by Sarah McColl
HE WAS FORGETFUL with grief. He didn’t remember anything she wanted, and when the funeral home asked about embalmment, he said that was fine, go ahead. It changed her. It made her smell sharp, like a biology classroom. “Can I see her?” I asked. “She doesn’t have any clothes on,” the men at the funeral home warned. “She hasn’t been made up. She’s just under a sheet.” As if that were not exactly what I wanted. This was the better time, when she felt more like she had been. But still it wasn’t her. I knew that as I bent down to hold her. She wasn’t there. Her body was hard and cold, and I nuzzled against her cheek and squinted my eyes to make the picture of her face a little fuzzier, because the face was wrong. It wasn’t right. I don’t know how else to say it. And I don’t know if it was the fluid they filled her veins with or if it was just that all the animation was gone. And when I’d close my eyes at night, that’s what I would see, that wrong face, that cold body. I tried so hard to remember the way she touched me, what it felt like when she was tucking the tag of my sweater inside the neckline or leaning down to kiss me good night. I love you, I’d say. I love you more, she’d answer, like it was a game I’d never win.
THE CLICHÉS ARE always embarrassing.
Like when I was sixteen and crazy about a boy who drove me to the seashore on our second date, then let my head nod onto his shoulder on the long drive home. I stood in the cafeteria the next day unable to sit at a table, my stomach too filled with fluttering to eat a sandwich. Butterflies. That boy is now a girl, I recently learned, and felt happy for her.
Grief is a mirror image of love.
At the funeral home, a man in a black suit told us where to send the obituary, and as he outlined the logistics, I wrote notes on a yellow legal pad taken from my stepfather’s office. I was proud to be so competent in a crisis. When the man in the black suit began to list nondenomination cemeteries, my stepfather interrupted, as if there were important information he needed to contribute to this conversation. He began to tell stories: how he met my mother in the Williamstown Second Congregational Church basement, how they found each other again at a college reunion, and their second, second date in Paris—four days in a two-star hotel during which they rarely left the room. “If I had my choice,” he finally said, “I’d keep her right here with my arm around her.” The man listened patiently with soft eyes. “Thank you,” I said about the cemeteries, “we’ll check them out.”
But as my stepfather and I left the building, I found I could not travel the distance to the sidewalk. My muscles went slack, and the scaffolding of my bones collapsed at the knee joint. On the front walk of the funeral home the afternoon my mother died, my stepfather held me until I could stand. I went weak in the knees, as they say.
IN THE CAR to scout our list of cemeteries, my stepfather said maybe we should put the funeral off for a month, maybe two. Dancing is Duncan’s romantic side, but he is the most practical among us. He works in insurance and is able to say things no one else will. “There will never be a good time,” he said. “Better to get it over with.”
My husband wanted to pay the rush fees for our divorce.
“It is a cliché that the man wants a quick divorce,” my mother had told me on the phone, “and then after it is said and done reconsiders.”
But now I could understand: I did not want my mother’s body hanging around for a month or two.
My husband and I split the cost, and I wrote him a check for four hundred dollars. He did not reconsider.
Lower Amwell Cemetery was windswept, with an empty, unlocked one-room shed with a broken window. This isn’t right, my stepfather said. He lifted his chin to the grass on the far side of a low stone wall. A lawyer he wasn’t crazy about owned the adjacent field. We opened the car doors, closed them again. My brother drove. The sky was ash gray.
When we turned into Sandy Ridge Cemetery, the car pointed straight toward a tall, upturned conifer. This wouldn’t do either.
“Your mother hated red cedars,” my stepfather said. The announcement was like a love letter to intimacy and to knowing, and it made me laugh. “Well, that won’t do,” I said. My brother rolled on between the headstones and out toward the exit.
One thing she didn’t hate: Mexican barrel chairs. I knew that. Years before, when I was moving into my first Brooklyn apartment, we found a disintegrated pair at a garage sale on Kingwood-Stockton Road, directly across the street from Rosemont Cemetery. I bought a wrought iron fireplace screen to hang above my bed as a makeshift headboard and two glass decanters etched SCOTCH and GIN. She did not buy the chairs. They would have worked in Texas, she explained, but that was her old life. They no longer suited the style of her house now. It was my turn. I would waste sunny Saturdays with the man who would become my husband, gripping my fingers around the wrought iron scrolls.
