The morning after my mother’s death I woke up to a world changed beyond recognition. Hanging in that world as though suspended in water were my father and my brother. We met in the new blank space of the kitchen and ate a silent breakfast. The silence was not one of anger or even of sadness; it was a strange pervasive silence almost like snow, a silence that coated everything and took away the shapes and forms, like the silence of the newly deaf. Without breaking that silence, we talked about what needed to be done. I agreed to phone my mother’s friends. Freddy agreed to go with my father to identify the body. My father called to make the technical arrangements for the funeral. We agreed to meet at noon to make together whatever decisions we needed to make together.
It is often said that there is nothing so terrible as to be the bearer of bad news, but this is untrue. Every time you convey some sorrow of your own, you are borne up by the dismay you bring to other people, which makes your own sensations fuller and more rounded. It is painful to make others sad, but their sadness also places and contains and validates your sadness. I called all my mother’s friends and many of my own friends that morning. I did not chat with anyone; I gave the news to each of these people and explained that I had many calls to make, and hung up almost at once. This telephoning was a powerful business: I felt that I reached into each of these men and women and brought forth their grief. Of course everyone was shocked, everyone but the very closest members of my mother’s inner circle. “But last week,” they all said, “at the party,” they all said, and I said only that she had died quietly and at home and as she had wanted to die.
That afternoon, we went to the funeral home to choose a coffin. There were dozens of designs available, and the choice reminded me of shopping for furniture with my mother; I could hear her voice criticizing busy designs and fussy craftsmanship. Freddy and I walked through the display room, and at last I saw a coffin of very simple design, made of beautifully grained wood, highly polished, with elegantly finished corners. It reminded me of the piano at home. I said I thought it was the right one, and my father and Freddy conceded that it was. Then the director of the funeral home (how do people become the directors of funeral homes, I wondered) took us into his office and said that everything would be taken care of and that the coffin would be brought to the chapel where the funeral was to take place. He asked whether we wanted to have flowers at the funeral.
“Oh, yes,” said my father. “She would have wanted lots of flowers.”
The director of the funeral home suggested calla lilies.
I said that my mother had always hated calla lilies.
“I like calla lilies,” my father said, but Freddy pitched in with me.
“Mom used to say they were the ugliest flowers on earth,” he said. “Like plastic coffee filters.”
The director of the funeral home wondered whether we had any other particular ideas, and brought out a book with glossy photographs of funeral wreaths.
I looked at Freddy and he looked at me. “Pink peonies,” I said. “The only flowers for this funeral should be pink peonies.”
The funeral director asked no further questions about the peonies. He wrote down our instructions. He wondered in what clothes we wanted to bury my mother.
My father broke down at that point. “She had such beautiful clothes,” he said. “We have closets and closets full of clothes at home. What clothes? How can we possibly choose clothes?”
But I had seen this question coming for a long time. I put my hand on my father’s arm. “I’ll take care of it,” I said.
“Thank you,” my father said, and stared off into space for a minute.
I assured the director of the funeral home that I would bring the clothes up later in the afternoon.
We arranged all the other details and returned home. I went into my mother’s enormous closet and found among the hundreds of dresses and suits and skirts and blouses the dress she had worn to my party, the black dress with the trails of brilliant flowers falling down it, like fresh snowflakes or chance tears, flowers in red and blue and pink. I picked out a pair of stockings and black shoes and put them all together in a bag and took them up to the funeral home.
Then we all sat down to write eulogies. Freddy had done a lot the previous evening, while my mother lay dying. I had sketched out drafts of one kind or another on and off during the preceding six months, but they all seemed banal to me. My father headed back to his bedroom to sit in the red chair and write.
“I suppose we should ask someone to read these at the funeral,” he said in passing.
“I’m going to read my own,” said Freddy.
I wavered.
“I couldn’t possibly stand up there and read,” said my father.
“I’m going to read my own,” said Freddy. “If you want me to, I’ll read yours, too.”
“If you’re sure you can do that,” said my father, “then you might as well. But I wouldn’t plan on that. Funerals are terrible. I don’t know how I can even get through the day.”
I wavered. Freddy looked at me. “I’ll do yours if you want, Harry,” he said.
I said that I would have to wait until the morning to decide. “If I can, I’ll read my own,” I said. “If not, I’ll let you do it.”
Then I sat down and wrote my eulogy. It was four pages long, double-spaced, and it was about my whole life with my mother, and it took me fifteen minutes to get it down on paper. It was like typing out something I had memorized a long time before.
