Obviously, I'm not talking about the body. That was summarily handled by the caregivers at the assisted living home, and the cremation arranged by me in a brief visit to the funeral home the following day with Theo in tow (now there was a fun mother-son outing).
The conference room-cum-coffin display area was warmly lit like a mall jewelry store, with glossy and shiny mini-casket samples jutting out of the walls and gold-rimmed (and cheap-looking, I'm pretty sure my mom would agree) ceramic jars glittering on the shelves. "I like this one, Mama, the one with the American eagle!" Theo announced, surveying the atrocity of urns. I was giddy and tearful at the same time, and felt like a character actor reenacting outtakes from a morbid black comedy. I even laughed out loud and explained to the funeral home director how surreal everything seemed, just like on Six Feet Under. She told me deadpan she had never watched that show.
I both relished and cringed at the fact that I was selecting the cheapest option for my mother – cremation, per her wishes, and a cardboard box in the interim before we could commission a ceramic urn from one of our potter friends. "For the box, beach or cloud motif – which do you prefer?" I guess my mom would prefer clouds? The $60 cardboard box was ready the next day. I half expected to find the gold tooth crowns and the metal pieces from my mom's hip replacement inside the zip-tied bag of ashes. I didn't realize that they sift out stuff like that.
After I brought home my mom's ashes and placed her box on the piano, I discovered my Uncle Art's ashes (same box, different motif) had been unceremoniously stored on top of a grimy cabinet in the garage by my father. Fun fact: according to the sticker on Art's box (Times New Roman font; I imagine the routine office task of someone creating this Microsoft Word template to identify the eternal litany of cremains), Art and my mom were cremated on the same day, exactly seven years apart.
The real difficulty in clean-up is everything my mother left behind. Her quilting supplies, a decade untouched, are meticulously labeled and organized in her closet, ready for seamstress hands. She was supposed to teach me. Her makeup drawer is organized exactly as she had left it, in tidy square compartments of Merle Norman lipsticks, tweezers, and hair clips. There is even a small bag of her hair, that she had been collecting for a bizarre (to me) plan to have a "wiglet" made to cover up the sparse and thin hair on her scalp. I don't know what I'm going to do with this bag, but I'm not going to deal with that choice right now.
There is still food in the fridge that was here before she left the condo to live at Hope Haven. I've been good about getting rid of the gross kinds of leftovers, but those jars of pickles and olives that she once touched – it's hard not to imagine her fingerprints, her touch, still there. Her books are still arranged in the order in which she placed them, even though she hadn't read a novel, or picked up a magazine to more than glance through its photos, in over a year.
My mother's handwriting is everywhere: on post-it notes cluttering the kitchen counter, on boxes in the garage still left unpacked from the move to the condo nine years ago (the box labeled "Dad's Sconces" is in her handwriting from the move from Juneau c. 1991, and it tugs at my heart when I realize the Dad in question is my grandfather). It's on the application she left half-finished 20 years ago for admittance to the Pioneer Home. Her tidy and clear signature inscribes her ownership on every one of her music books. I look through these keepsakes and photos, hoping to find the letter to me that would explain it all, her last goodbye, but how could she write such a thing when she didn't even realize what was happening to her.
One of the perks of accumulated clutter is that I can excavate archeological treasures, even digital, in the layers of my laziness and inaction. Last week on a night when John was out and the kids were in bed, I reread two years' worth of text conversations between me and my mom. I can trace the first instances of her forgetfulness, the familiar names she misspelled, the planned morning outings with the kids she slept through, her questions repeated and repeated again. I see the record of my worry. I know the date when she stopped writing to me. I now see that the sudden onset of her normal pressure hydrocephaly only seemed sudden at the time. The clues were there, but camouflaged by her diabetes diagnosis and our blind trust that, with medication and proper diet, she was on the mend and things would return to normal.
Things weren't normal for the last year or more. Once occasional peccadilloes of late-rising, pajama-wearing, and fruit juice-bingeing became the norm, were then arrested by medical intervention, and then she somehow was always in her robe, sitting at the table waiting for a meal, squinting through her glasses through the patio door to the brightness outside, hands fidgeting. Her bedroom became a convalescent room: bedside grab-bar, incontinence pads.
The counters drowned under the rising tide of empty pharmacy bags, Medicare paperwork, and junk mail that she no longer went through and
discarded. One year, my mother still made applesauce for the kids, still sewed the hem of my dress, still played Satie at the piano; the next, everything was forgotten or abandoned: favorite recipes for kale potato soufflé, how to thread a needle, her own singing. One morning in January 2017, as I was helping her in the bathroom with her toileting and showering (a daily event that I resented at the time but had the prescience of mind to know I would someday miss), she started singing a melody and lyrics that sounded like something from post-war 1940s. "I dreamt of this song, and I can't stop singing it!" She smiled wistfully. She didn't know the name of the tune. That was the last time I heard my mother sing.
Before the grandchildren, for the decade I lived in Seattle, we would talk on the phone almost every day. She would tell me about who they sat with at the Elks or on Friday night at the Big I, or what she was singing in chorus, or what she was making my father for dinner. I would rave or complain about all the small, swaggering victories or desperate tragedies of my young adult life. She was my soundboard, my coach, my eternal cheerleader.
When Theo was an older infant and toddler, she used to babysit for us every weekend – not at our request, but her pleasure. She would hand me a wad of cash on Friday or Saturday night ("Get a nice dinner out, just the two of you!") and I would hand over the baby. She would literally rock with him in the chair for hours until John and I returned, rejuvenated by her generosity. That was a golden year. When the girls arrived, her stamina was quickly depleted (and neither one of the twins was ever amenable to being gently rocked to sleep by a stationary Mormor), but sometimes her waiting arms were just what was needed.
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| Summer 2011 |
Even in the last few months of her life, she would still ask me if she could help, if she could pick up groceries for dinner (though she didn't drive or go shopping anymore), if she could watch the kids for me (she stopped babysitting in 2015). "Isn't there anything I can do for you?" she would call to me from her place in the living room, nearly immobile in her chair, smiling hopefully as she watched me chop vegetables in the kitchen for her dinner. It was that hopeful eagerness that really got me.
In the last few months of her life, if I started to cry in front of her, out of sadness or frustration or worry, she would always say, "It's going to be okay." And her voice would sound like the normal Mary Ann again – the mother whose first impulse was always to comfort me, even if she was oblivious about her illness. It didn't matter that she didn't really understand what was going on – all she wanted was to protect me, to soothe me, to make things better, to do something for me. It's going to be okay, she promised me.
And it will be, someday. Clothes and shoes will go to Goodwill; to my own shelves will go the quilting fabric I am hopeful will someday see the business end of a sewing machine needle. I'll be able to bleach and mop the kitchen floor and not think of her footsteps, and dust the shelves without wondering if any of her DNA remains in the flecks of microscopic skin and hair fragments she's left behind. I'll excavate through the clutter of dying flower arrangements and opera CDs, medical paperwork and prescription bottles, old appointment calendars and loose photographs without thinking of each as sacred relics containing a memory magic of her touch. A lifetime's worth of accumulation will be pared down into something manageable for me, and for my dad, and if I'm realistic enough, manageable enough for my children to someday deal with.
But I haven't started cleaning yet.
