Tea With Dad

by Nancie Laird Young

  I looked up at one point and took in the scene. Dad, Jim, the nurse with no name, and me. We stood together as a family, yet singular in our experience of Mom’s passing.

  It’s a horrible thing to watch someone you love die. I felt my mother dying with my whole body. As she struggled to breathe so did I. I raised my head and looked into her eyes when I thought I heard her last breath. I now know exactly what “when life leaves the eyes” or “when the spirit leaves the body” means. I watched Mom’s eyes dilate—as though they were spinning—and go still. I felt her leave. I closed her eyelids.

  I knew she was gone, but I took the stethoscope and listened for a heartbeat, felt for a pulse on her neck, then looked at the clock to check the time.

  “In case I forget,” I said to the nurse, “remember the time.” Then I handed back her stethoscope. I stood staring at my mother’s body trying to understand why I felt differently than I had a few moments ago. She looked so tiny in the bed.

  We were all quiet for a minute before my father stepped away from the bed. And then my father said, “I’m so glad she didn’t die with her eyes open. It’s horrible when that happens.”

  I said nothing, but my brother’s expression must have indicated that Mom’s eyes were open when she died, because I heard Dad say, “Who closed them?”

  My father looked at me and said nothing. “We need to call your brother,” he said. “I have to call the hospice nurse.”

  The hospice nurse arrived quickly, as she was at another patient’s house not far away. She confirmed Mom’s death, Dad called the funeral home, and the two of them began the process of recording and disposing of the morphine and other controlled substances. Everything happened quickly. I had hoped my brother Clint would arrive after the funeral hearse departed with Mom’s body, but I watched out the window as he walked toward the house, dressed in the camouflage military uniform of the day, just as the men from the funeral home wheeled my mother’s body from the house. I watched him look at the gurney, clench his jaw and walk bravely into the house.

  Dad came into the room.

  “Take your mother’s clothes out of the closets and out of her dresser. I want everything out of here.”

  I looked at my brothers.

  “Dad, that can wait. We can …”

  “I don’t want to have to look at her clothes,” Dad said. “It’s too much.”

  “What would you like me to do with them? Shall I put them in the attic? We can look through them later.”

  “I want them out of the house.” He was so definite. “We can donate them to Goodwill, the Salvation Army. I don’t care. I want them gone today.”

  “Shall I pick something out for her to wear?”

  “I’ve already taken care of that. The funeral home is handling all that,” he said as my brother, Jim, looked at me sympathetically, and nudged Dad towards the door.

  Clint brought me a box of large, black garbage bags and I began to empty my mother’s dresses, blouses, and slacks from her closet. Every piece of clothing reminded me of something, even if it was just how baggy it had looked on her during the last six months. As I filled the bags, Clint took them, two at a time out to the truck. Then when we were done, he drove everything my mother owned, except her jewelry, over to the Salvation Army. I was sad for myself, but sadder for him that he had that last chore.

  I went to tell Dad that we were done with the room, but he and Jim were not there. They weren’t outside either. I learned later that my brother had taken him over to the golf club to get a drink.

  I called the girls to tell them that their grandmother was gone. I asked Rachel to take her sisters shopping for black dresses or pantsuits to wear to the service. Then I signed on to my computer to notify my office of my schedule.

  There was one email notifying our group that, yet again, we had a new boss. There was also an email from the boss introducing himself and requesting that we speak briefly that afternoon and that he had called a staff meeting in the morning. I reached out to one of the people on my team and asked her to let him know that my mother had just died, so I could not speak to him this afternoon, but that I would call into the meeting the next day.

  God bless him. He responded almost immediately by instant message, extending his sympathy, and saying, “I mean this in the nicest way. Please do not call into the meeting. Take this time to deal with your mother’s death.” I sat there and started to laugh.

