by Debra Monroe
I’d planned three weddings. No funerals. I called a florist. The florist suggested two big bouquets, a big coffin spray, a corsage. I asked who would wear the corsage, and the florist said, “Any of the bereaved could. Or you put it on the deceased.” I declined the corsage. I thought it would look fussy and wrong on my mother-in-law’s Daisy-Trim Jacket.
Then she wasn’t dying. We sent hospice away.
I was at a nearby literary festival that takes place on a tract of land with a restored opera house and nature trails—not that I saw these, because I was there a few hours when I got a text message from Gary. “She’s gone. Dad and I just happened to be with her. Don’t leave. I’ll take care of the next phase.” Marie was roller-skating. Fraiser was on a date. Gary texted both of them. “Grandma’s gone. Don’t worry. Love.” He told me later that both had texted him back sad-face emoticons, which might seem to lack solemnity, but this was their first death, they did feel sad, and texting is the family lingua franca.
I talked to the festival director about leaving. Yet I should stay and honor my commitments, Gary said by phone. We’d had that trial run, everything set. It wasn’t as if my own mother had died, I thought, or as if I’d known my mother-in-law for years. I felt I didn’t have a right to grief, or to condolences arriving from strangers at the festival, and I’d answer that I was a newlywed, though middle-aged, but my husband was sad, and people looked confused. Was I coldhearted? Gary would be seeing the funeral director in the morning, finalizing plans. The festival was forty miles from the funeral home. I started worrying that Gary didn’t want me there because he thought I’d say something peculiar. I know I’m a little strange because of the decades spent alone even while with others.
That night at the festival, awake in my cottage, freezing though it was spring, I thought about my mother’s funeral in Oregon, where, because I was used to public speaking, I was asked to deliver the eulogy. Delivering my mother’s eulogy was like teaching during the earliest weeks of the semester in that I didn’t know the audience—the family my mother had married into—and couldn’t say everything I knew, just what the audience could handle. At some point, my mother had converted to Catholicism. When I was little, she’d been so wary of Catholicism she wouldn’t let me spend the night with a Catholic friend, worried I’d end up at Mass, spirited away. After her funeral, I went home. I was grieving the death of the mother I’d grown up with, not the one I barely knew who’d married again and died, though the new one had seemed lovely too. I said to my doctor, seeing him for other problems, “I haven’t slept for weeks. My mother died suddenly.”
The doctor had said, “Interesting. Not that I doubt you. It’s just that most people would have a psychotic break.” I’d had insomnia since I was a girl, daydreaming into night about Rapunzel or The Secret Garden, and I said, “If I would, I sure would have by now.”
I stayed awake all night at the festival too, and in the morning I called Gary and said I was coming. I got in my car and drove back roads to meet him at the funeral home, where he’d driven over with the “Watercolor Floral Dress with Daisy-Trim Jacket.” I told the funeral director that the florist had our order. Gary asked me to pick out the coffin. We wandered past brown coffins, white coffins, mauve coffins. He held my hand. I couldn’t tell if he needed comfort, or if he was offering comfort, or if he was holding on in case he’d need to squeeze my hand to stop me from volunteering something he’d rather I didn’t. Imposter syndrome, I thought. Why had I thought I’d ever be a good-fit wife?
By the day of the funeral, my husband’s office was at the busiest point of the season. I was in the middle of finals. But we were ready for, first, the viewing, where my confusion about who wears a corsage led to an altercation. I whispered to strangers, thanking them for coming. “I’m Gary’s wife.” If the person still looked confused, I’d say, “The daughter-in-law.” The funeral director handed me a corsage. I said I hadn’t ordered it. He said, “But it came with your order. You may as well use it.” I didn’t put it on my mother-in-law. I decided to give it to Aunt Gladys. It didn’t seem right to say: “The florist messed up, and I have a corsage lying around.” I said, “Here’s a corsage for you.”
A white lie, half-true. No malice.
