Amelia, who is trained as a birth doula, seems to know better what to do. She lights candles and incense in my mom’s room. She changes the water for all the cut flowers, culls the wilted ones. She rubs lotion into my mom’s hands, performs some Reiki. “I’m really feeling her presence,” she says at one point.
I can’t feel her at all. I try to talk to her when everyone leaves the room, but I have no idea what to say. “You don’t have to do this anymore,” I try. She rouses and almost seems to glare at me—bewildered, annoyed. As if I would be doing this if I knew how to stop, she seems to say with her eyes.
Heartbeat and pulse may be irregular. Gurgling and congestion—known as the death rattle—are common and often more distressing for the caregiver than uncomfortable for the patient. She may seek—or demand—“permission” to go.
Three and a half hours later, back at my house, my phone wakes me.
“I think you need to come right now,” Charlie is saying.
“Why?” I ask, my brain stubbornly playing dumb. My toes grope the floor for sandals and I clip my mastectomy drain to a fresh T-shirt and I run out into the warm night.
2. What You’re Afraid to Do
Back when I graduated from high school, one of my father’s cousins gave me a copy of an extremely readable book of anecdotes called Emerson in Concord, written by my great-great grandfather about his legendary father.
One of my favorite parts is the revelation that Emerson’s famous aphorism Always do what you are afraid to do was actually an admonition from his fierce Aunt Mary, who helped his mother raise the children after his father died when RWE was eight.
Emerson passed along this advice to his own children, and they to theirs. And here it finds me standing in my parents’ doorway in Greensboro. Walk into the house where her dead body waits. Watch your father weep.
Enter the scene. Imagine it as your own.
3. Something New Is About to Begin
A couple hours after the sun rises on the morning she dies, we leave my mom’s body on the bed in her room and go for a walk to look at St. Mary’s House, the little clapboard chapel around the corner where we are thinking we’ll hold the memorial service. It’s an Episcopal campus ministry—and more of a cozy one-room house than a traditional church. Twelve years ago, I gave my graduate thesis poetry reading there—my parents snug on a couch watching me in the front row.
My mom left conflicting instructions on the subject of her funeral. Do anything. Do whatever you want. Do nothing. It’s not like I’m going to be there.
Later: Well, don’t do nothing. And if you decide to toss my ashes into the ocean make sure the tide is going out, not coming in. And I’d really like Mark and Anne to sing something. And someone to say something. And, Nina, I want you to read that poem you wrote about you and me arguing in Italy.
Even later: Forget it. Do whatever you want. Just do something nice.
The only thing she was consistent on: cremation. Do not let me rot in the ground!
I take a selfie waiting in the driveway for the others to come outside: portrait of cancer patient with dead mother. Months later, scrolling back through my pictures, right after the ones I took of her body—her anemic arms covered in deep bruises, her eerily blissful face—I discover that out of instinct I’ve smiled widely for the camera.
As we walk away from the house into the August morning it feels like we are passengers straggling out of the wreckage of a plane crash. We are weirdly giddy, not good company for anyone but ourselves—delirious, shattered, and still under the spell of the gallows humor we’ve become as dependent on as oxygen in the final weeks to stay sane.
“It’s okay to leave her, right?” my dad asks.
“I think so,” says Amelia. “I mean, what’s the worst that could happen?”
It is the fantasy you have about your newborn after a particularly ruthless night—stepping outside, locking the door, and just walking quietly away from it all—only we actually do it.
Friday morning in late summer: School has just gone back into session, and, in the collegey neighborhood around UNC-Greensboro where my parents live, the streets are starting to fill up with students. Our awkward group ambles down the block toward the chapel. The doors of St. Mary’s House are locked, but Charlie and Amelia—who have never been inside it—peer in the windows to get a sense of the space as we stand on the porch. Just then I recognize one of the backpacked students locking the door of her car and making her way toward campus—our kids’ babysitter, a graduate student, who we hadn’t seen in a few months since her schedule changed.
“Hey—it’s Anneliesse!” I say to John. She is walking right past us, about to greet a friend on the sidewalk.
Then I realize the friend is someone we know as well—another regular babysitter, Virginia, also a grad student.
“Hey, you guys!” I am compelled to holler out. John and I walk toward them.
“Hey! Good to see you! How have you been?” All that stuff.
Charlie, Amelia, and my dad group silently behind us. What must we look like? Conspicuous. Or suspicious. Like maybe Virginia and Anneliesse are worried that the reason they haven’t seen us in a while is because we’ve joined a cult.
“Great! Doing okay! How are you? How is the semester going so far?” It’s the only thing to say.
The alternative: I have a mastectomy drain clipped under this loose shirt. My non-hair hurts. I haven’t slept in days. And my mom took her last brutal breath five hours ago. Right now she is lying by herself in her house around the corner. We’re scoping out this spot here for her funeral.
I have no idea how to introduce my family to these two young women.
“I’m sorry,” I say to everyone as we walk back toward the house. “I just couldn’t.”
That night, Anne and Mark—two of my parents’ closest friends and the ones that have possibly been conscripted to sing at the service—come over to be with us. Their daughter, Molly, is the ground zero of babysitters for us. It is through her that we know Anneliesse and Virginia.
Molly comes by the house, too, after her shift on the food truck where she’s working over the summer. Anne, Amelia, Molly, and I sit and cry together with my mom’s body.
“Please apologize to Anneliesse and Virginia for me?” I ask Molly, telling her about running into them. “I’m sure I was so weird.”
I’m sure I was so weird—a refrain I keep repeating, mostly to myself. Because it turns out, as the days and then weeks pass, she’s always right around the corner—alone in the house and newly dead. And I’m always announcing I’m okay, out here in the world where the sun is shining and something new is about to begin.
4. The Crematorium