signs.  Just follow the car ahead of you.”

I say, “Because my mom died?” Juliann laughs.  It’s not funny to me today.

Between bites she says, “That again.”

The cemetery’s well groomed grass and trees would be inviting if not for all the dead people.  It’s a sunny fall day, leaves on the edge of turning orange and red.  I’ve never seen a mausoleum up close before.  Standing here, all I can think is how much it looks like a three-story concrete card catalogue—an image that most of the people here who are under thirty would not understand.  Mom’s coffin will go in a drawer, the tomb, then it will be sealed until my Dad’s is added, we hope many years from now. Today the opening to their crypt is covered with a red velvet curtain.

Library card catalog . . .perhaps a model for a mausoleum?

I stand near Mom’s casket and read the engraved name plates on tombs surrounding my parent’s.  They will be in good company, among folks they know from church or the tavern or the bowling alley.  Later I’ll tease my dad, “Mr. Tanzer’s gonna be laying on top of you forever.  Good thing you always liked him.”

Many friends and family members gather around us.  Father Victor says a final blessing and shakes holy water on Mom’s casket.  I’ve seen this done in church my whole life, but today I am close enough to notice that the tool in his hand looks like a golden baby rattle.  What could it be called?  A holy water dispenser?  I make a mental note to research the name when I get home.  Father hands it to my dad, who shakes holy water on the casket, and then passes it to one of his kids, who passes to another.  I won’t know till much later that I held an aspergillum (from the Latin aspergere, “to scatter”).  We all bless Mom with holy water for the first time.  For the last time.

Then everyone stands around and looks at one another.  “That’s it,” Father Victor says.

“Now we eat?” Dad asks.  He is exhausted and hungry from the two hours of greeting some 300 guests and then the hour-long mass and the trip here to the mausoleum.

Father Victor nods.

I reach out to touch Mom’s casket one last time.  She won’t be entombed as we watch.  I know that much about the process.  Juliann knocks on the casket. “Bye, Mom,” she says.

“Back to church to eat,” my dad says.   Nobody moves.  “Soup’s on,” he yells to the crowd.  It’s how he used to call us to supper when we were kids.

Requiem

I gaze at my mom in her casket, and I have to touch her.  I can’t help myself.  Her arm feels like a hunk of wood through her dress, a thin piece of kindling.  I’m not sure what I expected the first time I touched an embalmed person.  Not this, I suppose.  Her hair feels the same, except it’s crisp with hairspray.  She is wearing a camisole under her dress, no bra, so I’m not sure what could be holding these missile silo breasts in place.  It takes everything in me not to poke at her new bust.  Her nails are polished, and a finger on her right hand is smudged, just like when I did her nails.

We chose a photo of Mom and Dad to go in her casket.  It was taken a few years before they married: Mom is sixteen and leaning against Dad on his family’s front porch.  “Love birds,” she’d say about this photo.  Today it’s tucked in the casket lining above her head.  Also displayed is a crucifix that my dad wanted with her.  I’ve seen it hanging in their house all my life, and for the last fourteen months it hung above my mom’s bed at the nursing home.  Until yesterday, I didn’t realize that the back of the cross slides open and inside this secret hollow all these years has been hidden a small vile of holy water.

My nieces and nephews, all college-age through their thirties, mill around the back of church with my son.  “Want to go up and see Grandma?” I ask him.

He shakes his head.

“No thanks,” my nephew says.  Grief experts say it’s necessary to see the deceased to say a proper goodbye, thus the ongoing popularity of open-casket wakes.  My son and his cousins are all adults.  They can choose to stay back here and look at photos of their grandma or go see her in her coffin.  I watch Juliann’s daughter, who crawled into bed with her grandma the last time she saw her just a week ago.  Today she wants no part of being close to the front of church where Grandma is laid out.

My dad is up near Mom.  Some of my sisters stand near him.  Others are in the middle aisle, so we See siblings can talk with guests at different parts of the long line leading up to view Mom.  I choose the back of the church with a sister to greet visitors as they come in.  As I gaze into these old faces, the people I once knew emerge from many wrinkles and layers of fat.  “Oh yes,” I find myself saying, over and over, to different folks, “Of course I remember you.”

My parent’s friends and relatives, many of whom I haven’t seen since I was a girl, say to me,   “I know you’re a See.” Some say, “Which daughter are you?”

I overhear a lot of laughter as guests gaze at the large picture boards we’ve put together with many photographs of Mom at each stage of her life.  Even a stranger could see how much fun she had.