  It was my father’s seventy-sixth birthday. My mother had just died. I had just cleaned all her belongings out of the closets and dressers in her room. All her toiletries from the bathroom. She’d been gone just over an hour. We mourned as individuals, not a family. And I had considered calling into a meeting the next morning. I was obviously insane. I went upstairs, sat in my mother’s empty room, and cried for the first time in years. I cried for the loss of her. I cried for everything I’d never cried for before.

  CHAPTER 22

  Taps

  THE GIRLS PICKED UP my brother Jim’s wife, Jennifer, at Dulles Airport, and then they all drove out to join the rest of us at Dad’s. A memorial service was set up for two days later. Mom would be interred at Arlington National Cemetery about a month later. Dad seemed to cheer up a bit with the girls there. Jim worked on Mom’s eulogy, and I went shopping for something to wear to the memorial service. Somehow, along the way, despite knowing that Mom’s death was imminent, I never bought anything to wear to her funeral.

  On the day of the service, we went over to the funeral home. It was on the route I took when out shopping or running errands. When I saw people gathered and walking in or out to the parking lot, I wondered: Were they family? Mourners? Had a parent or a grandparent died? I wondered if those driving by asked the same questions as they saw our small group parading through the doors.

  We all marched into the large room where Mom’s service was to be held. It wasn’t just large; it was huge, with rows and rows of chairs. We would barely fill the front row—on one side. When I saw that Dad had chosen an open casket, I turned around to prepare Jane, as I knew she would have a hard time, and bumped into my sister-in-law, who was standing beside her, the two of them rigid and wide-eyed. As I’d anticipated, they were not comfortable with the open casket.

  Jennifer whispered, “I don’t think I can bear to see your mother in a casket. I don’t want to remember her that way.”

  “It’s okay,” I told her, “you don’t have to go up to the casket. You can just sit in the front row.”

  “I can’t, Mom, I can’t; I can’t be that close,” Jane cried.

  “Okay, sit back a little where you’re comfortable,” I said.

  “I’ll stay with her,” Jennifer said.

  Later, when I turned around, I saw them sitting about twenty rows back, right up against the wall.

  I walked up to the casket to see Mom and my head snapped back.

  “Oh, Mommy,” I said.

  The funeral home’s makeup artist had applied the pinkest lipstick to Mom’s lips—a shade I would compare to Beach Blanket Pink. Jim walked up beside me, “What’s wrong?” I tilted my head toward Mom. He looked down, then back up at me.

  “Wow. I don’t think I ever saw Mom wear pink lipstick,” he said. “I don’t think I ever saw her wear pink either.”

  “You certainly did not,” I replied. Had any cosmetics been available and if I could have distracted Dad, I’d have redone Mom’s makeup. My mother’s makeup was always impeccable.

  “It should be,” Dad would say. “She takes long enough to put it on.”

  Dad came up to us and said, “They did a good job, didn’t they?”

  We agreed.

  Then he nodded his head to the back of the room where Jennifer and Jane sat crying together as far away from the casket as possible.

  “Look at those two,” he said. “Some soldiers they are. But I understand. It’s hard.”

  Every now and then, Jim and I would look at one another—no expression, no words. Just an acknowle
dgment. It broke the tension and comforted me a bit. I looked at my brother Clint, his bearing solid and respectful, and wondered how he felt.

  Jim delivered a beautiful eulogy. It struck me that his was so personal, drawing on specific experiences he’d shared with Mom, while connecting all of us in remembering who she was. It conveyed how well he knew her, too. How close they’d been. He remembered that she’d liked Auden’s “Funeral Blues,” as he did. He told of her going back to the theater and talking the ticket taker into letting her in just long enough to see the screen credits scroll so she could see the name of the poem and who wrote it.

  I thought, W. H. Auden, Mom. I told you. W. H. Auden wrote “Funeral Blues.” I couldn’t help it—I smiled.

  As he spoke, there were times he appeared to be overcome, but he’d pause, then continue without incident. When he was done, I stood up and moved to the front to read Kenyon’s poem.