• • •
I took sleeping pills again that night, and woke up the next morning with a start. Friday, the day of my mother’s funeral, was my mother’s kind of day, pure springtime, the sun bright and strong and the skies clear with a few tiny puffy clouds scattered down near the horizon as though their sole function were to underscore the extreme blue of the heavens. My father was weeping in the kitchen when I went in to make tea. Freddy was being stoical. I took a long shower and got dressed carefully. I had found the shirt I had had made for my party, that I had forgotten to wear ten days earlier, and I wore it that day. My gold watch had been repaired, and I wore that as well. During breakfast, I reread my eulogy, and I read my father’s, and I read Freddy’s. None of them was as simple or pure as my mother’s last words, but they were just as urgent.
We were to fight and argue, the three of us, through much of the summer that followed, but on the day of my mother’s funeral we could not let go of one another. My father’s misery was so terrible and so immediate that neither Freddy nor I could look away from it even for a minute, though it also weighed on me to feel that I had to support a grief besides my own. Freddy and I walked on either side of my father as we headed down for the funeral. We went through the great bronze doors with the merciless faces of Old Testament sages carved in them, and we passed through the main sanctuary, and we came to the chapel where the funeral was to take place. I had made perhaps fifty telephone calls the day before, but sad news travels with astonishing speed. Hundreds of people had come to the funeral. All my mother’s old friends were there, and all of my friends, and all of Freddy’s friends. People who worked with my father were there. Janet was there, and Robert, and the man who used to do my mother’s hair, and the woman who did her nails, and the seamstress who altered her clothes, and the doctors who had got to know her during her illness. The children of her friends were there, and the parents of some of my friends, and people with whom I had worked, and people with whom Freddy had worked. Friends of my grandmother’s, people I had thought long dead, were gathered in a few pews near the back. Our relations were there, even the cousins whose names I could never keep straight. It was a sea of faces. “She was so wonderful,” I heard, and, “She was so kind to me,” and, “What a magical woman she was.” Of course, people do say those things at funerals, even at the funerals of people who are not wonderful and not kind and not magical, but I believed then and believe now
that that mass of people had come to the funeral because they had all, in fact, been touched by my mother; and I wondered as I looked around at them where my mother had found the time to be so wonderful and kind and magical to so many.
The three of us stumbled up to the front row of the chapel, and after various people had come up to us and embraced us, the funeral began. I looked up at the soaring pilasters and at the high points of the ceiling and at the dark colors of the stained glass. I heard the beginning of the service. I thought it was impossible that my mother could be in the polished wood coffin at the front of the room, under its wreaths of pink peonies. I noticed that the peonies were not as pink or as full as the ones we had had for the party, and realized that I should not have let the funeral home arrange for the flowers. I noticed that the coffin seemed short, as though they would have had to crunch up my mother to fit her in, but I decided that this was probably an optical trick played by its proportions.
We were approaching the eulogies. My father wept steadily, and his breath came in sudden gasps. He looked sideways at me.
“You aren’t going to be able to read a eulogy,” he said. “Let Freddy do it.”
I didn’t say anything. Lofty religious words floated over our heads. The time arrived. Freddy stood up. “Are you coming?” he whispered to me.
As I looked up at the pulpit from which we were to read, I had a sudden image in my mind, so clear that the Gothic arches and the stained glass and the hundreds of mourners seemed to disappear. I saw my mother, dressed in the same dress she was wearing inside that closed coffin. I saw her walking up that long flight of stairs at my party. She was not leaning on anyone. With—as it had turned out—a tumor almost entirely obstructing her digestive tract, and another one wrapped around her spine, with a body ravaged from chemotherapy and lack of food, with a grasp on life as fragile as memory itself, she was climbing one step at a time, and as she climbed she was laughing and laughing and laughing. I saw her rope of big pearls swinging back and forth, and then I saw how her eyes lit up when they caught mine, and how she stopped laughing to smile, that particular smile that was my smile, that smile that had never changed, that she had smiled at me since before I had begun to remember. In that moment my funeral tears stopped. Then I reached further back, to my childhood, and I heard her saying, “When the time comes, you do what’s necessary. You do what’s appropriate. You do what’s right. That’s part of what it means to grow up, Harry.” And I felt that I owed it to her, at the very least, to stand up myself and say to all these hundreds and hundreds of people what she and I had always known and they, perhaps, had not.
So Freddy and I walked up together, and climbed the steps to the pulpit. We held on to each other as we climbed those steps. I thought of my mother telling us, when we were little, that she had had two children so they could love each other. “If you boys don’t stop squabbling, I’m going to leave you on the steps of the foundling home,” she would sometimes say in exasperation. I thought how pleased she would have been to see us together in this way. “Don’t worry,” Freddy said to me. “If you have a problem, just pass yours to me and I’ll finish for you.”
But I didn’t have a problem. I had dreaded having to stand up in front of everyone, without some genius composer’s music to shield me, but once I was there I wanted the time to last forever. I had been told that my mother was in the coffin down below me, but in the deepest part of my mind she was just where she had said she would be, sitting on my shoulder. I spoke slowly and with great certainty, giving each word as much weight as I could. The party the previous week had been so joyful as to be almost a lie: there had been no space at it for the terrible grief and anguish of my family. This funeral was so sad as to be again a lie: I needed to bring into it some of that quality of joy that my mother had brought to me and to all these others. I spoke for less than five minutes, and it was no time at all, but it was also a time as long as eternity.