A woman clasps both of my hands in hers.  “You have hair just like your ma,” she says.  “When she was a little girl she hid under a chair every time she had to get her hair combed.”  I look deep into this woman’s face, and I still have no idea who she is.

“This is your Aunt Helen,” another of the aunts says to me.

“Of course,” I say.  Those last years when we still cared for Mom at home, Helen was the sister she often asked for at bedtime.  I always told her, “Helen’s out on a date.  She’ll be home after you’re asleep.”  It was an answer Mom accepted, and then she let me change her into pajamas.    Helen was the beauty of my mom’s black and white photo album, the sister who attracted all the boys.  Or perhaps it only seemed so to my mom who was four years younger.

Now Aunt Helen says to me, “We’d wet your ma’s hair down and run our fingers through it.  Then we’d get the horse comb.  We didn’t have brushes in them days.”  I imagine how lovingly Mom’s older sisters treated this little girl with tight, tight curls.  They all cared for each other, in part because it was such a large family and because they were orphaned.  Mom was eight when her mother died of cancer and ten when her father was killed by a drunk driver.

Seven of Mom’s fourteen siblings now remain, and four of them were able to come some distance to be here today.  My Aunt Evelyn, who lives two hours away, told me, “I’ll walk to Virgie’s funeral if I have to.”  She’s eighty-seven.  Her son drove her.

This stream of bodies entering the church seems endless.  My parents know a lot of people, and my siblings and I have many friends and co-workers who come to pay their respects.  My older brother’s friend, a neighbor boywho is now fifty-seven and still cute, says to me, “Will you write my obituary?”

I tease back, “You bet, but all I remember about you is that I once peed on your shoes during hide-n-seek.”  It’s true.  I was three years old and hiding with him.  I didn’t want to take a bathroom break, and I got frightened while hiding in the dark garage.  I peed my pants while standing close beside him.  Apparently I trickled on his tennis shoes.  When I was a teenager waitressing at a local supper club, he reminded me of this nearly each time I saw him.

I sneak away from guests to go to the bathroom and to eat my granola bar.  On the way back in, I say to my brother, “We just need to get through today.”  I am naïve, of course, to think that our grief will be over after the funeral, but this requiem mass will be a step towards digging out of our heavy sadness.

A Horan brother signals to us that the funeral will start in five minutes, which means he will close the casket.  I touch my mom’s hair one last time and then sit with my husband.  All of us are seated in the pews, waiting.  My dad is beside Mom, leaking tears, as the undertaker removes her jewelry and hands it to him.  We all watch Juliann’s daughter walk up to the open casket at the last moment possible.  She puts her arm around her weeping grandpa and says goodbye to her grandma.

Ceremony

The night before my mom’s funeral, I sit at my kitchen counter drinking beer and listening to audio recordings I made of her throughout the last three years.    She died late on Thursday night, and now it’s Sunday.  For the past four weeks, I have not gone this long without seeing my mom.  Tomorrow at the funeral I’ll see her for the last time.  I can’t wrap my mind around that, so I sit at the counter and let my mother’s voice fill my kitchen.

“You’re a good person,” Mom says to me.  It’s May of 2010, and she’s in her complimentary phase.  Then she says, “Aren’t you lucky.  You made yourself that way, didn’t you?”

“You had a little to do with it,” I tell her.

After each time I recorded her and my dad, I’d come home and load the MP3’s onto my computer and listen, usually like this, late at night.  Somehow my audio recordings are more intimate than video.

Earlier this evening I sat in my dad’s livingroom with my family and watched home movies.  In one, it’s Christmas day at my parent’s house, and Mom opens a gift from David and his family: a new fishing rod.  She sits on the couch, moving the rod up and down, as if she is fishing on the carpet.  She laughs and laughs.  She’s got her apron on.  It’s after lunch.  I’m nowhere in the shot, though my first husband is there, sitting on a footstool at the edge of the livingroom.  This was a lifetime ago.  As I watch, I wonder, Am I washing dishes in the kitchen?  Why did I miss this with Mom?

 ~

Long before Mom died, my dad decided not to have a wake the night before her funeral but to  have a “visitation” or “viewing” for two hours before the service.  “Not enough tears for two days,” he said.  We all agreed.

Historically a wake was for family and friends to view the body of a loved one and to keep watch over it, usually at home.  In some cultures, a wake allowed time to make sure the person was truly dead, and sometimes a bell was attached to the body with string so family would hear if the person stirred.  Some cultures believed the watch vigil was for family to protect the body from demons until the person’s spirit crossed over.

