The Best Thing I Ever Didn’t Write About My Dead Mom

Somewhere in my boxes of old notebooks, there is the one that says on the back, “Sept-Dec 2012.” In there are the notes for the eulogy I gave at my mother’s memorial.

I didn’t write a whole speech because I wouldn’t have had enough time to memorize it and I didn’t want to stand there reading from a piece of paper in my hand. So I just “sketched out” the “major beats.”

I didn’t invite any friends to her memorial because nobody knew her, it was going to be a weird and painful event already, and it wasn’t even in the city, so friends would have had to travel. I was having a shiva at my much more convenient apartment afterwards, with food and booze and the works, for friends who wanted to come by and condole.

Bill and I took the train up to the funeral home in my mother’s suburb. When we got out onto the platform, my friends M and E were there. M, a dear friend from high school, was one of the few friends who’d ever met my mother.

It was a shock to see them, they were out of context — they must have looked up the funeral home or asked my husband where it was. And it was like having a second self pour into my body, the way my psyche picked them up and put them inside me, and I was fortified.

I had no idea how badly I needed to see them until I saw them.

As we walked to the funeral home, the song “Titanium” was playing from a car at a red light.

You shoot me down…but I don’t fall…I am tie TAY nee umm ummm ummmm…

Wasn’t I, though? Aren’t I? I felt buoyed by my friends and the song and the fact that I was getting this done and it would be over with..

M and E were dressed nicely. Bill was wearing a tie. I was wearing wool pants instead of jeans, which only happens about 10 days per year, and my every-single-day sneakers.

Even though there were only fifteen people there — my brother and his family, M and E, two greaseball guys in suits who I didn’t know, a long-haired, crying woman in her forties, who was a friend of my mother’s (a what now?), and of course the bereaved and distraught fifth husband, a man who lived with severe mental illness and deserves to be treated with dignity, despite his fucking psychotic and abusive behavior — when I got up to welcome and thank them for coming, I felt underdressed.

Couldn’t even be bothered to wear shoes to her mother’s memorial, I thought, though I guarantee nobody there cared.

I wanted to be comfortable. I wanted to feel like myself. I wanted to have the soles of my feet planted flat on the floor so I could draw strength from it.

But, for a minute there, I felt sloppy and immature. An embarrassment. A joke. Disrespectful, though I hadn’t meant to be, but how could it be interpreted any other way? I mean, sneakers? At your mother’s memorial?

At least they were expensive sneakers.

The old notebook is in storage in New York, but I can probably recreate the bullet points accurately enough:

• My mother had a painful childhood without a lot of love.
• Despite that, or because of it, she worked hard to become self-sufficient.
• She gave birth to me when she was 23. When she was 39, she gave birth to my brother. This meant that she was raising one child or another from ages 23 through — math, whatever. It was a long stretch.
• Meanwhile, she strove and scrambled and made herself into a successful entrepreneur. A boss.
• She loved working. She did it all the time.
• “When she met Ray, she finally decided to take some time for herself.”

(Translation: My brother was a teenager, and she grabbed the first man she saw so that she wouldn’t be alone when he left home.)

• “She sold her business, and she and Ray opened their store, which they loved.”

(They poured her money into his bad idea until the business was in an undersea Atlantis of debt and so were they; that took six years.)

• “She got to concentrate on the things she loved: her cats, her home, her husband. After working so hard her whole life, she was enjoying her later years.”

(Local woman dies in squalor.)

• “She died too soon, but she went quickly, at home, with her husband by her side, which is a blessing.”

(Which is a mantra I developed within a minute of getting the news of her death. He was hyperventilating with distress, and I immediately started to spin the story so it was okay, and he was the hero. I spoke soothingly, like he was my child, adopting his heartbroken tone, but with an attitude of acceptance. You were there for her, Ray. She didn’t have to be scared or alone. She didn’t suffer, she knew you were there, and she knew you love her. [Couldn’t put it the past tense yet, had literally just heard.]

I can still feel my husband’s warm hand on my back, beaded with water from the shower I took right before the call came, but that doesn’t add anything emotional, does it? [Any time this gets too meta I know it’s a defense but I’m fine with that. I need defending, and I’m hoping it’s instructive to others to watch me kid myself in real time. To wit, I will not delete this part as I have deleted so many already for being self-indulgent. Look upon my self-indulgence, ye mighty, and relate.])

Final bullet point:

• So, it’s all okay in the end. It was good! It was a good thing! Her life was hard and she sacrificed her kids! I mean, sacrificed FOR her kids, ha ha! But then she met Ray, and that was good! And now she’s happy being dead, so we don’t have to be sad!

I AM TITAYNEUM UMMM UMMMM