Then Freddy read his eulogy, and I noticed that he had captured things about my mother that I had not captured. And then he read my father’s eulogy, which was not so much about my mother’s character or qualities; it was like the scream of a wounded animal, long and relentless, the scream my mother had not produced when she died.
• • •
Helen came along to the grave site, and after the burial, when they had lowered my mother into the earth, I turned and saw Helen through the glistening air, and I heard again my mother saying to me, “Helen is a good friend.” I could not demand more comfort from my father or my brother because they were busy demanding comfort of their own, but I could turn to Helen and collapse, and so I did that. Helen came back to the apartment with us, and she stayed almost all the time during the weekend, while we received mourners. People poured and shifted through the house. My father wept in front of everyone, and I disliked that intensely. Freddy and I comported ourselves like hosts, and introduced people to each other, and made sure that everyone was comfortable. Every night, when the people left, my father would tell us, Freddy and me, that we had to stay to help him to get on with his life. “You can move back into this apartment,” he told me.
I said I would stay through the weekend, and that beyond that I would not even consider it.
He told me that I was selfish and impossible.
I told him that he was selfish and hateful.
Freddy told us that we had to stop battling. He reminded me that I had promised my mother that I would help to take care of my father.
I said that I would take care, but that I would not go on sleeping in that apartment.
Like an old man, my father shuffled back to the room in which my mother had died a few days earlier, the only room he had to sleep in, and lay down by himself in that big double bed. It was as though he were locking himself inside a shell.
And I went into my old room, to sleep. As I waited for sleep, halfway to dreams, I thought that a part of me had been ripped out of my body. I know that science has appointed the brain as the seat of all our emotion, but the dull ache of loss has never sounded around my head in the small hours of the night. It is in my chest that it speaks, and it is around my lungs and in the coursing of my blood that I feel as though I am being torn apart. In that half-conscious state, it was not my mind that had been yanked so unceremoniously from my body, but my heart; and when I woke up the next morning, it was in my chest that I seemed to be missing some crucial part of myself, and to be no more than a shadow of what and who I had been.
• • •
Sunday saw the last of the condolence callers. That night, when all the people had left, I packed my things to go back to my own apartment and I went into my parents’ room to say goodbye. My father was sitting on the bed, his bed, and looking at my mother’s handbag, which she had left sitting next to her night table, where it had always been. Either Freddy or Janet had come in over the weekend and closed the book that had been open beside her bed, and put away the glasses that had sat on top of it, but the handbag was just where she had left it.
“Look at that,” said my father.
I was going to meet Helen and she was going to come down and help me settle back into my own apartment. I thought I would explode if I didn’t leave soon. The walls were pressing close; I saw that if I stayed with my father, I would become as old and as lonely as he. That prospect enraged me. I picked up the handbag and put it on the bed.
My father put his hand on the bag.
I picked it up and turned it upside down and shook it, so that everything in it fell onto the bed. My mother’s wallet, her silver pillbox, her lace handkerchief, a square powder compact with an amethyst on it, a few blue felt-tipped pens, a couple of photographs, her ring of keys: all these things went tumbling onto the bedspread; and with the others came also, to my astonishment, the diamond pin that had been my grandmother’s.
My father and I both stared at it.
“That’s the one she t
hought she’d lost,” said my father.
“That’s it,” I said.
We looked at it again, as though it were a meteor fresh from the outer reaches of the galaxy.
“Freddy,” I called, and Freddy came running in from his room. “Look,” I said.
Freddy looked down at the bed. “What do you know,” he said. “It’s that pin. So it didn’t go to the dry cleaner after all.” He leaned over and picked it up. “Remember how Grandma used to wear this all the time?” he said. “When I think of Grandma, I think of her in this pin.”
My father began to cry again. “If we could only let her know that we’d found it,” he said.
Freddy crossed the room to put it away, and he opened my mother’s jewelry box. Placed neatly on the tray that held her everyday earrings, the top tray in the box, were three envelopes. One was addressed to me, one to Freddy, and one to my father. It was Sunday night. The condolence calls were over, and we were about to begin the struggle of life without my mother. We found her letters all together; it was as though she had planned this detail, too.
To me and to Freddy she said what she had said before she died. She told us that she loved us and that we had to get on with our lives. To my father, she wrote simply this: “My dearest Leonard: What a sweet life we had together. How happy you made me. You made me feel beautiful, you made me feel cherished, you made me feel safe and protected. Above all you gave me the bliss of knowing always that I loved and was loved. You are in my heart always.”
A Stone Boat Page 27