Exit Laughing

by Victoria Zackheim

  By the time we got home, I had named him Moley, in honor of Ratty in The Wind in the Willows. Moley went right into the freezer when we arrived, but when Monday morning came, I impulsively decided to take him to school. My friends were always bringing their pets to school for show-and-tell, so I had the brilliant idea of telling my parents that I was taking Moley in for this reason, even though there was no such event that day. I did want to show him off, but I also didn’t want to leave him alone in the freezer all day.

  My teacher, Miss Hopper, was a high-strung woman with poppy eyes and a buzzing, nervous energy that always made me feel exhausted. But I liked her and felt that, as one of the few young, unmarried teachers in the school, she wouldn’t mind so much if I brought a dead animal to class. But when I opened up the Figgy Pudding box, she immediately asked if my parents knew what I had brought to school.

  “Oh, yes,” I told her confidently. “They told me I could bring him.” I scooped Moley up and—stroking his fur with one hand—held him out to show her. “See how cute he is, Miss Hopper? You can pat him if you want.”

  “Oh, sweetie, that’s okay,” she said, her poppy eyes even wider than usual as she stared down at him. “It’s really not hygienic to handle dead animals. In fact, why don’t you go wash your hands? Right now, honey. Just put him right back into that box and give him to me. You can show him to the class before lunchtime.”

  When I returned to my desk a few minutes later, a boy I didn’t like very much said, “Ew, you brought a dead rat to school?”

  “Noooo,” I said, angrily. “It’s a mole!”

  “That’s gross,” he sneered.

  Turning my back on him, I tried to focus on my addition worksheet, but I felt a little worried. Was Moley gross? I thought about the gingerly way Miss Hopper had carried him across the room and the fact that he was sitting on the very top shelf behind her desk. I also remembered my sister sneering at him in the cab. But then I remembered the way Moley’s fur grew in a perfect little swirl under his arms and the way it looked like he had a potbelly when I made him sit on my lap. I didn’t care what other people thought: Moley was mine and I loved him.

  My instinct to stand by my mole paid off when I got to tell the whole class about how my grandfather had killed him and how I had managed to get a hold of him and bring him home on the plane. Miss Hopper looked very solemn and said it was “really, really sad” when something died—even a wild animal. Everyone was quiet and serious-looking as I walked around with him, and a couple of kids looked like they might cry. Even when one of them darted their hand into his box to pat him and was abruptly sent off to the restroom to wash, the atmosphere remained subdued. This only made me feel more important. Other kids talked about going to beaches in Florida or watching TV on their vacation, but no one had a story as interesting as mine.

  My exhilaration was only slightly dimmed when, just before I left the room for lunch, Miss Hopper pulled me aside and quietly asked that I not bring Moley back to school. “You might want to give him a nice burial in your backyard this afternoon, sweetie,” she said firmly. “I think he’s been through enough.”

  Put Moley in the ground? I thought. No way! Obviously, Miss Hopper was just being “conventional.” I wasn’t actually sure what the word meant, but I was pretty sure it explained why she thought I should get rid of Moley.

  At lunch, several of the boys wanted to talk to me about “that dead animal you got,” and I found myself showing off a little, referring to Moley the same way and talking about how my parents didn’t mind that I had him. Then, in my group violin class that afternoon, our teacher, Miss Aubrey, who was old and ill-tempered, was late to class, and I slipped Moley out of his box to show everyone. For a few glorious moments, I was surrounded by kids, all of whom had promptly dropped their violins and raced over. As they passed him around, several of the girls cooed, “He’s soooo cute,” and I once again felt proud to have him in my possession. The whole idea that his being dead was disgusting or upsetting was totally forgotten.

  When the door opened and Miss Aubrey walked in, I had to think fast. I knew she was going to have a fit if she saw Moley, so I ducked down, grabbed my violin out of its case, and dropped Moley inside. All the kids laughed as I sat back up and began flipping through my Suzuki book, pretending to tune my violin.

