A Simple Yet Functional Journal

mood: pensive

music: Life - Queen Latifah

I don't want to lj-cut this, but you may not all want to read this. Your choice.

This morning, nine years ago, I woke up to my father knocking on my bedroom door. He told me, "You should get up. Your mother died." I came downstairs, and looked into the study where she'd been sleeping (she hadn't been able to climb the stairs to the bedrooms for a long time." Someone, I don't remember who, mentioned she might have dislodged the oxygen tube in her sleep. I went into the living room.

I tidied, I think, and got dressed, and puttered around for nearly an hour before I just stopped where I was and started crying. My aunt (mom's sister) was there and held me for a while. Not long after, the people from the funeral home came and took her away. We'd always planned on cremation, but we had the embalming done as well because one of my brothers was at home and needed to drive back and we needed to give him a chance to have a last viewing.

Sometime that evening, I could nor bear to be in the house any longer and went out. I didn't know where I was going, and finally wound up in a coffee shop a few towns away. It was owned by a friend of my brother's and somehow he knew and they would not charge me for my coffee. I sat there until almost eleven-thirty, when I decided I could not bear to not be home for the New Year and drove home rather too fast. Fortunately, I suppose, the police watch for crazy driver's just after midnight and not before. I got home just before midnight, and we (I presume) watched the new year come in as a family.

That's nearly all I remember - just random moments with nothing connecting them. I don't know what I did after I got home.

A tore himself up a bit over not having been home. He'd been there for Christmas but had wanted to drop back home for a bit. He got the call while he was still on the road. We went with him to the viewing, a few days later. Mom was in clothes we'd picked for her and rather more makeup than she normally wore in colors she would never have worn. I was struck by the shell-pink lipstick. I suppose they have to do that for viewings.

The memorial service was not for over a month, because so many of her students wanted to come, and we had to wait for the holidays to be over to be able to notify them. I had to stifle near-hysterical laughter at one point at an odd hymn. When you are family, you sit in the very front and everyone stares at you, and I think helpless giggles would not have gone over well. I think of that every time they play that BNL song lyric "I'm the type of man who laughs at a funeral" because you can do that. N got all of one sentence into his memorial speech and had to hand it over to a friend to read (set up in advance, since we knew it would happen). I don't think I even tried.

That summer, we buried Mom's ashes at the house in New Hampshire, with very little ceremony. There's still a marker there. Some day, future generations will find the marker and wonder about it the way children wonder about things that do not touch them.

It was years before I stopped seeing things and thinking "I have to show that to Mom!" (followed by a shock of realization) and slipped more naturally to "Mom would've liked that." It was also years before I could attend a New Year's Party. I'm going to one tonight.

I think that's enough.