She died in bed around four in the morning on Friday, and we kept her body there all through the next day and into midmorning on Sunday. Hospice came around dawn on Friday to help us clean her and dress her—we opened the blinds and blasted the Beatles and put her in the funkiest outfit and covered her in purple flowers. She looked radiant. She would have swooned over the luminance of her skin.
Something I didn’t expect: She didn’t leave all at once. And I don’t really mean that in an esoteric way at all. At first she was present, even though she was lifeless. But every time I would go into and out of her room, I would come back to something newly less “there.” The way her fingers were curled on her chest (those softest, most delicate hands—my earliest memory), her lips, the color of her skin. By Sunday morning it was her eyes—they’d changed to a vinyl-looking film; they were not hers at all.
The same thing has happened with the death smell. When I walk in the bedroom, it is pristine—much as she kept it before she was sick enough to relinquish those duties to us. The cleaning lady has come. The marigold-print bedspread is crisp and fresh and square, her unguents are neatly aligned on the nightstand next to her glasses and her green comb, and her orderly stacks of camisoles and yoga pants all smell of fresh detergent.
I walk around the room twice, sniffing at everything—searching for just one whiff of her—organic, living/dying her. It is not here. So I stand in the room and cry for a long time.
And then I steal all her shoes.
I don’t really know what comes over me. It started happening even before she died, after she stopped being able to walk. I would go over to hang out and while she was dozing I’d poke around in her closet and try on sandals and boots and clogs I’d never given two thoughts to before. And then I’d leave with a pair.
She’s about a half size smaller than me—and we don’t even totally align in terms of taste—but I can’t stop myself. I pile all her shoes into a big shopping bag and lug them to my house. And now I’m in my bedroom scrunching up my toes and tromping around in them.
6. Red Devil
The kids are deeply annoyed that I’m headed back into chemo. They hate it when I’m not there to pick them up from school, to schlep to piano lessons and swimming, to pack their snacks, help plan their class parties. And I appreciate that their enormous self-centeredness is still intact.
“Didn’t they do a lot of chemo already?” Freddy asks at supper. “What kind is this one?”
“It’s called Adriamycin,” I say. “It’s bright red. Like as red as Kool-Aid. The nurses called it the Red Devil.”
“We’ll bring some home for you as a treat,” says John.
“No thank you,” says Benny with genuine indignance.
I tell the boys it won’t be much different from the last time.
“But this time you have to do it without your mom,” Freddy points out. “I would hate that.”
“It’s okay,” I say. “I have you guys. Seems like given all your super powers and epic warfare strategies, you might be able to help me with the Red Devil.”
“The problem is they’re lazy,” says John. “They’re only interested in vanquishing evil when they’re in the right mood.”
“Totally,” I say.
That night John finds the boys asleep with the lights on in their bunk. Freddy has been drawing a comic book: Red Devil vs. the Cell Creep. You know the tale.
7. Labor Day
The second service is to scatter the ashes. Labor Day: We drive up to our family place on the Cape. Dozens of cousins and aunts and uncles. The landscape of vacation. The boys are thrilled to miss school, extend the summer a few more days. The hill is turning brown, the corners of the island are sharpened, the ocean has shifted from hazy gray-green to chilly navy.
I feel the future coming like a promise: motherless September, more chemo, and after that—whatever it is that happens when the doctors set you adrift on the sea of after treatment.
I sit on the porch swing before the ceremony and watch a guinea hen nervously pecking around in the lawn with her head bobbing up and down in the grass—a vigilant look to the task at her feet, another to the horizon, and again—and I understand what it is to dawdle in the sun on a perfect day and feel winter and grief in the warm breeze and in the dry rustle of the grasses and in the waves in the bay newly tipped with white.
We had started the season with a flock of eight guinea hens—exotic-looking, high-strung, speckled fowl known for eating ticks, which infest the island. Beautiful, anxious birds. They roamed free around the yard during the day, laying eggs, disappearing together into the tall grasses, squabbling, munching on ticks and other bugs, and periodically working themselves into loud, seemingly unprovoked lathers.
“Oh chill out, ladies,” we’d say when they would abruptly round a corner and zigzag madly across the lawn in a frantic rush toward nothing and away from nothing. They seemed to work each other up like a pack of kids telling ghost stories. “You’re fine, birdies. No worries.”
At night they were cooped and quiet—safe from the coyotes that prowl and yip along the island beaches after dark—in a henhouse perched on the cliff near the ice-age boulder and the clothesline where even before my mom died I could sometimes feel her ghost and the outdoor shower with its mermaid mural and front-row view of fishing boats and sailboats and ferries shuttling vacationers out to the Vineyard.
Early in the summer, the guineas made a nest in a thicket of poison ivy just off the road down to the barn, and we discovered they must not have all been hens one day when, after a great deal of squawking and fluttering, suddenly there was a collection of downy chicks huddled on the path.
One was dead or nearly dead. The others were not yet very mobile, and all day the kids ran up and back reporting on the status of the babies and arguing over their names and personality traits—getting as close as the alarmist flock would permit before they would flap up and dive at the boys’ heads. Then, on one visit, the ruckus turned to something more serious, squawks turning to sirens, and the boys watched an osprey swoop down out of the sky and carry off one of the chicks—Clarence or Roberto or FuzzWuzz—and the boys began screeching and flapping themselves.
And then again, minutes later, after the grown-ups had been pulled into the unfolding crisis, the osprey returned and snatched another. And then another.
We yelled at the sky, “Stop that right now!” and the guineas all shrieked and the boys shook sticks in the air and the osprey with the chick in its grip looped up and out, disappearing over the hill and the gray-green waves, silent and unmoved as a paper airplane, and when, despite our efforts, every last chick was gone, we walked back to the house to explain with uncertainty in our throats about the cycle of life.