When My Mother Died Liz Lane
When my mother died, we did what many people do; we had a wake followed by a funeral the next day. My mother died on a Friday – December 13th. It was Tuesday of the next week that I stood with my family, father, brother, and two sisters, in a room at a funeral home by which I had driven hundreds of times in my life but never entered. My mother’s sisters were there as well, along with many friends, and my long-time boyfriend. By the dozens, flowers were placed, and the scent permeated the room. My mother lain at one end of the rectangular room in a light purple casket. She was wearing a navy blue silk blouse that I had bought her for Christmas. I would have been giving it to her eight days from then if life had been normal. Instead, there she was, lifeless, and there we stood, trying to wrap our minds around how our family had just imploded.
That afternoon, we waited for what turned out to be over a hundred people who came to send my mother off to wherever she would go next. Cousins, neighbors, co-workers, mailmen who knew my father – many people I knew and many I didn’t - streamed through the door. I stood there present and accounted for but in body only. I had checked out, hasta la vista to the baby of the family. I couldn’t cross over, migrate my citizenship from Friday night, a girl with her mother at a Christmas party, to the new place where I was now expected to reside, one that began in a funeral home filled with white carnations and purple gladiolas that were very close to inducing a gush of vomit from my queasy guts. As I stood in the line to receive people, which made me uneasy as it was, some of my friends arrived together. I glanced over and saw them back at the midpoint of the line. One of my friends whom I had not seen in a while was there. We had been close friends for years but had grown in different directions in the last couple of years. She would be there of course; she knew my mother since elementary school. When I saw her, though, I had the strangest reaction, a visceral mix of deep comfort that she’d come, and annoyance. I was annoyed by her hat. A cool, stylish hat that looked great on her incited a flash of what I can only describe as a quick hot anger in my belly. To write that, to admit that an accessory could have that effect on me anywhere never mind my mother’s wake incites a flash of shame. There she was, her eyes meeting mine, so sad and worried, and I was irritated by her choice to look so well put together, so fashionable. How could she come into the room in her gorgeous wine colored hat, all velvet and mod, while I stood in front of my dead mother being eaten from the inside out by a beast?
And what a beast…Grief, is truly a hideous creature. If someone could capture that bastard, drag it into a lab, and extract its poison…Now that would be a weapon of mass destruction. Not only can people not function in the face of extreme grief, but all rational thinking disappears into the wind. They are less than…Less than kind, less than normal, less than human.
But of course my friend should wear a hat; it was December for God’s sake. Any color, any style, she should wear whatever she wanted. Even more important though, my mother loved hats. My mother, the woman in the front of the room for which all the people had gathered, adored a gorgeous hat. And people were there to honor her, not me. She was a woman, friend, sister, and a person who had a full and meaningful life long before she brought my sisters, brother, and me into the world. She carved a path on this earth, with a loud voice, a dry sense of humor, and pride that demanded style in everything she did. My mother told jokes with a glint in her eye, kept secrets, and dug her toes in hot sand for decades before I was born, and got tan lines in sexy bikinis for years after. She buried her nose in books, made friends, and fell in love. She worked. She prayed. My mother was a storm in every sense, all the intensity, drama, and beauty – dark clouds breaking to breathtaking blue sky. She changed the world each day she was in it. So the truth is that there should have been fancy hats in every shape and color, dark purples, bright blues, tangerine oranges, raining from the ceiling the day we were all sending her off. It wasn’t my friend who shouldn’t have been in one; I should have been. Everyone should have. I understand my reaction of course; it was the incongruity between the extreme hopelessness I felt drowning in loss and the hopefulness found in standing up, pulling yourself together with pride, and putting your best foot forward – in a wine colored hat in rich velvet with a black ribbon. That, of course, is what my mother deserved, expected even, and I understand that a little better now.
When my mother died, we did what many people do; we had a wake followed by a funeral the next day. My mother died on a Friday – December 13th. It was Tuesday of the next week that I stood with my family, father, brother, and two sisters, in a room at a funeral home by which I had driven hundreds of times in my life but never entered. My mother’s sisters were there as well, along with many friends, and my long-time boyfriend. By the dozens, flowers were placed, and the scent permeated the room. My mother lain at one end of the rectangular room in a light purple casket. She was wearing a navy blue silk blouse that I had bought her for Christmas. I would have been giving it to her eight days from then if life had been normal. Instead, there she was, lifeless, and there we stood, trying to wrap our minds around how our family had just imploded.
That afternoon, we waited for what turned out to be over a hundred people who came to send my mother off to wherever she would go next. Cousins, neighbors, co-workers, mailmen who knew my father – many people I knew and many I didn’t - streamed through the door. I stood there present and accounted for but in body only. I had checked out, hasta la vista to the baby of the family. I couldn’t cross over, migrate my citizenship from Friday night, a girl with her mother at a Christmas party, to the new place where I was now expected to reside, one that began in a funeral home filled with white carnations and purple gladiolas that were very close to inducing a gush of vomit from my queasy guts. As I stood in the line to receive people, which made me uneasy as it was, some of my friends arrived together. I glanced over and saw them back at the midpoint of the line. One of my friends whom I had not seen in a while was there. We had been close friends for years but had grown in different directions in the last couple of years. She would be there of course; she knew my mother since elementary school. When I saw her, though, I had the strangest reaction, a visceral mix of deep comfort that she’d come, and annoyance. I was annoyed by her hat. A cool, stylish hat that looked great on her incited a flash of what I can only describe as a quick hot anger in my belly. To write that, to admit that an accessory could have that effect on me anywhere never mind my mother’s wake incites a flash of shame. There she was, her eyes meeting mine, so sad and worried, and I was irritated by her choice to look so well put together, so fashionable. How could she come into the room in her gorgeous wine colored hat, all velvet and mod, while I stood in front of my dead mother being eaten from the inside out by a beast?
And what a beast…Grief, is truly a hideous creature. If someone could capture that bastard, drag it into a lab, and extract its poison…Now that would be a weapon of mass destruction. Not only can people not function in the face of extreme grief, but all rational thinking disappears into the wind. They are less than…Less than kind, less than normal, less than human.
But of course my friend should wear a hat; it was December for God’s sake. Any color, any style, she should wear whatever she wanted. Even more important though, my mother loved hats. My mother, the woman in the front of the room for which all the people had gathered, adored a gorgeous hat. And people were there to honor her, not me. She was a woman, friend, sister, and a person who had a full and meaningful life long before she brought my sisters, brother, and me into the world. She carved a path on this earth, with a loud voice, a dry sense of humor, and pride that demanded style in everything she did. My mother told jokes with a glint in her eye, kept secrets, and dug her toes in hot sand for decades before I was born, and got tan lines in sexy bikinis for years after. She buried her nose in books, made friends, and fell in love. She worked. She prayed. My mother was a storm in every sense, all the intensity, drama, and beauty – dark clouds breaking to breathtaking blue sky. She changed the world each day she was in it. So the truth is that there should have been fancy hats in every shape and color, dark purples, bright blues, tangerine oranges, raining from the ceiling the day we were all sending her off. It wasn’t my friend who shouldn’t have been in one; I should have been. Everyone should have. I understand my reaction of course; it was the incongruity between the extreme hopelessness I felt drowning in loss and the hopefulness found in standing up, pulling yourself together with pride, and putting your best foot forward – in a wine colored hat in rich velvet with a black ribbon. That, of course, is what my mother deserved, expected even, and I understand that a little better now.