But Gary, who should have been a judge, pointed out later that even white lies cause trouble. Aunt Gladys’s eyes filled with tears, and she thanked me. This was the death of her only sister. A few minutes later, a woman rushed in, hurried to the coffin, looked around. I said, “Thank you for coming. I’m Gary’s wife.” Marie was next to me. Gary was across the room. The woman said she was Zea. Then she said: “What have you done with it? Where is my corsage?” Confused, I stared at Zea’s empty lapel. Zea said, “I ordered it for her in the coffin.” Then I understood. I said, “It seems I made a mistake.”
I wondered if I could ask Aunt Gladys to give hers back. Or should I try to order a replacement corsage? I was also thinking about Aunt Gladys, who’d been single her whole life, now living in her hometown, and Zea, divorced in a furtive way—how they’d turned out different. Aunt Gladys belonged to us, to others. Zea belonged to no one. I could have become Zea, I thought, not unsympathetic. Zea hit me. She missed my face. She hit my arm. I wasn’t hurt. I was embarrassed. Zea left, hissing that I wasn’t family, not really.
Before the service started, we waited in the choir loft. Then—a funeral is like a wedding—the relatives would be seated last. Men don’t dress up for church here, I noted. Gary’s male cousins, farmers, welders, well diggers, wore jeans and western shirts. One wore bib overalls. He didn’t have front teeth, but he smiled wide and kind at me, at Marie hugging me, at Fraiser standing to the side, anxious. The pews were full. My funeral won’t be so full, I thought. I’d lived too many places and lost track of too many people. My mother’s funeral had been crowded, but the squadrons of attendees had belonged to the groom’s side. My mother had been so recently married that it was impossible not to make that distinction. Moving and three marriages had scattered her friends.
People trailed into my mother-in-law’s funeral, including Aunt Alvina, whose quilting circle had made the food: kolaches, not unlike my grandmother’s kuchen; trays of homemade sausage; pimento-cheese sandwiches, crusts removed. Gary’s ex-in-laws came too, the ex-everyones and their partners showing support, some dressed like Gary’s male cousins, because Gary’s ex-sisters-in-law are gay. Nana Pat often remarks on this: “Can you believe it, Debra, that I raised not one but two gay daughters? But they’re so nice.”
Then the funeral director waited as we said that necessary goodbye before the coffin lid closes—necessary so you understand that death is death, not relocation. After the service, we drove to the cemetery. A historic drought was underway. Wind like a furnace blast blew across withered cornfields, and the striped canopy over the gravesite tilted, wobbled. I thought about my grandmothers’ funerals, one in autumn, one in winter, colder, but the same incessant gusting. The faces all around me, austere and creased, saying prayers with German accents, seemed familiar. Done. We went to our cars.
Two weeks later, Aunt Alvina died. She was my father-in-law’s sister. She had scads of children, so we didn’t arrange her funeral, which was in a town near La Grange. Her funeral was bigger than my mother-in-law’s. A table displayed agricultural extension plaques honoring her and trophies from the county fair. She’d been an exemplary cook, a seamstress, a driver of tractors. My father-in-law sat crumpled, stricken. Afterward, Gary drove him to the assisted living, and I left with Marie and Fraiser. Fraiser liked English classes best, and he asked me about the origins of modernism, and I was doing my best to answer—mass migration, the anonymity of a postagrarian life creating new freedom in terms of one’s inherited identity, but also new loneliness—when I saw a familiar driveway, a long and winding approach.
I’m not saying that the name of the town where we went to Aunt Alvina’s funeral hadn’t rung a bell. When we used to visit Gary’s parents, we’d go to nearby towns for d
inner, and I’d been here before, in this east Texas town where long ago I’d spent a grim Christmas at a hunting camp not yet converted to a house, with my second husband, Chet, my father-in-law and mother-in-law #2, the broken furnace, crazy grandma, snoring in-laws. Everyone has a past, I’d think, as Gary drove us into town, and we parked next to a restaurant. But I hadn’t seen this driveway in over twenty years. Curious, I wanted to turn down it, memory lane. But no telling who I’d meet, I thought. Myself, outmoded. I kept on driving.
