*
After the cremation the rest of the afternoon is airport runs and phone calls, and the evening is soup and beers on the back patio with music and family and friends. An old best friend pulls into the driveway on her motorcycle, driven that day from New York. Amelia’s parents are here. John’s mom and sister have both flown in from out West. They walk through the gate. The neighbors bring dessert. All through this, the oven is at work in the back of that parking lot on the other side of town.
*
We hold two services. The first one is at tiny St. Mary’s House, where my parents’ and my friends all sit packed in a giant circle and look at each other, crying and smiling. The kids sit on pillows on the floor and form an impromptu band with a few of their friends to help Mark get through his beautiful rendition of an Everybodyfields song—“By Your Side”—on the guitar. They play harmonica and bongos and beat the wooden floor with their hands. They are exceptionally pleased with themselves.
I’ve asked people to wear bright colors if they want because my mom loved bright clothes. Her favorite color was purple, although three days before she died she changed it to orange.
“Orange,” she kept telling my dad. “Orange is the best.”
“You want to eat an orange?” my dad would reply, always trying to feed her.
“No,” she would shake her head fiercely. “I love orange.”
Two nights before she died she had a nightmare that she was going to be abducted. She woke up agitated, restless, panicky. She couldn’t escape the dream world. Ativan didn’t work. Neither did the pain pills. “Let’s just think about orange,” my dad eventually tried. “Meditate on orange.” He rubbed her feet and talked her through every orange thought he could generate at 3:00 a.m. Finally, her breathing calmed and she slept again.
A friend tells me that this is significant: In Buddhism, orange is considered to be a highly evolved color, representing illumination (who can trust the light?!) and essence—something full of wisdom, strength, and dignity.
I love that she could go her whole life ardently loving purple, and then shift to an equally passionate affinity for orange less than a week before she died. It’s exactly like her: She had strong opinions but was never afraid to change them—to evolve or retract or alter. Her favorite way to start a sentence—“You know what your problem is?”—was closely rivaled by “You know what I was wrong about?”
After the songs, Charlie reads a poem. Friends share memories. My dad—not one for public speaking—grips my hand as we sit on the chapel’s cozy couch.
I apologize for not reading the poem she asked me to about Italy—I just can’t do it. I fail to follow Emerson’s Aunt Mary’s advice. And because I can’t stand seeing people feel unhappy, I tell silly slapstick stories that she loved to tell: the way she was a magnet for the ridiculous, the time she got stuck on an airplane toilet, the time the bumblebee flew up her nose, the time she was scooping up dog poop and it ended up in her hair, the time in San Francisco that she had gone pantie-less to the bank when I was a baby and she set me down on the floor while she filled out a form and I pulled her hippy skirt down to her ankles and wouldn’t let go. I feel her voice in my mouth.
As I’m talking, a picture of the Virgin Mary hanging behind me suddenly falls off the wall and crashes to the floor. Lots of gasps and some laughter. “Jeez, Jan,” someone says. “Give it a rest already.”
We end the service with an open-ended moment of silence. We tell people they are free to go whenever they want. Before the memorial, when we were planning this, I kept worrying that people would feel awkward or uncertain or like they needed to stay as long as others do. I wanted there to be a gong or bell at the end of the moment to let people know it was okay to go.
Charlie was clearer: “It’s about honoring the unknowing and the awkwardness and the mystery of dying,” he said. “It’s unsettling—and that’s okay.”
Oh my God, I thought. I am terrible at death. I don’t know how any of this is supposed to work at all.
*
It will be a couple days before we receive the ashes from the cremation because, as Joe the mortician tells me one morning in the driveway, after the incinerator, there is the cremulator—a high-speed blender of sorts that grinds the cremated bone fragments into approximately four pounds of rocky sand.
Two days after the memorial service, Joe rings the doorbell holding the stash can. He’s home from work for a quick lunch, the hearse crowding the narrow driveway between our houses. His wife, Josie, is home full-time with the baby, and Joe is trying to get back to working a regular schedule. His eyes are raw with the shock of parenting. I can hear the sound of newborn cries through our open windows at all hours.
“These are for you,” he says when I open the door, handing me the container. Four pounds.
“Thank you,” I say, holding it awkwardly with both hands, wanting to put it under my arm, but knowing that would not be right either. “I hope you guys are doing okay over there.”
“We are,” he says, smiling. “Tired—but she’s so great.”
Fifteen minutes later I peer out the dining room window. The driveway is empty. I discover I’m still holding the canister, balanced on my hip and in the crook of my arm. I’ve let the dog out and straightened the couch cushions and made a grocery list, but I haven’t put it down. Through the screens, I can hear Josie humming and cooing to the baby—that mindless meandering tune of comfort and companionship—the loveliest of music, one of the first sounds I imagine I ever heard.
5. Plunder
One afternoon, I stop by my parents’ house to drop off some papers for my dad, who has gone back to work. My mom’s Prius is in the driveway. Her purse is hanging on the chair in the kitchen.
Oh, good, I have to stop myself from thinking, she’s home.
Their ancient beagle, Clyde, is sprawled snoring in the hall and does not look up. The house is hushed and glowing with afternoon sun, an orchid blooming on the dining room table. Everything seems as it should be. I walk into her bedroom.
Seems—such a sneaky word.
In the days right after she died, her bedroom smelled like, well—death. We all noticed it. Not an outright bad smell, but kind of a cocktail of all the smells of those final weeks and days and hours. Lotions, Clorox, incense, medicine, flowers, breath. Plus something else. Decay, I guess. The scent was in my nose for days.