My mom once told me that when she was a little girl, the most afraid she’d ever been was when her parents were laid out in their coffins in the family living room.  I never knew to ask if she lay in bed with her sisters, all night listening for a tinkling of the bell that meant this had all been a terrible mistake.  Her mom was alive.

When I leave my house on the morning of the funeral, I pass Slim’s Saddle Bar, where the barstools used to be topped with real saddles until some drunk fell off and sued.  Even before 9 am there’s a group of people on the front porch smoking cigarettes and drinking beer.  They are just off the 11 to 7 shift, I’d guess, and having a few drinks before bed.  No one knows I’m on the way to my mom’s funeral, and for not the last time today, I will realize it’s just another Monday to the rest of the world.

I pick up my son.  As a pall bearer, he has to arrive early to carry his grandma into church.  We gather with my dad and all of my siblings and their spouses and children and grandchildren in the vestibule.  We See’s make a crowd.

“I’ve got Mom’s purse with me today,” I say to my sister.  I hold it up.

“I’m wearing her dress,” a sister says.  It’s a lovely navy blue print from 1950 or so, when Mom was a size five.

“I’m wearing her earrings,” another sister says.  These are sweet tributes, part of our own ceremony, though none of us told the others we were going to do this.

“I’m not wearing her underwear,” Geralynn says.  We all laugh.

My son and his cousins go out to the hearse to get their grandma.  Last night we estimated the weight: if Mom is 80 pounds and the casket is 220, then the six grandkids can sure lift fifty pounds each.

When they carry her in, a sister says, “There she is,” as if Mom’s been missing.

Her casket seems too small to hold a body.  My hands feel enormous.  Everything is slightly fuzzy around the edges.  For a moment I think I might pass out.

The pall bearers rest the casket on a cart and push Mom up to the altar.  The Horan brothers open her casket for our family viewing.    This is the moment I have dreaded: seeing her “laid out.”  I stand next to my dad.  I hear a brother suck in his breath and walk away.  We’ve got about thirty minutes with Mom until guests start to arrive.  Let’s just get through this, is all I can think.

“She’s pretty,” I say to my sisters.

Dad didn’t want anyone to take photos of Mom her last two weeks of life, given her lack of dentures and empty stare.  Today, she is beautiful.  Anyone who knows her well knows this isn’t how she looked, but she is lovely.  The Horan brothers have filled in her cheeks—no longer the hollowed out features of a person starving to death—and they’ve given her back her large bust.  The first thing I notice when I see her in the casket is these breasts standing at attention.

My siblings and I gather around Dad.  “Who brought a camera?” he says.  “I did,” I tell him.

He says, “Now you can take her picture.”

Zombie Girl

I put one foot in front of the other, my body in forward motion.  My head is lost.  There is no other word.  I find myself wondering Did I say that out loud or just think it?  To compensate I say, “I’m sorry if I told you this . . . ”

Yesterday on my way to the grocery store, I realized I was still wearing my bedroom slippers.  This morning I accidentally put a CFL light bulb in my clothes dryer.  Days ago I set it on top of my washing machine, and today when I put wet clothes on the washer, it clung to them as I moved my pile into the dryer.  At first when I heard that familiar clink as clothes tumbled, I thought I left some coins in a pocket.  When I opened the door to see the many broken pieces of a light bulb, I wanted to crumble on the floor.  My mom died, and now I have a frickin’ broken light bulb and mercury fumes all over clean wet clothes in my dryer?!

I went upstairs and told my husband, who got up from his laptop and gave me a good, long hug.  Then we  Googled “Clean up CFL light bulb.”  Big surprise: “in a dryer” was not one of the millions of options.

It’s the weekend, and I have my usual weekend chores.  Still, I can’t wait to get to my dad’s and just be there with my siblings.  We share the ultimate experience: Mom died.   It’s not funny to me when I say it at home alone.  My grief comes in waves.  When I finally put my head in the dryer to pick up broken slivers of light bulb glass, I sob and sob.

 ~

Tonight at Dad’s, Ger and I sit so close to each other on the couch that our thighs and arms touch.  We have a photo album between us and a beer in our hands.  We’re flipping through pages searching for pictures of Mom.  Ger went through her own albums last night and brought over a stack of old photos.  Now she says, “In every one Mom has a baby on her lap.”  I pour over them.  In my favorite, Mom has four of her grandbabies—ranging in age from twelve to eighteen months—lined up on the diningroom table in front of her.

