First Thoughts on the Death of My Mother

She died.  My mother died.

It still feels weird to say.

She died Sunday, June twenty-first, at about 1:30 in the afternoon.  I wasn’t there, although I’d been with her every day for the past three weeks, but when I got the call, I went up and sat with her at the Board and Care before she was taken away.   I was afraid, kind of: I’d never seen a dead person before.  And she looked really dead.  Not herself.  Her mouth was open.  Her hand, when I held it, was icy, just as I thought and couldn’t quite believe it would be.

I sat with her again the next day, at the mortuary, with my ex-husband, who wanted to see her.  She looked better than the day before.  Actually, she looked quite beautiful.  My ex-husband and I had a lovely conversation for about twenty minutes, and afterward we both said we almost expected her to sit up and participate.

Everything around the death of someone close to you is surreal and odd.  Some of it is horrible and some of it isn’t.  Some of it makes you want to laugh, and then you feel ghoulish and heartless.  But, you know, feelings.  We get to have them.

I made all the arrangements on Monday.  On Thursday, I was driving to my early-morning spin class when I got a phone call from Marty, the mortician.  (Seriously.) 

“I’m calling to let you know that cremation is about to begin,” he intoned.

“Oh,” I said.  “Okay.”  Inside, I was like, What the fuck?   Now I have to think about this during hill surges?

Marty laughed.  “There’s no going back now!” he said, in a surreally gleeful way.

I think morticians don’t hear themselves, sometimes.

The service was nice.  Oddly nice.  My closest friends showed up even though most of them didn’t know my mother.   I saw some cousins I haven’t seen in a while.  I spoke and the rabbi said, “You done good” afterward, which was comforting, if purposely ungrammatical.  My daughter said she was proud of me.  Robert cried.  And then we had hors d’oeuvres in an oddly, surreally elegant room at a local hotel.

I have been sick since the night of the twenty-first: nothing too serious, just the sorts of things requiring doctor visits and medications that (I found out too late) interact adversely.   I Googled it and found a scientific explanation of how grief mucks around with the immune system.  It’s why people often die after their spouses of long standing have passed away.  They succumb to infections, their bacteria-killing neutrophils incapacitated.

I don’t feel as though I’m grieving.  I feel as though I’m getting on with things.  But my neutrophils know better.

People say that sitting with the dying can be beautiful.  I never understood that before, but I do now.  My mother and I had some moments—during her last hospital visit and in the Board and Care during that last week—that I will treasure for the rest of my life.  It was almost as though she was finally able take a machete to the plaques and tangles that had been gumming up her neurons for years.   I am grateful to have been there, to have seen what I saw and heard what I heard. 

I’m going to write about this more, but I think I’ve written all I can for the moment. 

Writing helps.  Eventually, writing always helps.