My Mom didn’t want to be a bother so so she willed her body to the university medical school to be a cadaver. I imagine she carried that off adequately. You may think me heartless to speak so lightly, but I have plans for becoming a cadaver myself, and presume that I shall also carry that off adequately.
What happens is, after a year has passed, the family gets a letter that says Mom’s ashes are ready for you, and you can have what’s left. They do have a brief memorial service for all that year’s cadavers together. After some discussion, our family decided to plant Mom in the back yard and sow flowers on top of her. I know you’re supposed to to quit referring to one’s remains with pronouns, but it seems friendlier that way, somehow. Anyway, I’m not positive where she is, other than down in the northwest corner of the yard, at our old house. It was unforeseen, the move, and we couldn’t really take her with us. I didn’t mention to the prospective buyers that my mother still inhabited the back yard, out of kindness and not wanting to nix a sale.
It was kind of moving, the interment. My son read the One Hundredth Psalm beside the final resting place, since that was her favorite. She would have been touched by the seriousness of his reading and the tremor in his voice. We shooed the cat away.
One of my more sentimental relatives suggested a marker be placed in Mom’s family’s burial plot in Florida, but I declined. She was a free spirit, and I won’t let them get her in the end. When I say free spirit I am referring to her more independent streak, which enabled her to elope with my father, back in 1934. I wish now I had gotten the details of the elopement drama. Too late now to ask anybody just how it went when my Mom sneaked out of her parents’ very proper Florida home to run away to a red headed, basically unemployed and alcoholically destined fiance in N.C. who was living in his parents’ North Carolina farm house at the time. Hardly the way for a dear daughter and member of the Junior League to behave, but I think she was fighting for her personhood, if that makes any sense. Her own mother’s personality was just a little strong.
I do have a copy of the belatedly released 1934 wedding announcement, and a respectable year did pass prior to my arrival. They had met on the tennis courts in Jacksonville. It didn’t help our own subsequent relationship that Mom had a long and painful labor or that she perceived me red-faced and angry from the beginning, me having refused to nurse. Maybe you get a little flavor of how things went….She asked me once why I called her by her given name rather than Mother, and I stumbled over my words, not wanting to tell her I needed to get some distance from her for the survival of my own personhood. From time to time now, when thinking of her, I try to make myself think “Mom,” for all the good that may do.
I don’t know how Mom lived to be 74, wound as tight as she was. A dropped spoon or other loud clatter would set her to shouting and slamming things, a kind of kneejerk response she had. As a child I was aware of her vulnerability, but leery of the land mines she had planted around her.
Ours was a “don’t upset your father because he might start drinking” household, and he always did, anyway. Mom had physically escaped her aristocratic roots, but remained tethered to the notion that the only real people are men. Unfortunately for her, she only bore daughters.
I knew our family was different, but lacking perspective, I wasn’t aware of the unhappiness that hung over us all. So it was a mixed blessing when I was sent away to my maternal grandparents–then in Chevy Chase–to attend the fifth grade. I escaped the numbing unpleasantness of my own home that year to a gracious world of dinner served by candlelight. The cost was exposure to her strong personality, a small price to pay, I figured.
As luxurious as the Chevy Chase environment was, it was a lonely year, due in part to my Grandmother’s critical opinion of all the classmates I brought home. It seems her objections had to do with what she called their “breeding,” apparently evidenced by a coarse physical feature she thought she detected in them.
It was beyond her ken to realize that the families of those same Chevy Chase classmates she scorned would have distanced themselves with haste from my immediate family, back home, a fact that I dwelled on at some length at night while lying in my small room off the back staircase.
This was the background of conflicting and alien values against which I one day informed my grandmother that I thought I might be going crazy. Without a heartbeat she rebuked me with the firm assurance that “our family doesn’t go crazy.” She didn’t add that “it isn’t nice,” but I got the message, and more fodder for insight into my own Mom’s struggle.
But Mom had the last laugh, I guess, if you could call it that. She was 54 at the time, and working long hours as a jitney driver with a regular route in Miami Beach, when as luck would have it she picked up a woman from Chevy Chase. The two got to talking about family and roots and one thing and another, and the passenger offered to call Mom’s mother when she returned to Chevy Chase and send Mom’s regards. I suspect that Mom did not discourage her. Just what went down is better left to the imagination. Not too long after that Mom’s mother passed on from heart trouble, although I’m not suggesting the two things were connected.
Mom’s great difficulty coping with her emotions was highlighted many years later, when she struggled to inform me of the death of her father (a great intelligent warm man) from a massive heart attack. Perhaps she was already experiencing the early stage of the Alzheimer’s which subsequently claimed her, or maybe it was a lifelong pattern of repression brought into focus, but what she said was, “Do you know where I can get a black dress?”
“Lots of places. Why?”
“I’m trying to tell you, Daddy’s dead.”
One of my biggest regrets is that I was not with Mom when she died, nor did I pen an obituary.
My handsome suitor from Indiana was waiting for me in the lobby at the time of my last visit with Mom in the nursing home, when she apparently went into ventral fibrillation and began panting for breath. I stopped at the nurse’s station as I was leaving and asked that they look in on her, blocking from my own awareness the evidence that she was rapidly approaching the end of her own long road.
Later that afternoon the doctor called to let me know that Mom had passed, and that he had been with her at the time. Although I had run away, she had not died alone after all.
It was my failure of of the heart.
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