My sisters who live away—Juliann, Sharon and Jackie—have arrived.  We’re waiting for David and Mary to come from across town.  I tell my sisters that Mom’s last words to me were “God dammit.”  I make my voice sound like a possessed woman in a horror flick, like the Zombie Girl I seem to be these last three days since she died.  “God dammit,” I say again.  Everyone laughs.  “She really didn’t want me to take her teeth out that night.”  Mom never swore until she got Alzheimer’s, and it was funny to me every time.  I never imagined a swear word would be the last thing she said to me.

1978: I’m ten and looking at a photo album with my mom.  David sits near us.

We look at more albums and drink more beer.  Since my mom died, I’ve been fueled by adrenaline and Miller Lite.  We can’t seem to choose which photos of Mom we’ll use, so we agree to take out all of the photos we might use.  Each of us has a stack  next to her.

Later in the day Ger says, “I almost forgot to tell you.  Mom’s last words to me were, ‘I love you, Geralynn.’”

I tear up.  “Really?”

She nods.  “Then Mom said, ‘And you’re my favorite.’”  Everyone moans.  She so got us.  We’ve played this I’m their favorite child game for years.  I am ready to award Ger the ultimate winner.  Instead I scream, “You bitch.”  Everyone laughs some more.  “You had me at I love you.  Look—YOU made me cry.  And my mom died.”  We howl with laughter.

After supper, David brings old home movies that he has recently transferred from VHS to DVD.  We gather in Dad’s livingroom and watch as our parents open gifts at their fiftieth wedding anniversary party fourteen years ago.  Mom is chubbier than I remember.  Her voice is strong, almost shrill.  After their gifts are open, she dramatically tries to fit her foot into the tiny wedding sandals she wore in 1948 when she was eighteen.  We dug these out of her attic, I remember now, and in the background hang Mom’s wedding dress and Dad’s wedding suit, which my brother suspended from the ceiling as anniversary decorations.  “Cinderella,” she is saying.  She can’t quite get the words out given her laughter.  “Cinderella.”  We can’t hear Dad over Mom’s cackles, but we can see him wiping his nose.

Dad says now, “I must have had a cold.”  He’s in his lift chair, an oversized recliner with an electric lift that allows him to easily get out of it.  I’m sitting on the floor at his feet.  We’ve got about fifteen family members packed into his livingroom to watch David’s videos.

“You were crying,” I say over my shoulder.  We all watch him hand his Kleenex to Mom, and she takes off her glasses and wipes her eyes.  She’s crying from laughing so hard.   In the video, my son and his cousins are first or second graders who jump up and down beneath the camera so just the tops of their heads appear on film, as if on a trampoline.  We watch this, and laugh and laugh at these little boys, now college students.  Men.  I miss my mom, but at this moment I could weep just at the passage of time.

The next video shows Christmas Eve at David’s house, and our parents are there delivering gifts to his four little ones.  His youngest, Evin, is four years old and as soon as he unwraps a “jogging suit” from his grandparents, he strips to his socks and underwear and puts on his new clothes.

Tonight, we roar with laughter, but the people in the video don’t even seem to notice Evin changing his clothes.  I’d forgotten so much:  that Mom and Dad gave each of their 16 grandkids a red garbage bag full of gifts—that this was how Mom “wrapped.”  They delivered gifts on Christmas Eve to each of their five local kids’ houses.  Evin runs a wide lap around the room as David records.  “Dad,” he is saying, “Dad.  I got a jogging suit.  I’m jogging.”  My mom is so pleased that he loves her gift.  She tells Evin’s brother to stop it when he tries to interrupt Evin’s jog.  Her sharp tone is one my siblings and I all recognize.  We scream with laughter.

Tomorrow we’ll see Mom for the last time, in her casket.  Tonight we watch her on the TV screen because of a treasure David brought for us in his coat pocket.  I’m not sad, here in Dad’s  living room, where thoughts of “personal space” disintegrate when we all pack in.  Sometimes on holidays all these people make the house claustrophobic and the air so heavy we have to open the front and back doors, not just because of the body heat but because if we don’t the  house may explode.  Tonight it feels good, close, just what I need.

I sit on the floor with my nieces, all in their twenties, though on the screen they are little girls in bib overall shorts and funny glasses.  Some sisters are squeezed on the couch.  Someone leans against a paneled wall. Guys stand around tonight—one hand in a jeans pocket, one hand wrapped around a beer—just like they do in the video.

Phone Ticks

My sister, Juliann, called me six times in the 36 hours since Mom died.  I lost track of the number of emails she sent.  She wrote to offer advice about planning the funeral and the flowers and the photo boards.  Then she called to hear how it went planning the funeral and the flowers and the photo boards.  Being four hours away is difficult for her, especially now.  After one call, which I take at Dad’s kitchen table while we’re eating lunch, he says, “It’s about killing her not being here.”  I nod.  She doesn’t want to miss anything.