“That’s a marvelous redbud tree,” my stepfather said at the third cemetery. It was in full bloom, the same electric fuchsia as the branches outside their bedroom windows. He sat on a bench dedicated to the memory of someone else. “I can sit here,” he said, patting the empty wood slats beside him. He took two plots, side by side.
FAMILIAR COUNTRY SIGHTS: mice skittering across the pantry floor, snakes silent and sleepy in the garden, and silverfish leggy against the bathroom tile. Yet there was an unfamiliar country sound as I went to sleep that first night at the farm. The ruckus in my childhood bedroom was a trapped bird, beating wings and feathers. It was so out of place, so unexpected, like a clown waiting at the bus stop. I shut the door, though part of me knew this was cruel, and slept in my little brother’s empty room. I was tired of thinking about others. I had never been so tired.
By morning, I choked awake with the memory of a body beneath a white quilt. Then my husband on the telephone. We hadn’t spoken since the night he stuffed shirts and underwear in his laptop bag. It had been another season. “I thought she was getting better,” he said, his voice blank with shock.
Time to deal with the bird. It would have been months since anyone had ventured beyond the sick rooms of the house: master bedroom for sleep, TV room for couch naps, kitchen for cups of tea. However long it had been trapped, this bird had managed to shit everywhere. On the blue and white Laura Ashley duvet cover, on the antique folding desk, on the changing table my mother had seen by the side of the road while driving home with my stepfather after lunch years before. Stop! she said, as soon as white spindle legs and a cardboard sign that read FREE came into view. She threw it in the backseat for a grandchild who had yet to be conceived.
While the bird flew from one corner of the room to the other, landing atop the tall bookshelves stacked with watercolor palettes and a hand-painted Japanese tea set, I threw open the window above the changing table. My two-year-old niece’s unworn diapers were now splattered gray-green. And then—after all that furious flapping and wing beating, of crumpling collision into the ceiling and walls—this bird found its way out. It sailed through the open window with the purposeful ease of a button slipping through its hole. The room was suddenly still, and the panicked pace of my heart slowed in the quiet. It was time to mop.
“I still think Murphy Oil Soap is one of the finest smells in the world,” my mother wrote at the end of an email that spring, apropos of nothing. Her houses had always been a wreck; Murphy Oil Soap was the fragrance of making things right. So I pushed and pulled the perfumed mop across the wide-planked wood floor with alternating fury and exhaustion. I dragged the bucket around the room, its water turning opaque as it filled with long, stray hairs from my sister’s head and mine and dust puffs like season’s-end dandelions. And then I found it. On the waxed floorboards beneath a west-facing window, another bird’s body, stiff as a Christmas ornament.
This was country life. But that morning, it felt like something else—an uncanny death pileup, a haunting. The wooden mop handle slapped the floor. I went downstairs and returned with a white tea towel from a kitchen drawer. I wrapped the body and carried it down the long driveway, past my mother’s orde
r of peony bulbs and rhubarb plants collected on the porch, still in their brown packages. On the far side of the road, I opened the cotton bundle to drop the bird in its open grave and—who knows, maybe from blood or the stiff catch of its feathers or dried, brittle feet—the bird stuck to the towel. I stood on the side of the road, the one that led to the sloping graveyard where my mother would soon be buried, shaking the cotton fabric. The bird wouldn’t fall free from its shroud or my hands, until finally, it did. It landed with the ceremony of another day’s newspaper tossed onto the front step.
THEY ARRIVED WITH mops and buckets, yellow rubber gloves, vacuum cleaners, plastic caddies filled with cleaning products. My mother had been reading, and not reading, in a book club for more than a decade. Actually, she had been a member of two book clubs, each group discovering the other at the funeral like a secret family. That sunny morning, they walked toward me standing on the porch.
“Your mother would have wanted you to be comfortable in the house,” one of her friends said. She had tried to send a cleaning lady over in the last months, but my mother had demurred, either embarrassed by the state of things or simply not wanting a stranger to rearrange what was, at least to her, the familiar order of her own chaos. “It was important to her the house be ready for you kids.”
