A STRANGE AFTER

I believe she wanted to keep living, but she wasn’t hung up on it. It makes sense now, the way she’d said that God could heal her. Meaning it was within His power, up to Him. Just as He could choose not to and instead to call her home, to let her live in the ever after she always believed was beyond this one. Having her there made it real, not the frivolous cartoon place I’d tried to convince my cousin Nina of when we were kids, the one with gold-paved streets and block after block of identical mansions, but someplace with purpose. A place where my mother’s faith and her goodwill might be reunited with her spirit’s original amplitude so that she was large, larger than all of us who grieved her. Larger than the world as she had known to imagine it or the God in whom she had trusted, who was larger and stranger than she’d known to imagine Him.

In the days preceding her funeral, the house was full, and we moved through the blur of actions that always fills in the space between someone’s death and our ritual for saying goodbye. I was surprised at what it felt like, surprised enough that I wondered if what I was feeling was really what I felt: an empty, groggy disbelief coupled with an unexpected relief. As if the long buildup to letting go was almost worse than the silent free fall of afterward. That wasn’t it, exactly. But at least, finally, there was a name for what I felt—grief—a shape to try to fit it into. There were words, sanctioned words I might offer or collect like the dull, heavy coins of that new realm.

There were times, lots of them, when someone would offer to pray with me. I never said no. I possessed no inclination to take God to task for my mother’s death, didn’t find it difficult to think of her death as something that had happened to her rather than me, some twist or fold in her destiny that had only just brushed against mine.

My mother had been so adamant about the afterlife that she’d forbidden us from making a shrine of her grave. “Bury me in a simple pine box, and don’t visit my body in the ground. I won’t be there.” She’d said it almost happily, triumphantly, as if doing such things might constitute proof that Heaven is real. And we came as close to doing what she’d asked as the funeral industry would allow, eschewing the brushed titanium Cadillac of coffins and choosing, instead, the plainest oak.

At the burial, we stood around the gravesite in our dark mourning clothes. Pastor Gainey spoke, I’m sure, movingly, powerfully, but my mind would not stay still. Is she with us now, or has she already gone? And if she goes, can she ever come back? I thought of her watching our flimsy bodies, our bowed heads and put-upon shoulders, with a tenderness and a clarity beyond our ability to grasp. How miniature our lives must have looked from there and how utterly bereft we must have seemed, standing over the hole in the earth that would never contain her.

Look up, I imagined her saying. Look up and see how much distance waits beyond this life! Be happy for me! Be glad! In the first moments after her death, when it was clear that she was gone, I looked up at the ceiling above where her body lay. I had been thinking about what people say happens when a person dies, how the spirit hovers in the room awhile, watching from above, taking in the fact that it has come free of the body that was once its anchor. November 14, 1994. A rainy Monday night. I wanted her to see my face as she floated off toward whatever awaited her, as if that gesture might serve as a signal that I believed she was on her way to that elsewhere, the tunnel and the light, the other side. But I hadn’t given any thought to what it would feel like to me, staring up at what my eyes told me was nothing at all.

The memorial service was at First Baptist after the funeral. Conrad and our father and I each spoke (the others had feared it might be impossible to keep their emotions under control long enough to say anything), and then we listened to the other congregants as they made their tributes and offered their goodbyes. One of my mother’s church acquaintances was a young man I’d never met before, my own age or perhaps a bit younger. When her health had taken a swerve for the worse, he’d begun coming by the house to sing for her. He stood up and sang one of her favorite hymns—I wish I could remember which—and though my heart buckled each time his voice went off-key, I was touched and peevishly jealous, that the two of them had shared something so intimate, so quietly profound. How many more lives would we find, if we only knew how to seek them, within the life we recognized as hers?

A woman we’d known for a long time, who had been living with an illness of her own for several years, rose and described a vision she’d had the evening of my mother’s death. As she began to speak, I tried to remember what had plagued her health. Was it epilepsy? Mental illness? After years of hearing her name, I realized I had only the vaguest sense of who she was. She had always seemed somewhat rattled to me, as if her sickness or the medication facilitating her recovery had taken her a little ways away from perfect clarity. But this woman—Sharon, that was her name—spoke in earnest.