Juliann calls for the last time, just an hour before she’ll get in the car to drive here.  When I pick up she says, “Am I being a woodtick?”  She cackles into the phone in a way that reminds me so much of our mother.  Woodtick was my nickname as a clingy kid.

“You’re my phone-tick,” I say.  “Call anytime.  I know how hard it is to be away.”

I tell her we saved the photo boards for her to put together for the funeral, so she’ll have a job when she arrives.

Since Mom died, I’ve called Ger a few times, and I’ve been with her often.  On Friday night—after going with her to the funeral home, the church, the flower store, and Golden Age—I resist calling to ask, “How are you doing now?”  On Saturday morning I pick up my phone to call her, and she’s dialing me.  Later I call to ask when she’s going to Dad’s.  I call about what I should bring to Dad’s.  I am her phone-tick. She is my link to Mom.

When I was maybe four or five years old and our parents went out, Geralynn was often in charge of David and me.  At bedtime, she’d hold me in the old rocking chair, and I’d say to her, “You’re too bony.  You’re not like Mom.”  She was fifteen.  I can remember the way my face felt against her thin shoulder.  I could never find a comfortable spot, mostly because she didn’t have nearly the “padding” that Mom did.  Large families like ours functioned because older kids took care of younger ones.  My mom used to say that I had five other mothers: my older sisters.

Patti and Ger, 1973.  I’m 5 and “clingy.”  She’s 15 and “bony.”

Saturday when I get to my dad’s his driveway is full of cars, so I park on his front lawn.  When we used to bring Mom home from the nursing home I parked in this spot, right next to the front door so we could easily walk her up the four front steps and into the living room.  When she could no longer walk, her son or my son carried her from car to house and back again.

Today Joey and his wife park on the street and walk towards my Jeep as I unload my food and drinks.    “Why’d you park there?”  Joey asks me.

I shrug.  “Cause my mom died.”

He bursts out laughing.  It quickly becomes my phrase of the day. Want another chicken leg?  Sure, my mom died.

Joey carries my case of Miller Lite into the house.

Early this morning my neighbor called to see when she could drop off food for my dad.  His neighbors did the same.  These are items we rarely eat: fried chicken with deed-fried potato wedges—what we Midwesterners call “jo-jo’s”—maple Danish, brownies with thick chocolate frosting.  Delicious, but terrible for us, as if when a loved one dies all dietary rules are suspended until after the funeral.  There’s an ice cream bucket full of pasta salad, a bowl of fruit, coleslaw, pumpkin bread.  Every time I open the fridge I spot more food and think of that Harper Lee line from To Kill a Mockingbird, “Neighbors bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between.”

We all sit around Dad’s kitchen table, a smorgasbord laid before us.  Joey and his wife eat a piece of fried chicken over a napkin.  My dad nibbles on whatever gets passed around.  Trays of sliced summer sausage and cheese or cut up vegetables.  I notice bakery buns with the price tag scraped off of the plastic wrapper.  This minute detail, a gesture between neighbors, makes me choke up alone in the kitchen.

My son stops over before he goes out for the night.  He eats two pieces of fried chicken over a large Styrofoam container, the top warped from the heat of the chicken or the warming lamp.  He gathers his bones in a napkin to throw away and saves the remaining thigh and breast pieces for someone else.  This is a family affair.  No one uses a plate.

“Have a donut,” I say.  “Your grandma died.”  My dad giggles.  Alex stares at me.

“I was going for funny,” I say to Alex.  Dad laughs some more.

I pack two huge maple Danish for my son to take home.  I’ve been divorced for over seven years, but whenever I give Alex food I still send enough to share with his dad.  My ex-husband lives just down the street; technically he’s my dad’s neighbor.

Ger and I are supposed to be looking through old photo albums so Juliann can make a photo board for the visitation at the church.  We plan to take framed photos of Mom and the family and as many pictures as we can arrange on the 3-foot by 3-foot fabric-covered boards the Horan brothers gave us.  Instead we sit at the table, drink beer, and talk about food.  I’m tipsy on two beers.  “I’ll have another,” I say to Ger.  “My mom died.”  We laugh and laugh.

My husband arrives in the midst of our second round of grazing.  He’s still new to this family and to all of these people packed in a relatively small space.  He sits at the table and everyone passes him chicken and coleslaw and jo-jo’s.  He’s a guest, so I offer him a plate.