I'm Glad My Mom Died(48)

“?‘To never have sunlight on your faaace…’?” A little heavy on the vibrato, but Mom’s into that sort of thing.

“Good, stop. I don’t wanna burn you out. Your performance peaks early. So are you gonna do it?”

I feel obligated. It’s Mom’s dying wish. The only problem is I don’t think I have the range to sing it. I’m okay in the verses where I can use my lower register. But once the song hits that soaring chorus, it’s way out of my range.

Back at my place, Mom asks me to pull the song up on YouTube so I can practice along and give her a taste of what the final performance will be.

“I thought you didn’t want to burn me out.”

“Well, we’re practicing so far ahead—hopefully—that it won’t matter.”

Mom’s pointed choice of words—or word, rather—hits me hard. Hopefully. I feel furious with her, then immediately guilty for feeling furious. I must be a terrible person to be able to feel fury at my mother while she’s slowly dying.

I throw the energy of my guilt into meeting Mom’s wish. Maybe that’ll clear my conscience. I pull up the song on YouTube, and another tab with the lyrics. And then I begin. The verse is, as expected, fine. But once I get to the “?‘Did you ever’?” part… it’s confirmed. Out of my range.

“Well, it’s because you didn’t do any vocal warm-ups,” Mom assures me. “Do some vocal warm-ups and try again.”

I do ten minutes of mee-may-moos before trying again. But then I try again and it’s the same issue. I try one more time, just to make sure.

“It’s out of my range,” I finally admit.

“Don’t say that,” Mom says sharply.

“I’m sorry.”

“You’ll get there. I know you’ll get there. You’ve got plenty of time to practice—hopefully.”

I don’t want to practice the song my dying mother has instructed me to sing at her funeral. I don’t want to think about my mother’s funeral. I want to go back to ignoring the things that make us uncomfortable to talk about. As much as I thought I hated it, I want to go back to pretending.

“Why don’t you just try it a couple more times tonight, sweetheart?” Mom urges as she removes her Ugg hat to scratch her bald head. On the surface, it seems like such a sad gesture, but I could swear she’s doing this manipulatively.

I click back to the beginning of the song. The twinkly 1980s intro starts. I try again.





47.


“YOU’RE GOING THE WRONG WAY,” I tell Grandpa over speakerphone as I watch him from my window.

“Woops.”

He pulls a 180 with Mom’s wheelchair and starts heading in the opposite direction. I’m looking down at them from the courtyard-facing window of my apartment. I chose this apartment for its view, or rather, for what’s not its view. The most desired units in the complex are the ones facing Sunset Boulevard, looking right out onto the bustling city. But there was no way I would’ve gone for one of those, because those complexes face Nickelodeon Studios, and plastered on the side of Nickelodeon Studios is a bright purple-and-yellow billboard for iCarly, complete with my fake smile and cheesy airbrushed hairdo. There was no way I was waking up every morning to face myself.

After a few wrong turns and elevator button pushes, Grandpa and Mom finally make it up to my unit. We chitchat for a few minutes over tea before heading back down to the parking structure so Grandpa can drive us to lunch.

“Where do you wanna go?” I ask. Please don’t say it, please don’t say it, please don’t—

“Wendy’s?” Mom suggests innocently.

“Sure,” I say through a tight smile. There’s nothing inherently wrong with Wendy’s. In fact, I’d go so far as to say there are several things inherently right with it. We’ve all tried the Frosty.

My tenseness isn’t coming from Wendy’s, it’s coming from Mom’s reasoning for suggesting Wendy’s. She knows I have money and could take her anywhere she’d like, and yet she chooses Wendy’s not because she likes it, but because she can go and tell her friends or fellow churchgoers how humble she is, how down-to-earth, that even on a day as special as her birthday, all she did was eat a side salad from a fast food restaurant.

This thing in Mom drives me nuts. This thing where she yearns to be pitied. She’s got stage four cancer, she’s already plenty pitied. She doesn’t need to throw Wendy’s on top of it.

Grandpa pulls out of the structure and gets to the first stoplight. The stoplight that sits directly in front of the giant, terrifying iCarly poster. I start organizing his messy back seat pockets out of anxiety. I pull out papers, crumpled-up receipts, dirtied napkins, and a copy of Sean Hannity’s Conservative Victory. Grandpa looks over his shoulder to see what I’m doing.

“You wanna borrow that? I’m done with it. Excellent read. Very excellent read.” He raps on his dashboard as punctuation.

“Maybe.” (No.)

“There she is!” Mom says as she snaps a photo of the giant poster with her disposable Kodak camera. She has at least a hundred photos of that same billboard.

As she takes the picture, the camera drops out of her hand and to the floor. I stretch down to pick it up, and by the time I sit upright with it, Mom’s convulsing. Her hands are clenched into tight little balls and her face is contorted so that one eye is squinted shut and her mouth is scrunched up entirely to one side. Her convulsing looks like the rocking of somebody in a mental hospital. I’m horrified.