IWAS BENT OVER in Uttanasana when I saw Brian thread through the class toward me. My yoga partner, a tall guy with stork legs, was pushing down on my sacrum. The teacher said,“Come up slowly, Marni.”
Brian had a neutral but bright-eyed expression and a slightly fixed smile. A strange vision in the middle of yoga class. I followed him outside into the hall.
“What’s wrong?” I said,with thoughts of Casey first.
“It’s Clyde,”Brian said, holding me.
“He’s in the hospital?”
“No,” he said in a wondering voice,“he’s dead. ”He put his arms around me.
“I’m not surprised, I’m not surprised,” I cried. “I spoke to my mother on the phone today and I could tell she was worried about him.”
But of course, I was shocked to the core. Apart from the stomach problems he had been having for the past few weeks, my 94-year-old father was rarely ill. I never saw him in bed during the day. Trust him to make such a whistle-clean exit.
Brian and I drove straight to Burlington without saying much. A shawl of calm descended on me; I felt clear and cool. Everyone else in the family was already on the scene when we arrived. My sister-in-law Kathy opened the door, and we cried together. Jori was dry-eyed, but her mouth was twisted down. Bruce was sitting on the couch in the den looking flushed.
“Where is she?”my mother said,moving through the halls. She tottered toward me with an almost ironic “Wouldn’t you know death would come along?” expression on her face. She looked short and white. I said, “Oh Mom,” and put my hands on her face. Then I held her. She appeared chagrined and rueful.
Jori’s husband, Wayne, had the flu and had gone home rather than risk passing it on to my mother. Casey was up north in Quebec, working for the owners of our cottage. I decided the call could wait ’til tomorrow. Let him have one happy day in the woods.
Everyone was in the den, drinking sherry. Brian opened a bottle of red wine and brought me a glass, a big one.
“So tell me the gory details,” I said.
“Well, we had a really good day,”my mother began. “He’d been having pain for days before, but this afternoon he told the doctor that he was feeling a little better. Then he said he wanted meat and potatoes for dinner—‘no more tinned salmon. ’We went out in the car, bought some groceries, and on our way back he decided to pay a bill at Sears. He went in alone. I thought, I ought to go in with him, but he said no, stay in the car. When we got back home I said, ‘Oh let’s have a drink. ’”
He hadn’t been drinking because of the medication he was on, she explained, but he’d been off the drug for a week.
“So we both had a weak gin and tonic. I said, ‘Why don’t you just stretch out on the couch while I get dinner?’ because he was looking so tired, and I went into the kitchen to get it ready. He was in the bathroom when I heard some sort of noise and went in. He had fallen and was trying to pull himself up. . . .”
My mother went on to describe how she helped him lie down and went to fetch a pillow to put under his head. His eyes grew wide as they looked at one another, and she knew that he knew that this was it. She called my brother, who phoned 911.
“When we arrived, the paramedics were just pulling out in the ambulance,” said Bruce. “Slowly,with the lights off.”
The calm of shock prevailed. My mother was quite present, which I marvelled at. Here we were, sitting around as if waiting for dips and dinner, in the lee of our father’s death.
Jori and I stayed overnight with my mother, who lent me the white summer nightgown I had given her years before. I hadn’t brought a change of clothes or even a toothbrush. When it was time to go to bed, I used the downstairs bathroom he had died in, aggressively. Everything had a different aspect now—the little scissors he used to trim his moustache, his eye drops, his black comb and square brush. Jori stayed in Bruce’s old room, while I slept next door to her, beside my parents’ bedroom.
When she was settled in bed, my mother put her headphones on as usual to listen to Art Bell. Whenever she couldn’t sleep, which was often, she listened to his all-night call-in program, where supernatural theories were floated and people phoned in to describe their abduction by aliens. It distracted her through the long night. I kept surfacing from sleep to hear the leakage of radio voices from her room as she patiently lay there. I woke at six and thought, “Daddy.” I remembered being a little girl, going fishing with him down along the lakeshore. I felt him swarming through the house, anxious about us.
