We are gathered together, family both immediate and extended, a clutch of close friends. My mother is in a casket, of sorts. It’s actually an industrial strength cardboard box. She’s been transferred to the box and lay inside, surrounded by dry ice. She’s frozen. Solid. She’s a momsickle. And we’re here to cremate her body, finally. Its been a draining, exhausting seven weeks, no one more exhausted than my mother, who finally gave up the struggle to lung cancer four nights ago.
Since then, its been a bizarre, disorienting emotional roller-coaster as those who loved her have laughed, cried, anguished and some of us, visited awake in the predawn hours by my mother’s spirit. Her latest visitation “from over there” my uncle likes to say with a wry smile and nod-up of the head, was to inform a woman who never met her to gather family and friends for a wake of sorts.
The woman tells my father this at six-thirty a.m. on a cool, bright Colorado morning. Estranged for thirty years, my mother apparently felt compelled to have her former husband see to a few last minute details for her. That’s mom--always including everyone. The woman is both apologetic and dumbfounded. She never met my mother, but worked in the same building. While the soap slid off her body in wet slimy sheets during her morning shower, she said her head was suddenly “filled with a movie--narrated by Louisa”.
The “message” says to bring Bushmill’s whisky (my dad’s favorite for some time, who says time doesn’t heal all?) and red roses. Lots of red roses. Her brother, a frail, dark-haired Spanish wizard of a man laughs when he hears this. “I told her the Navajo put flowers in the grave--so their relations would walk on petals in the afterlife--she always loved that story”. He laughs again, a high, thin laugh that shakes his whole body. His face lights up and we all laugh.
Now, two days after our “wake” we are here to say a final goodbye to the husk, which housed her for sixty-six years. We’ve prayed, done Buddhist ceremonies and cried. Cried so much that if anyone else wants to shed a tear we’ll have to get some Fed Ex’d to us – we’re all cried out. There are no more prayers. Louisa’s spirit has stopped making house calls. We can say goodbye.
But the morticians aren’t moving. They’re whispering in too-loud voices. Something’s wrong. “Problem?”. I ask. They exchange worried glances--a tacit, morticians “rock-paper-scissors”. The loser, a mid-forties death-clerk takes a breath, coughs nervously. “Her jewelry--state law prohibits us from cremating her with her jewelry on”.
Nobody says a word. We kind of decked mom out in her favorite rings and bangles thinking they’d make the trip with her. “We’ll have to remove them--unless you’d like to...”. I glance around the room--no one in my family would like to apparently. I can’t blame them. We’ve spent four days with my mother’s decomposing body, the sweet heavy smell of death now coating our every cell. Everyone’s gone just about as far as they can on this voyage--time to head for home. But since we’ve come this far...
I nod to the mortician who actually seems relieved. I’m about to find out why. I reach down alongside my mother’s frozen body and find her arm. It feels like a branch in the winter, stiff and lifeless, hands balled up and still. I feel her fingers, they are tiny, thin, preserved. I cup her wrist in my hand and pull it towards me--her whole body moves to the side a bit. She is of course, hard and cold as a rain-soaked sidewalk. And now I see the dilemma. In order to remover the rings and bangles, I’ll have to force her cold, frozen fingers free.
As I move her arm back and her body is once again horizontal a wisp of knowing moves through the room. Now they get it, too. And now, with complete certainly, no one would like to be involved. My personal macabre meter reached “tilt” long ago and though this is a new high, or low on my all-time weird list, grief has long given way to a kind of giddy, humorous disbelief. I mean, really--how much more fucked up can it get? I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing. Then I wrench my mother’s cold arm-stick up in one quick motion. It gives way somewhere at the shoulder and rises from dry-ice mist in to view.
In a way, this is awesomely bizarre beyond words--I would so dare anyone in the Addams family to top this. I firmly take my mother’s preserved fingers and force them straight, sliding off each ring. By now, I’m in to the rhythm of it and am satisfied at my own handiwork. The last ring is pulled over her hard, small finger-knuckle and I raise the gold like some deep-sea diver hoisting up the final nugget of booty surrendered by the deep.
My family looks on in awe, shock and final, silent confirmation. Despite the mood, the circumstance and the sheer madness of it all, the moment is just too perfect and I cannot resist. I look around the room slowly and with confidence as I remove the latex gloves, snapping them off professionally “I’m afraid that’s all I can do for her”. My brother shakes his head and suppress a giggle. My girlfriend who will someday be my wife and mother to our precious daughter, nods and smiles--she’s loves that I am both freak and saint, sinner and devil cursed with all, but blessed with innate, perfect unpracticed comic timing.
As we leave the mortuary, we look up to the chimney which coughs thick, curling dark clouds up and in to the inverted-ocean blue sky. Louisa. “Oh no” I say, “Now she’s everywhere”. We go to breakfast and cannot figure out what to say as the perky waitress asks “what’s everyone up to this morning?”. Between bouts of quasi-hysterical laughter, we manage to order a table full of pancakes, omelets, bacon and endless rivers of coffee.
We laugh and eat like lumberjacks. I eat and eat and eat knowing the empty feeling will never be gone, not now. I eat anyway. After twenty minutes I sit up, take a deep breath and look out the window. Endless Colorado sky blue to the edge of nowhere. Except for a few dozen cloud-puffs. I look again. They float buoyantly and I cannot help but notice about a dozen of them resemble small rose petals. Laid out across the sky so perfectly you could walk on them.