My mother had used that phrase a lot in the last year of her life, that she wanted to “get the house ready,” that she wanted it to be “finished.” She searched Craigslist for furniture and drove an hour to pick up free chairs upholstered in a dusty-red fabric she liked. When Bliss came home for six weeks between teaching jobs, she asked him to refinish the kitchen floors. He spent hot days on all fours, sanding small, hard-to-reach places by hand, and painted three different stains in side-by-side stripes for her to select the best shade. When she peeked into the kitchen to survey his progress, he wrapped his arms around her shoulders. They swayed back and forth while they talked, as if in the gym of a middle school dance.
The book club stayed for hours, the music of their caretaking filling the house: the rhythmic motions of the vacuum back and forth over the rugs, their feet up and down the stairs, the opening and closing of closet doors, the laundry room rumbling with what would soon be clean sheets on each bed. Murphy Oil Soap perfumed each room. When their work was finished, they gathered together in the living room and bowed their heads. Allison, they said.
THE FUNERAL HOME asked me to return with a bag of clothes for her to wear. The forever outfit. I chose the pink crocheted dress she wore to both my brother’s and sister’s weddings. “Crotch-et-ed,” she had called it, imitating the saleswoman. Pompoms hung from the sleeves and the hem of the skirt, and she would shimmy whenever she wore it, shake her hips to show how the pink pompoms could bounce and bop. This span of time is liminal and uncanny: A person is dead but their body is present, and so we relate to it in the ways we always have. My stepfather said pack a pair of underwear for her to wear, too. “But she never wears underwear with hose,” I said, and he said pack them anyway, it seemed like the right thing to do. When I told my sister what I’d done, she must have also thought of our mother’s body as if it were alive, the comfort we still wanted to give it, how she would go into the ground wearing underwear she never would have worn in this life. “Poor girl,” my sister said. I packed shoes, too: leopard flats with pink trim.
She left no instructions, just the snippets of things she’d mentioned in passing. I remembered the plain pine box and the honeysuckle bush. All the other choices were for us, not her. That I wanted her to wear a swipe of her favorite lipstick and to spray her with Ralph Lauren’s Safari one more time, that Rick wanted her to wear underwear. And when I was upset about the embalming, which she didn’t want, Jenny reminded me what my mother would have said in her high-pitched singsong. After that, every decision got easier. Sarah, I don’t care. I’m dead!
One of those afternoons between death and funeral, when my sister had arrived and was changing her daughter’s diaper by a bedroom window, a bee buzzed up to the panes of glass and hovered there. “Mom used to call Violet her little bumble bee,” Katy told me. When I was in the bathroom that same day, I said, splashing water on my red swollen eyes and already wet cheeks, the lights wouldn’t stop flickering. “Okay,” I said, “okay,” nodding at the light so hard, soapsuds still on my face. They are nonsense coincidences; they are messages from beyond. Both true.
My sister was very concerned about what the funeral directors would do to her face. “Call them,” she said, “you have to.” I called from a PNC Bank parking lot. She didn’t wear makeup except lipstick and mascara, I told them, so please don’t use anything else. They told me about how her skin color would start to change. Maybe a little bit of blush then, I said. Sometimes you find yourself saying things you never imagined you’d have to say.
It took Bliss several days to fly home from China, which made the embalming seem sort of okay in the end. You put four kids in a car, and it feels like a party, even when you are going to see your mother one last time before she is dropped into the earth. Duncan drove. He is very left brained and logical, the savior of the unsayable again. He said, “Okay, who has seen a body in this state before?” I think he and I were the only ones who raised our hands. I loved him for asking that question.
The funeral home dressed her. I don’t like to think about that. I brought her perfume and sprayed under the ugly blanket they covered her with and behind her ears, so that when each of us hugged her, it would feel more familiar. “Her perfume was a good idea,” my sister said. “That was the realest part for me.” My little brother stood over her body and read her a letter. Then he collapsed on her chest. I’d never seen him like that. Or my older brother, who, when he walked away from her body, doubled over and pressed his fingers to his eyes. My stepfather kissed her face again and again. My two brothers and my stepbrother and my sister and my stepfather and I stood in a tacky room while morose music played. I sprayed more of her perfume.
