Life and Other Near-Death Experiences(2)

That’s why it was going to be such a bummer to tell him that while I’d been watching my kittens defecate all over the rainbow, I’d taken a wrong turn at happy and run smack-dab into a dead end.



As I speed walked through Dr. Sanders’s office and out to the elevator, I found myself thinking about funerals, as one will do when one learns one is not long for this world. I’d gone to a single funeral in my life, but afterward, I swore I would never attend another.

Because that funeral had been my mother’s.

At ten years old, Paul and I were too embarrassed to hold hands in front of other people, so we huddled together in a corner of the funeral home: he clasping the back of my dress, me grabbing at the corner of his suit. We watched our father greet this person, and reminisce with that one. Occasionally someone would approach the two of us to offer pat condolences, then quickly move on, all parties relieved that what needed doing was done. The chemical-scented air was suffocating. An eternity passed, then another. Finally someone gently pushed us to the front of the room where our mother’s body lay.

The funeral home was decorated like a small chapel, and we were instructed to sit in the front pew beside our father, entirely too close to the casket. I remember thinking that I could not feel my feet, and my hands and face were tingling as well, though my ears burned from the knowledge that everyone seated behind us was trying, and failing, not to stare at the remains of our family.

Our pastor took his place at the podium and began to pray, asking God to welcome “Phillip’s wife, and Paul and Elizabeth’s mother” to her heavenly home. I had a different request for the head of the Holy Trinity: I prayed that the tingling was a sign I was seriously unwell and would join my mother in very short order. I begged God to take me to her—the pre-cancer her, with a smile free of pain, reaching for my hand—because the only place I would ever want to be again was wherever she was.

My father said some words. A few other people spoke as well; I don’t remember who they were or what they said. And then the room was empty, and Paul was pulling at my dress, harder now, telling me it was time.

The casket was only partially open, as though the half of my mother’s body that ultimately killed her was not suitable for viewing. I told myself that if I didn’t look directly at her, none of it would be real, that this terrible experience was actually happening to someone else.

But I had to, because it was the last time in the world that I would ever see her face.

Even in death, skin coated in pancake makeup, cheeks over-rouged and now sunken when they’d been swollen and stretched in hospice just days before, she was the woman who had wiped my tears when I needed comforting, and cut my sandwiches into small squares just as I liked, and told me she would love me forever and ever and still even longer than that.

She was lovely. And I knew as I reached down to touch her softly, one more time, that anything that happened next in life simply could not be as unbearable as this good-bye.

I expected my father to scold me for touching her, but for the first time that day, he had let himself go and was weeping on his knees, oblivious to his children.

Paul was crying beside me. Now he took my hand and held it so tight that it hurt. I didn’t tell him to stop. We were just beginning to realize we were motherless children, and that we were all we had left.

By the time my father, Paul, and I got in the car to drive across the state for the burial, I had decided I’d had enough of funerals for one lifetime. It was a vow I almost kept: when distant relatives passed away, or a friend’s parent, or a colleague, I sent large bouquets and vague apologies for my absence.

But as the elevator doors outside Dr. Sanders’s office opened and I stepped into the plummeting metal box that would deposit me in the hospital lobby, it occurred to me that I could not keep the promise I had made to myself twenty-four years ago.

I would attend more than one funeral, after all. It just so happened that the second would be my own.





TWO


Then this happened:

“Tom? Tom?” I was crying so hard that my contacts had fallen out, and I couldn’t really tell if the blob hovering around the kitchen island was my husband.

The torrent of tears started the minute I left Dr. Sanders’s office; it was a miracle that I managed to make it from the maze-like medical building on Lake Shore Drive to Michigan Avenue and flag down a cab without being flattened by a bus. At nearly five o’clock on a Monday evening, it took half an hour to make it to our condo in Bucktown, and as every quarter mile passed, I became more distraught. When I thought of my life—as in the big-picture, full-screen version—this was not how the story ended. I still needed to learn Spanish and quit my job and see the world and maybe adopt a child or two (I couldn’t seem to get pregnant, for reasons my ob-gyn had yet to identify). The ashy particulates in the urn that would rest on our fireplace, which was soon to become just Tom’s fireplace (sob!), were supposed to be at least seventy years old, not thirty-four.

“Marriage troubles?” the cabdriver asked at one point, handing me a tissue. This made me cry even harder, because my beloved Tom would soon learn he was about to become a widower. Tom! So loving, so brave. He wouldn’t let me see him cry, but I could just imagine how I would wake in the middle of the night to find him weeping silently in front of his computer (he had insomnia and was often up until two or three in the morning). I felt worse for him than almost anyone, except for my dad and Paul, as they had already lived through my mother’s death. Even now, her absence was as palpable as a newly missing limb; all these years later, the three of us still hadn’t learned to balance or ignore the phantom ache.