In the morning my mother was up first, and wearing the big grey bathrobe that her grandson had brought back from Asia for her. “It’s so warm, I wear it all the time,” she said conversationally. Jori was having a shower, so the two of us sat together on the broadloomed steps in the hall, waiting for her to come out.
“It’s just like old times,” Jori laughed when she saw us. We were all without makeup and looking utterly haggard. As usual, my mother got out the breakfast cereals and the bowl of unshelled nuts. Every morning she and my father had cereal with raisins, banana, and freshly cracked walnuts and almonds on top. This we had and sat down with tea.
Mornings are not good for my mother at the best of times. Her hands shake and she is at low ebb. We talked about who to phone and what to do. Jori knew all their friends, the ones still alive at least, and she would call them. My sister was the haircutter for most of them. I would put the death notice in the local paper. I was the writer.
My mother got dressed and, with hands that trembled more than usual, sat trying to read the Globe. I composed a death notice to my mother’s strict, Quakerish requirements. No flourishes allowed. Then the curiously mundane details of dealing with the body of someone who has died carried us along from one hour to the next.
The director of Just Cremation was vacuuming when I happened by. It wouldn’t do to have dusty surfaces in this line of work. The shop was a small storefront affair, handily across from the Egertson Funeral Home, where my father now reposed.
“I’ll be right with you,” the director said. He had large, liquid brown eyes. I sat down in one of two winged Victorian armchairs that faced his gilt-edged desk and took one of his business cards. Armand Alazzi. A Lebanese or Armenian name, unusual for Burlington, where I had grown up without encountering a single dark-skinned person. The director had a full brush-like moustache and smooth, thick, springy hair. He smiled apologetically as he moved the mouth of the vacuum back and forth over the broadloom, and we shared its high-pitched, indignant noise.
My mother for years had instructed us that there was to be no funeral service, and no fuss was to be made of their deaths. Always in the plural; having done everything together for 68 years my mother and father assumed they would die together too. It would be like the two of them finding a parking spot at the mall—she was the spotter, he was the driver. Whenever I came home to visit,my father would open the bottom drawer of his mahogany pull-down desk to point to “the arrangements,” as he always called them.
“You only need to make one phone call. Call Egertson’s, and they’ll take care of everything.” He knew that tidy business arrangements and planning for the future were not our forte.
“I don’t want any strangers gawking at me,”my mother would always add at that point. She had a horror of funerals with an open casket, and of trays of crustless sandwiches passed among the curious. She had already embarked on a course of electrolysis because, as she put it, “I don’t want to have a stroke and be lying in some hospital bed with hairs sprouting out of my face.”Being seen dead was a concern.
“Just send us up the chimney and come home and have a glass of sherry,” she would say with a kind of gay irritability whenever we tried to protest. But now that some of my friends were being picked off by cancer, I began to find the conventions of funerals reassuring. Someone thought to make sandwiches, another friend could be counted on to say the wrong thing, so-and-so would get drunk and stay too long—it all kept you clasped in the present. The mundanity of funerals said that life with its pots of tea and mixed motives would go on.
But burning a person, it turned out, was not as simple as a phone call. There were laws about human remains, and the question of scattering, or interment, and then the business of what to put the ashes in, and who in the family would keep them. As murderers and widows come to learn, it takes surprising enterprise and a certain amount of work to truly rid yourself of the body.
I think my mother was in shock. The fact that my father would leave her side forever and ever, just as a hot dinner was about to be served, was not something she could quickly grasp. So instead of weeping and falling apart, she applied herself to this practical problem—the recipe, as it were, for her husband’s ashes. As with a casserole, first came the matter of choosing the appropriate dish.
After an urn-tour of the house, we settled on a rather eccentric swirly blue ceramic vase, something my mother had made. My sister had fashioned a lid for it by gluing together several plywood discs that I had bought at the craft store. An ad hoc sort of urn. I delivered the vessel to Just Cremation, and my mother and I retired to the den with large glasses of sherry. There would be no service, just the family, and a brief “visitation.”
“Well,”my mother said,“that’s that.”
But that wasn’t that at all.