My sister turned to me. “I prefer the bumble bee,” she said.
I GATHERED BLOOMING BRANCHES of lilac and white dogwood from the fence at the edge of the farm and carried them to the cemetery. It’s good to wear red shoes on important days, my mother had said. The heels I’d worn to college commencement sank into the soft May soil. I had worn a different pair on my wedding day.
The day was clearbright, cloudless and blue, and my family stood circling a deep pit on a hillside. A pine box was suspended over the hole, and I thought about her bones blunted against the wood. Against the dark earth, the pine was pale and pretty in the sunlight, like the white of an ocean wave.
When my niece began to cry, my sister gathered her into her lap and began to breast feed. I stood alone in the sun, only blossoms in my arms to hold. The minister read Edna St. Vincent Millay. My mother had carried a paperback of her poems to college. How incredible, the coincidence, I had thought. Now, I pity that girl on the hillside. She is so desperate for signs. Who doesn’t read the sonnet that begins “I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground”?
The talking finished, and there was not much, my family members took the lilac and dogwood branches from me one at a time and placed them on the lid of the casket. One blew off in the breeze. Someone picked it up and placed it gingerly again. The second time it fell off, they didn’t bother. I laid my branches and grabbed a handful of dirt and placed it on top of the pale casket. That looked pretty to me, too, the black rubble of earth against the bare sanded surface.
THE PLAN WAS to sing Anne Murray, but Bliss warned me he would not be able to harmonize, despite our practice. My voice cracked at the first line. People smile and tell me I’m the lucky one. He joined in. My niece spilled her Cheerios on the creaky oak floor. Even though we ain’t got money, I’m so in love with you honey. The full-throated voice of a woman surprised me. It was me and not me. It reverberated on the wood pews.
I cried in the white wooden church, and later, eating a ham sandwich.
“I am realizing,” I told one of my mother’s friends, whom I had never met, “that having a mother who loves you is a lucky stroke, like being born beautiful or rich.”
“Arguably,” she said, “a mother who loves you is the best advantage.”
TO MYSELF I called it a “roiling” grief. I knew no other word to describe how I heaved: at the steering wheel, lying sleepless in bed at night, in the arms of anyone who paused long enough to offer a sympathetic look. The emotions were a testament and comfort. Feeling is living to me, to me, too. When the fit would end, I was hollowed out, scooped clean. Ready again to be full.
My therapist suggested group grief counseling, but I shook my head at the idea. Someone else might know loss, but no one could understand mine. My grief was special, singular, as all are, unknowable by anyone who had not also belonged to my mother by birth. Even among my siblings, we each had our separate ways.
Six months after her death, a relative by marriage approached me at a party and began to cry. I knew him as the man who used to sit with my mother in the kitchen after Thanksgiving dinner when he’d had too much to drink. Once, as I cut a second slice of pecan pie, I saw him lean close and whisper how much he loved sex, how he loved to get sweaty.
She had made him feel so understood, he said.
“You think you’re special?” I asked.
ANOTHER FRIEND WROTE another book and hosted an event in a Brooklyn bookstore. The tables were crowded with her hardbacks, cupcakes, and Champagne flutes. My friend wore a stylish dress with an architectural detail at the neckline that seemed to say I am a serious literary author. Her hair had been blown out, and there were no empty seats. “It’s so amazing to see all these people from different times in my life in one place,” she said from the podium. She looked around the full room and leaned into the slim microphone. “Hi, former boss. Hi, ex-boyfriend,” she joked. Her face was bright. I felt so proud of her and so happy. One day my name would be written on the chalkboard propped outside on the sidewalk. Tonight, 7 p.m.! My dress would have some kind of cool neckline, too. Then she stopped scanning the room, and her eyes settled on a face. From the back, I could see a sleek gray bob, the stiff collar of a starched shirt, a red silk scarf. It was her biggest smile yet. “Hi, mom.” I was glad I could not see her face. I was glad my friend could not see mine. “You guys, she came all the way from Ohio.”