  “Children, please! Be quiet!” Miss Aubrey said, looking suspiciously at me over her glasses. “Zoe, is there something you want to share with the rest of us?”

  Again, the room erupted into excited whispers and giggles, and I began to sweat, sure that someone was going to let it slip that I had a dead mole in my violin case. And I had another source of worry: Moley had definitely begun to smell. Not bad exactly, but a distinct odor. I hoped it didn’t start to spread around the room, which was already stuffy and overheated. “Oh no, Miss Aubrey. Everything’s fine.” I assumed a bland, disinterested expression and, once she turned away, shot a fierce warning look at the two grinning boys sprawled in the seats behind me. As the class proceeded, I sat in a paroxysm of anxiety that either the smell—or one of my classmates—would give me away.

  Back at home that afternoon, my mother insisted Moley go immediately back into the freezer, and by the time I got home the next afternoon I was feeling tired and grouchy and only peeked in on him briefly. While I would never have admitted it, Moley wasn’t looking so cute anymore. Somehow his day at school had leached the gloss from his coat, and he had frozen into a strange shape, with one paw bent at a spastic-looking angle. Another day passed without my taking him out to play, and another after that. By then, my interest in him had definitely begun to wane, although I thought about him often, missing those first exhilarating days after he came into my possession.

  Then, a few weeks later, my mother came into my room looking excited. She had been telling her friend, Sally, about “our mole saga,” as she called it, and Sally had suggested we get in touch with Laney Dexter, a teenager who lived a couple of blocks over. Laney was an eccentric girl with glasses and messy hair who always reminded me of Meg Murry in A Wrinkle in Time. Just like brainy, odd Meg, Laney had some unusual interests, including, apparently, taxidermy. She had been teaching herself how to dry and stuff animals so as to preserve them and had apparently been practicing on various recently deceased pets from around the neighborhood.

  “So I was thinking we could see if Laney could stuff your mole,” my mother said brightly. “That way, you can keep it, but you don’t have to worry about having him … decompose.”

  My mother looked so delighted with the idea that I agreed, although I didn’t feel very enthusiastic. I’d been to taxidermy shops up in New England during summer vacations, and the animals there always looked dusty and sad. What I wanted was Moley to be soft and fresh again so I could play with him. I thought about the word decompose and suddenly felt like crying. I knew what decompose meant. It was when things turned mushy and moldy, like old fruit when it’s been on the counter too long. I hadn’t minded so much that Moley was dead, as long as he looked alive. But now I realized that, instead of staying the way he’d been at the moment of death, Moley was going to rot and turn into something awful. It was a prospect I didn’t want to contemplate.

  That weekend, we took him over to the Dexters’ house, and Laney agreed to work on him. I should have known I was never going to see Moley again when I caught a glimpse of eight or nine frozen little packages all lined up next to each other in her freezer, but by then it was too late to snatch him back.

  And sure enough, I never did get Moley back. Laney must have accrued quite a backlog of dead animals because, over the years, I’ve run into other people from the neighborhood who told me that they, too, handed over their deceased pets, never to see them again. But then, I suppose having my mole stuffed by a self-taught teenage taxidermist might have been worse than having him trapped in her freezer forever. And frankly, I was ready to let him go by then.

  What I wasn’t ready to let go of was my interest in death. I
continued to back my family into corners to grill them on their preferred way to die, and I found death scenes in movies and books of enormous interest. Like many children, I was curious about death and not sure yet if I should be afraid of it. Even when my grandfather died the following year, I remained more interested than sad. Mainly, I thought a lot about his body and was deeply relieved to hear he’d been embalmed, which apparently meant he wouldn’t decompose. At least for a while.

  Years later, when my father died from cancer at the age of sixty-eight, and my mother ended her life after a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease, I would get a crash course in death’s concomitant companions, grief and loss. And yet, despite the weeks I spent talking about and preparing for their dying—and, in both cases, being with them at the end—there was much that remained fundamentally unknowable and mysterious when it finally happened. And so, the desire to understand, to hold death in my hands, persisted, leading me to spend several years writing a memoir about how their lives ended and what it meant to me.

