My daughter Ruthann placed a warm hand on my shoulder. I’d been kneeling a long time.
“Do you want to go get something to drink? There’s food in the other room.” I stood up, my legs stiff and sore. I looked around. More visitors had gathered. I vaguely recognized most. I should say hello, thank them for coming. Mom would have wanted me to be a gracious hostess, on this occasion as on any other.
“I’m going to sit for a while,” I said. “Maybe later.”
“Are you okay?” she asked and studied my face. I nodded and sank into an upholstered chair.
It wasn’t just home maintenance she’d taught me. Mom preached from the practical to the heartfelt: High heels will ruin your feet; spend money on decent shoes because when your feet hurt, you hurt all over. Clean underwear went without saying. Stand up straight, practice yoga, stretch every day. Send thank-you notes and sympathy cards. Put some thought into what you write. Go to wakes; call friends who’ve lost a loved one, and don’t just call the week after the funeral, but keep calling. The second year is harder than the first. All of life was a lesson and I trotted along at her heels. She made everything interesting, whether it was how to cut and sew a Vogue pattern, how to hit a golf ball on a downhill lie, or how to choose a ripe pineapple. She taught me how to listen, and how to wonder. She taught me how to focus.
It wasn’t that I didn’t see this coming. I’d seen it coming for a long time. Maybe that was the problem. The long slow decline was over. And now, what should have been relief turned out to feel like nothing of the sort. Why does grief take us by surprise?
She gave birth to me and then instilled me with everything she knew. What’s the opposite of unfurl? That’s how her life ended. She folded up. I stood and moved into the crowd. I tried to socialize and make everyone feel welcome, just as my mother would have done.
The funeral showcased the Gibbons’ family expertise. The Roman Catholic mass, the drive to the cemetery, and the burial all constituted a precise symphony of tradition and symbolism, each movement perfectly executed by a team with longstanding experience and comfort in their roles. We had only to follow their instructions and our dead would be interred. Wear black, remember lipstick, place tissues in your pocket. Make the sign of the cross and mouth the words to the twenty-third psalm. One final day and this strange but comforting ritual would be complete. Her suffering had ended. Long live suffering. And then, as the graveside service concluded and the mourners began to disperse, Mom’s caregiver walked over to the casket and gave full, vibrant voice to her grief, a grief that was completely out of tune with our longstanding civility and repression.
Mom’s caregiver was Vicki, a sunny and capable woman in her sixties from the Philippines. She lived in during the last year of Mom’s life, sleeping on the sofa in the living room, spending twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week with Mom except for a few days a month when one of her sisters would come to relieve her. Vicki cleaned Mom, dressed Mom, fed Mom. She put make-up on Mom and plucked her eyebrows. She sang to her. She watched an amazing amount of television with Mom, and got her hooked on Dancing with the Stars and Filipino Karaoke. Vicki’s singing voice made my ears bleed, but Mom loved it. And when Mom died, Vicki grieved, not in the tidy and quiet way of our family, but in the loud and messy way of her own.
It was in that awkward moment at the cemetery, a moment of pure finality and utter solitude—after the prayers had been said, when the visitors began ambling back to their cars, when I felt the slim fragments of religious belief slip further away from me—that Vicki draped herself over the casket and howled. Her chest heaved and her unrestrained sobs filled the dry autumn space of St. Mary’s Catholic Cemetery, from which I could see, in the distance to the south, my childhood home. Between my old house and my parents’ graves lay the Elmhurst College campus, with its grassy playing fields and nondescript dorms. There used to be tennis courts dividing the graves from the fields and my back yard, but they’d been removed to accommodate more parking. I remembered hitting balls there with Mom, when I was twelve or so. She didn’t play well, but she adored Rod Laver. I rubbed my arms. The day was cool for early fall. I think it had rained and yet everything seemed surprisingly arid. “Dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return." True enough. All cried out, I felt like a piece of fruit made indestructible by some appliance you might buy from the Home Shopping Network, use once, then forget about. Apricot jerky, perhaps, or an apple chip. I watched Vicki sob and understood that her emotion was purer than mine. She’d known Mom a brief but intense period of time; she’d had the last measure of Mom, distilled to its essence.
Perhaps this was a cultural problem. I knew from my work that different cultures prepare themselves differently, or not at all. It’s complicated. But who doesn’t anticipate death in the elderly? Life ends. That’s the only thing we can agree on. Certainly knowing that simple fact should help us prepare. It’s shocking when it does not.
After a moment, I went to Vicki. My sisters joined me. Because that’s how we do things. I placed a hand on her back. She turned and hugged me, hugged each of us. I would never be like Vicki, I thought; I would never have the luxury of such rich clear feeling expressed publicly and precisely. I come from different stock. My sisters and I descend from a long line of women who tough it out, suck it up, and huff ambivalence with every breath. My grandmother taught my mother, her mother taught her, my mother taught me. We are American women, the lot of us, daughters of more than one revolution; we’ve buried loved ones in these plains since the 1600’s. Stoicism comes easily to the ambivalent. My mother’s family had been poor and depressingly dour until this past generation. That’s when Dad and his cronies arrived, pumped up on ambition fed by the Great War, seeking and finding opportunities and giving us the chance we needed to laugh, at long last. I gazed at the overcast sky that had only begun to break. Faint streaks of blue split the gray, promising something beyond the gloom of the day. It felt like a little gift, a heavenly surprise. Thank you, Mom.
My daughters Beatrice and Ruthann put their arms through mine and together we walked to the car. We would have a luncheon for my mother at the club where she’d played golf for over fifty years. Still, I marveled at Vicki’s public display. It seemed like performance art: a statement of high anguish. I didn’t know what to make of it. Her loss was genuine—she’d cried before, big heaving sobs. But I kept my sobs in. My sisters kept theirs in. Silence best held the grief I understood.
Two
A flurry of activity followed Mom’s death and burial. My sisters and I, along with our adult children, quickly dispensed with her effects. In a matter of days, we divvied up her jewelry, purses, hats, linens, and furniture, keeping most, pitching some, giving much away. We were marvels of efficiency. Mom had liked jewelry, acquiring quite a bit over her ninety-three years.