  I made it about three-quarters through the reading before I choked up and began to cry. I hung my head and tried to catch my breath. Mortified that I might not be able to continue, I stopped for a few seconds then managed to finish.

  After, a minister completed the service, and we left.

  “Let’s get something to eat,” Dad said. Someone suggested the Olive Garden, so we went there. We were seated quickly, the only ones in the place dressed in suits and dresses. The server noticed.

  “You all look nice,” he said. “You’re all dressed up.”

  I caught my brother’s eye and saw he had the same thought I did. We willed the server not to ask the next question—to no avail.

  “And where have you all been?”

  Everyone at the table stopped talking, horrified, as my father looked at the young man, paused, and then said, “To a funeral. My wife’s funeral.”

  “I’m never going there again,” Dad said when we left the restaurant. It would take fourteen years before he returned. I’m kind of sorry. I always liked their salad.

  Due to the number of burials at Arlington Cemetery, the internment couldn’t happen right away. About a month later, the day finally came.

  I’d visited before, of course; not just as a tourist, but when my Uncle Bill was buried there, and when my second husband proposed to me near General “Blackjack” Pershing’s grave twenty-three years earlier.

  “Let’s go off campus for lunch,” he said. “It’s a beautiful day for Arlington Cemetery.”

  I thought, Arlington Cemetery? In the heat of summer? I knew he was a history buff, and he loved Washington, DC. Besides, it would be a change from our usual lunch at The Tombs in Georgetown, so I said, “Okay.”

  A marriage proposal was the last thing on my mind that day as we trudged in office clothes through the cemetery. He seemed more purposeful, albeit a little on edge, but I thought it was because he was trying to follow the map. We stood at the head of General Pershing’s grave, and he pointed toward the panorama of the city before us.

  “This is one of the most beautiful views of Washington,” he said, and I had to agree. Then he proposed. I accepted.

  “Of all the places in this town, why here?” I asked him.

  “Because our children and their children can always find the place where I proposed to you,” he said. “Where our family started.” I thought that was thoughtful and beautiful. I still do.

  Now I was back to bury my mother, having not yet buried all my feelings about the marriage that had ended almost ten years before. The irony of a marriage proposal in a cemetery didn’t hit me until then. I imagined my mother looking over at me, at first expressionless to gauge what I was thinking, then in recognition, grinning with conspiratorial mischief. I had to smile to myself.

  On this sad day I took more notice of things I had not paid as much attention to before. Other people with cameras walking. The quiet surrounding me, despite the crowds. Others standing or sitting through their own loved one’s graveside service. The periodic wail of a bugler playing taps.

  First, we arrived at a small building reserved for gathering and meeting with a chaplain before moving as a group to the gravesite. Other families met with the chaplain assigned to them by branch of service. Our chaplain was wonderful. What a job he had. He asked questions about Mom and encouraged us to tell him anything we thought important.

  Dad had many things to share. ‘Oh, she always said she wanted to be carried to her grave by six good-looking soldiers,’ he told the chaplain at one point.

  The size of Mom’s memorial service at the funeral home may have been small, but her interment was not. We had expected just our immediate family, but slowly the meeting place filled up. My first husband and his wife came, my second husband attended, friends of the girls, friends and neighbors of mine, and people from my office. Our group slowly grew. I was surprised and deeply moved. When it was time, everyone lined up in their cars as instructed, and convoyed over to the gravesite.

  As we drove up, I saw the hearse and seven tall, good-looking soldiers in dress blues, standing by.

  The chaplain explained to all of us gathered there, “Suzanne wanted six good-looking pallbearers. We brought an extra in case one fell out.”

  My eyes turned from them to the gravesite where I saw some chairs and people beginning fill the lawn behind them. Mom would be leading a column. The last on her row. The latest to arrive. I heard my father say, “Damn, she’s going to hate that. Hell, I’m going to hate it.” Someday he, too, would be buried there.

  “Hate what, Dad?” I asked.

  He pointed to our left. Across the way loomed the Pentagon, or what my father referred to as Fort Fumble. He had hated the time he was stationed there.