My semester ended. I’d go to a professional conference in early July. Then I’d have a small surgery to repair damage from my previous surgery. The previous surgery had been exploratory, for problems that, in Spooner, people call “plumbing problems,” but in my educated life people describe as gynecological. I’d like to avoid saying which problems because I was raised not to talk about gynecology, or gall bladders, or livers. “Organ recital,” my mother once said about a conversation with a neighbor she’d found indecorous.
My previous surgery had been incomplete because, surprised at the extent of the problem, the doctor ran out of time. Then I got a postop infection. Was I nervous about my upcoming surgery? No. Between my previous, botched surgery and my upcoming surgery, I’d worked through my post-traumatic-botched-surgery panic by wigging out over a small dental procedure. I didn’t want it, I’d said, stubborn. I needed it, people had said, soothing. It’s an easy procedure, the oral surgeon had assured me. Right, I’d thought. After the botched, gynecological surgery, I’d battled to stay alive because, answering my phone calls, the heedless surgeon had told me he was sure I didn’t have an infection. The oral surgeon had noticed I was scared and promised to be careful.
The oral surgery turned out fine. After it, on a December day, I’d turned fully conscious in Gary’s truck as snowflakes fell—rare in Texas—and I saw him in a plate-glass window in a jewelry store, picking up a sized engagement ring, my Christmas present, it turned out, and he’d thought that, drugged, I’d sleep through his errand. The young gynecologist doing my new surgery to repair my old, bad surgery was careful, like the oral surgeon. She’d ordered scans, tests. Gary was busy at work and the kids still in school.
I was thinking about the conference. I was thinking that basil I’d planted was bushy and tender, and I’d make pesto. My phone rang. It was my new doctor calling to move the date of the surgery to August. “Why?” I’d planned for time to recover before teaching again, commuting, the long days—though, if I consider the trade-off between a short commute as a single mother and a long commute as a mother married to a good co-parent, I’m better off. Still, I missed my house in the woods. Everyone plays roles, but maybe more if you move often, advance through social circles, mate and marry a lot. As I’d tried to be what people expected, my self I knew best, my self without veneers, was solo.
My doctor said, “I need an oncologist. This is when he’s available.”
She’d asked a general surgeon to assist too, three surgeons in all. A long, more intricate surgery, she said. She didn’t know for sure that I had cancer because, due to scarring, she couldn’t get a tissue sample. But I had three out of three symptoms of uterine cancer. Slow-growing, responsive to treatment, she added. She had to take everything and still fix problems from the previous, botched surgery. She said, “I don’t do odds. But if I did, given your history, I’d say your odds of being cancer free are sixty-forty.”
This was better than forty-sixty or fifty-fifty, Gary said, when I told him. Better than a successful biopsy that came back positive. I knew, and still know, that everyone who’s had worse news than a sixty-forty guess in her favor and nine weeks to find out for sure has had a harder life than me. Gary knew I’d be fine, he said. He’d take care of me always. I was youngish, and even bad news, he said, wouldn’t be terrible news. And soon enough we’d face more health issues before, in the end, we’d face more, more, and more.
I didn’t find this comforting.
We decided, together, to wait until after the surgery, days after, when pathology results would be back, and we’d tell the children it had been more than routine only if the results were positive. To this day, Gary insists that he was confident. I followed suit. I read for the conference, book-length manuscripts. I remember the manuscripts, but I don’t remember the conference at all, except for leading workshop with willed intensity that, according to the postconference evaluations, students construed as a manic joy of teaching.
After the conference, I had another test, this one involving dye and a balloon. On the way home, I picked up prescriptions, and I lost my keys in a small pharmacy—no big aisles of detergents, makeup, hair brushes, just medicine and sick people—and I retraced my steps, emptied my purse, retraced my steps. A very old man shuffled over. He said, “Have you checked your car, the ignition? They’re probably there. Then go home and rest.”