  As I turn my bike around and head for home, I pass yet another dead skunk. Unlike the earlier one that lay perfectly preserved on the side of the road, this one has suffered the full gory consequences of being struck by a passing car, and it’s not a pretty sight. I have no desire to get closer to it. No impulse to touch or move it. But I do take a look as I ride by.

  HAVE FUN AT THE FUNERAL, GIRLS

  — Sam Barry —

  Death. Talk about a punch line.

  My father, David Barry, died at home. When good guys died in the movies, they always got in some great final lines or accomplished some final task that gave meaning to a sad moment. My dad’s death, my first experience of a real human death, wasn’t like that. There was no soft lens, no special music, no explanation of the meaning of life. Instead, we watched him slip further away into his memories. As the days and weeks passed, he spoke less and less, except to ask for chipped ice.

  I remember sitting by his bedside, near the end. The Mondale/Reagan presidential debate was on TV.

  “Who do you think won?” I asked him when the debate was over.

  “The Cleveland Indians,” he replied. I looked into his eyes. He wasn’t joking. Dave had grown up in Cleveland, and I was pretty sure he thought he was somewhere back in the 1930s at this point. (The Cleveland Indians never won in the 1980s.)

  Humor and laughter were an important part of our family life, and this held true as Dave lay dying. We laughed to relieve stress; we laughed in response to the absurdity of people offering pat answers to life’s dilemmas; we laughed to ward off our fear; and we laughed at happy memories. Those last days were something of an extended wake, only the deceased wasn’t yet deceased.

  Years later, when I was a Presbyterian minister and required to represent a coherent belief system, I officiated at many funerals and memorials. I felt honored to do this work—when you are a pastor, you are invited (or stumble) into some very intimate territory. I also discovered that it was a good idea to lay aside preconceived notions of how others would behave or what people needed. Sometimes I encountered walls of anger, and it became clear that the home life of the deceased was not all love and roses. Other times people were manic and laughing, as if a party, rather than a death, were the matter at hand. Still others revealed no emotion; I might as well have been doing their taxes. When someone is dying or has died, expect every possible emotion: depression, relief, anger, giddiness, denial, happiness, sorrow, and yes, all possible forms of humor.

  I remember presiding over the funeral of a motorcycle-riding poet and English teacher who had crashed on the highway and died. There was a big crowd, and I opened up the floor for anyone to share. Big mistake. It was like the funeral of Elvis, as woman after woman came up to talk about her passionate relationship with the deceased. It took me a few hours to regain control of the event.

  Important as they are for the living, in some ways funerals and burials have very little to do with death, much as wedding planning and weddings have little to do with marriage. It’s the mystery and finality of death that we live with in the dark night. Those who are left behind do most of their grieving alone, after everyone has gone home, in the months and years that follow. The reality of death is realized over time through thoughts, feelings, memories, discoveries, found and cherished objects, and all the ways in which a person is missed (or not) and remembered (or not).

  My mother, Marion Virginia McAllister Barry, was fascinated by death. I suppose we all are, but Marion made a lifetime practice of thinking, talking, reading, and joking about death. I remember her reading Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad, by William Craig, a classic account of one of the most important and horrific battles of World War II, and excitedly telling me the details, such as how the residents of Stalingrad ate rats, shoes, or whatever to survive. These were my teenage years, and I was often stoned when she shared this information, so it made quite an impression on me.

  Marion’s interest in death and dying stretched back to her youth. She was raised in eastern Colorado and western Nebraska during the Dust Bowl era, a time and place that did not necessarily foster a cheery disposition. My grandfather was a mechanic who moved the family around, finding work in sugar beet factories and at one time trying his hand at homesteading. People often describe the great outdoors as wholesome, but a landscape littered with empty irrigation ditches ripe for a person to accidently tumble into (this happened to Marion) and an atmosphere suggestive of the Apocalypse is probably not what they have in mind.