  When the time comes and Dad is buried with Mom, his casket will move to the graveside on a horse-drawn caisson. He’ll receive the twenty-one-gun salute and a bugler playing “Taps”—one of the saddest sounds I’ve ever heard. As a military wife who served by standing and waiting, my mother was not entitled to any of that, of course. But the chaplain acknowledged her service by reading the words to “Taps.”

  I remember being tearful and beginning to quake from my chest. Not tremble—quake. I felt someone touching me, gentle and firm. When I looked, I saw the hands of my youngest daughter, her hands placed on my shoulders, looking at me. She smiled reassurance. Her two sisters stood at her side nodded and smiled at me as well. Giving me strength.

  PART V

  A person’s identity is not to be found in behaviour, nor—important though this is—in the reactions of others, but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going. The individual’s biography, if she is to maintain regular interaction with others in the day-today world, cannot be wholly fictive. It must continually integrate events which occur in the external world, and sort them into the ongoing ‘story’ about the self.

  —ANTHONY GIDDENS

  CHAPTER 23

  Relata Refero: All the Stories

  UP UNTIL THE AGE OF FOUR, I spent much my life in my great-grandparents’ home, and I complied with the edict of being seen and not heard. As a little girl, it was easy to become invisible. During the day, adults were sometimes unaware or even forgot that I played nearby. Some nights after I was put to bed, sounds from the large kitchen in the back of the house beckoned to me. In my footed pajamas, I crept down the steep stairs—always careful to avoid that one stair Grandma told me about, the one that Uncle Jack used to avoid when he snuck in late, because it squeaked—from the middle bedroom on the second floor to the landing in front of the swinging door into the kitchen. I could push it open just enough to peek in.

  The big kitchen I knew during the day, bright with sunlight and filled only with sounds from the radio and my grandmother’s voice as she prepared meals, folded laundry, or sipped tea, changed with the absence of daylight. The air in the room seemed thick, mixed with cigarette smoke, and the light from the ceiling lamp appeared yellow. The people were different, too. My grandmother’s apron was gone. She sat at the kitchen table with other women—sometimes
my aunts, her friends, or my grandfather’s cousins. The women wore jewelry and lipstick, and they’d done their hair.

  The men wore the same white shirts they’d worn to the office that day, with collars open, no ties, and rolled up sleeves. They leaned against the counters or the stove, cigarettes in one hand and tumblers of scotch or bourbon in the other.

  And as I listened to my relatives and their friends discuss, brag, and gossip from my place on the landing at night or from the corner in the kitchen where I played in the mornings, I witnessed how a story told one day, whether it was true or not, morphed, epic in its retelling, as it passed from one person to another—a day, a week, a year, one generation to another—until codified in our family’s history and, ultimately, in my sense of self.

  More than five years had passed since I first moved in with Dad before I learned that my father’s uncle Al Murphy had not been a polygamist after all. And, contrary to family lore, not one of his three wives had been Chinese. I was both shocked and disappointed.

  “Everyone knew Al,” I’d been told. Relatives described Uncle Al, though not a tall man, as very strong and physically fit, a tough cop who walked a beat in Brooklyn where he’d grown up as one of John Valentine (Pop) and Anna Marie (Nana) Murphy’s five children—Margaret, Al, my grandmother Eleanor, Harry, and Grace.

  I do not remember meeting Uncle Al, though he didn’t die until I was twenty. I don’t even remember hearing that he’d died. But I felt I knew him well. My mental picture of him had been drawn by the words I’d heard in relatives’ discussions about him during short and infrequent visits my family made to Brooklyn between moves from one military station to another. In my mind, he was muscular, with a dark head of hair, unlike his light-haired siblings. I pictured him as stern and serious looking. He stood on the sidelines or in the shadows of my imagination, his gaze penetrating. Perhaps I’d seen a photograph of him. He seemed as real to me as if he’d been present during those times I lived with or visited my grandparents.