When I walked into a room, worry flitted across Gary’s face before he put on a hearty manner—to me, indistinguishable from the coded message that I lacked courage, or that he didn’t like this agitated version of me. Agitated how? The “responsive to treatment” part of the doctor’s call had taken days to register. At first I thought I had to stand weeks of trying not to think about my 60 percent chance not to die, before I understood I had a 60 percent chance not to require chemotherapy, which would be better. And 60 percent, not 50, 40, or worse. Meanwhile, I discovered that I wasn’t concerned about life, mine. I’d been my daughter’s only parent for her first ten years. She was in middle school. I hadn’t lost my mother, available by phone, until I was forty. And I’d had her to see, to spend time with, to touch, until I was in college; I wanted to be that for Marie.
I decided to find a therapist. The therapist said, “Of course, you feel worried, facing mortality.” Not a fresh perspective, I thought, as I drove past the city cemetery. Across from it is a business called Beall Memorial Art. In front, a life-sized statue of a man tees off. I was at a red light, staring at the golfing graveyard marker, when the radio started to play a torch song with an emotive vocal dip. Thanatos trumps eros, I thought, alone in heavy traffic. Why did I find a song about lost love cathartic? The vocal dip, the appoggiatura, did its work. Stored memories released. Or darkness encroached. I wanted to get on a highway and go. I’d stop in a bar, get drunk, have a fling, first the distraction of that, then the hangover and hard work of getting to know a stranger.
Not really. Not anymore. Yet I’d cut loose this way for a month or so after high school. For a few years after James Stillman but before I married. After my first divorce, my second. Before I was a mother. Getting acquainted, then the disentangling and back to responsibility—by then, any problem I’d had before the fling was old news. But that life had been shifty, temporary. The light turned green. This life was better. I drove back to it.
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. The doors to the pre-op room opened. Gary’s voice was too calm, I thought. He thinks I’m unhinged, like Zea. He’s naturally laconic, and his profession has weeded out the extraneous. He says “I love you” when you’d expect: after I say it, or while saying goodbye. “I love you,” he said. The anesthesiologist had arrived.
The mask covered my mouth as I stayed calm, pretending I was an adolescent at the lake’s edge, waves lapping. No, earlier, a far-off memory, fainter and fainter, like a Xerox of a Xerox: a memory of memory. I lay on a blanket. Above me, trees flex and billow. Their emerald leaves tremble. I’ve not been a member of the human race for long. An old lady sits nearby. “Gutta,” she says. She’s gone around the bend, as I’ve just overheard, maybe during the car ride here. Other women surge inside to see handiwork, leaving me on my blanket and this great-grandmother in her chair. My sister goes inside too. My brother isn’t born yet, just a twinkling volition in the life before this, a fist-sized fetus in my mother’s belly covered by a new maternity blouse she’d have sewn herself. Stranded with my great-grandmother who calls out, “Don’t leave me,” I understand our situations—if not the two of us
—are dead ringers. Left to fend for ourselves, we’re doomed.
“There.” A post-op nurse changed my IV and wheeled me to my room.
I went home. When the phone call about the pathology report came, negative, I was strangely blasé, sedated. I longed irrationally for busy work, for a sewing basket I no longer owned. I didn’t have glossy and colorful skeins, stamped pillowslips, my hoop, my tiny jeweled scissors from Garnett’s store. I thought, I’m going to be a cranky old lady. Marie thinks so. I cuss when I’m multitasking: cooking while grading; vacuuming while stopping to add a line to a paragraph. “All this cussing will spill out when you’re old and in a hospital, and I’m going to have to explain to the nurses that you’re otherwise polite.”
I didn’t feel polite, even with familiar pictures on the bedroom wall, lace curtains Gary had grudgingly said he liked here, in private. I trudged to the living room, admiring a chair I bought in Utah, a table from North Carolina, a cabinet from Gary’s parents’ house. I remembered Gary saying this house would be our last with stairs. “We can still have front steps,” I yelled. “I’m not ready for a goddamn wheelchair ramp yet.” But he wasn’t home. Who was? My friend from Vermont, my long-distance friend Gary had sent for because she has an almost paranormal ability to understand people’s feelings, and she’s a medical reporter. She eased me to the couch, saying, “He’s out filling one of your prescriptions.”