  For a time the family lived in Minatare, outside of Scotts Bluff, in the Nebraska panhandle. Not much happened in Minatare, so Marion and her best friend Elizabeth had to find ways to entertain themselves. Once, when the two girls had been acting out in class, a teacher informed them that they were to stay after school.

  With a broad smile on her face, Elizabeth turned to my mother and said, “Shall we, Marion?”

  Because Minatare offered so little of what we normally think of as fun, the girls made do with whatever was happening in town. Sometimes this meant stretching the definition of entertainment to include funerals. Marion and Elizabeth would get in line to view the body, whether or not they had any connection to the deceased. One afternoon, as they were leaving the house, a neighbor stopped raking in his garden and said, in a droll Western accent, “Have fun at the funeral, girls.”

  Marion studied biology and English at the University of Nebraska at a time when the human race was locking onto the knowledge that germs are bad and cleanliness is good, and my mother took that message to heart. Between the dust that swirled everywhere and her newfound recognition of the omnipresence of germs, she developed an obsession with cleanliness. Her feeling was germs could kill and were going to get you eventually, but in the meantime we could stave off the Grim Reaper with copious amounts of bleach, ammonia, soap, and water, and by cooking the hell out of meat.

  Marion’s dark view was reinforced by world events: the Great Depression, which had hit the farmers all around the Dust Bowl years before, overtook the world, and then World War II. She met my father and eventually moved to a suburb outside New York City, where my father, a Presbyterian minister, found work trying to cure the ills of the inner city, while my mother worked at being the perfect housewife, the postwar ideal for women.

  Life was good in many ways. Armonk, New York, where they settled, was a lovely little town; they had four healthy children, a lovely, very clean home, enough money, and many good friends.

  But happiness was for Marion a more ephemeral state than for most. She became moody enough that friends remarked on it; some even suggested solutions. Marion tried to tough it out. Unfortunately, she was trying to tough out clinical depression. Darkness settled over her spirit, and suicide began to look like a logical choice. Over the years she danced with the Grim Reaper, taking a few extra pills and knocking herself out for a weekend, edging ever closer to the negation of consciousness. And then she would return from the world o
f the dead, funny as ever. People were always delighted to see her. Wherever she went, people would shout her name, and she would respond with some edgy wisecrack or self-deprecating remark.

  But there came a time when the depression that haunted Marion began to take over entirely. Dave was struggling with his own demons—alcohol and work addiction—and he was often away, and hardly there when he was present. Alone in the suburban wilderness, Marion began to slip deeper into her own hell of despair. Eventually, she reached the point where the oblivion of death seemed to be her only option, and one weekend, when no one was around, she took enough of those little pills to kill someone twice her size, washing them down with vodka for good measure. (Marion wasn’t much of a drinker—that was Dave’s department—so there was no question that the vodka was added for its medicinal effect.)

  I was fifteen years old and a bit of a teenage hellion at the time, and was off on a weekend spree of partying that did not include checking in with my mother. However, I had a premonition that something was wrong and stopped at Hi Health, the local beer and cigarette stop, to use the pay phone and call home.

  “Hi, Mom, I spent the night at Regis’s,” I said, referring to my partner in crime, Regis Goodwin. We could pretty much do whatever we wanted at the Goodwins’ house—his mother worked the graveyard shift, and his dad pretended to maintain order as he watched Yankee games and got completely snookered.

  “That’s fine,” she said, her voice flat and far away.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  There’s fine, and then there’s fine. Her voice, her responses, everything was a little off. The person I spoke to on the phone was like a hologram of my mother, not really there, slipping in and out of view. I made my decision. “I’m on my way home,” I said, changing my plan, which was the standard plan for every night at that stage of my life: to find a party and meet the girl of my dreams.