“I saw Kathy being ushered up to Heaven,” she said, gesturing with her arms so that her rings caught the pulpit light and her bangles clanked against one another. Her makeup had been applied with a heavy hand, Southern Baptist–style, like Tammy Faye Bakker, so her eyes seemed fixed in place, dark spots on her otherwise powdery face. “And I saw all the many angels who were there to welcome her.” At that point, she stretched out her arms and fluttered her hands like a singer waving to fans from a spotlit stage. “They were curious about this person, this blessed person who was coming into their midst.”

It was the kind of church talk that usually caused me to glaze over. The fluffy clouds and white robes, the harps and heavens, the unsettling depictions of Christ as a spaced-out blond naïf. But Sharon was talking about my mother. And if she had information—even a medication-driven intuition—about where my mother had gone to and about how I might attempt to imagine her—well, I wanted it, wanted to add it to my stable of versions, the ones I flipped through before sleep when the stars all seemed to be facing elsewhere.

A reception was held in the room just behind the sanctuary, a room where I’d sat for years in putty-colored folding chairs listening to Sunday school lessons. A room that, because of its multiple functions, also bore the faint Jesus-smell of stale coffee. Tables of food had been set up along the wall by the church ladies who had succeeded the ones I remembered from my childhood. Some of them weren’t much older than I. The meal was homespun potluck fare, and it was offered in love, but again, I was irrationally angry, just as I’d been with my father weeks earlier, unleashing upon him a rage that was merely a symptom of my own impending grief. Nevertheless, I found myself despising that church meal. It was hodgepodge, mismatched. Nothing like what my mother would have put together for company.

I’d baked an Alabama lemon cheese layer cake and a black-and-white checkerboard square cake, which my mother had made only on special occasions, and while the others of us were sitting in the memorial service, one of those well-meaning ladies had hacked them into tiny cubes and skewered the bits with wooden toothpicks. A handwritten note sat between them reading: Kathy’s daughter has baked cakes using her mother’s special recipes. I crumpled it in my hand and tossed it in the trash. No matter that she was already gone, and no matter that the ladies who orchestrated this gathering had just as much right to grieve her as we did, I was rankled.

The other girl I knew in high school who’d lost her mother to cancer, the one who drove the old burgundy Saab, was there. She read about the service in the obituary we had placed and came to pay her respects. We were alike in our loss. I didn’t know how I ought to behave in light of such a fact. We walked outside and talked about mundane things, smiling those pained smiles that meant there was something we were aware of not knowing how to say.

In the weeks following the funeral, after all the distant family had left and routine began to reassert itself, I found it surprising that there was space for so many of my ordinary moods, stretches of any given day when everything, or almost everything, felt normal, or almost normal. But then I’d catch myself thinking of my mother as if she were there, just a room away, and the reality of her death crept back in like the mortar between bricks, holding everything in place in a strange After that no longer included her.

Back when I was in grade school and fascinated by anything old-fashioned, I’d convinced my mother to buy me a few kerosene lamps. I liked to read by them, even though their light was flickering. It made me feel like I could step inside history and live there awhile, not my same self but not quite a stranger either. My mother derived nostalgic satisfaction from sharing those things with me, things she remembered from her rural childhood in the 1940s, beautiful obsolete things that almost seemed to delineate the borders of a place where child versions of the two of us might be able to meet.

One dark winter afternoon when one of the kerosene lamps was burning in the living room, I put down my book and wandered into the next room where my mother was blocking together pieces for a quilt. The Phil Donahue Show was on the television, with the sound turned down low. “Go back and check on that lamp,” she’d said after a few minutes.

“Okay,” I’d replied, but the TV caught my attention, and I didn’t go.

“Is that lamp all right?” she’d asked after another minute.

And, certain that it was, I’d told her, “Yes, it’s fine.”

A minute later, something told me to get up and go check. It was a quiet but urgent feeling, and I jumped up to make sure everything was in order. When I got to the living room, I saw a column of flame licking the ceiling. My mother had the presence of mind to cap the top of the lamp with a dish resting on the same table, and luckily the flame consented to being snuffed out, though it left a dark, sooty ring on the ceiling. It took a long time for the spot to fade.

Sometimes after Mom had died, I’d be going along as if everything were fine, as if the day were any ordinary day. And then the fact of her death—no, not simply the fact of her death but rather the facts of her death and her life; her presence in this world and the presence her absence made; the whole of what I remembered or lacked; everything she gave and left and what, in leaving, she took—the fact of all that, like a column of threat and promise and light, would flare bright and hot in my mind.