MELISSA PRITCHARD
A SOLEMN PLEASURE
HELEN REILLY BROWN
July 14, 1918—April 6, 2008
CLARENCE JOHN “JACK” BROWN, JR.
April 17, 1918—June 13, 2003
CREMATION REQUIREMENTS
Cremation is performed by placing the deceased in a combustible casket or container, that in turn, is placed in a cremation chamber and subjected to intense heat/flame. Bone fragments and dust are brushed from the chamber after cremation; however, it is impossible to remove all of the cremated remains. Because some dust and residue always remain in the chamber, there may be an inadvertent or incidental commingling of residue from previous cremations. This also may occur as a result of mechanically processing cremated remains.
Cremated remains may be buried, entombed, placed in a niche, scattered over private land with permission of owner or over public property (may require permit), or remain in family’s possession, usually in an urn (wood, marble or metal container).
Cremated remains should be collected upon notice of availability. The crematory authority may dispose of the remains in a legal manner 120 days after the cremation or after agreed-to pick-up date.
FUNERAL SERVICES FOR HELEN BROWN
CATEGORY A—SERVICES
|
Professional Services |
|
|
Direct Cremation (Non-declinable) |
$1,000.00 |
|
Cremation Fee |
$300.00 |
|
Transportation |
|
|
Transfer of Remains to Funeral Home—Vehicle |
$350.00 |
|
Service/Utility Auto |
$175.00 |
|
CATEGORY A—TOTAL |
$1,825.00 |
CATEGORY B—MERCHANDISE
|
Minimum Cremation Container |
$95.00 |
|
CATEGORY B—TOTAL |
$95.00 |
CATEGORY C—CASH ADVANCES
|
Copies of Death Certificate |
$150.00 |
|
Medical Examiner Permit |
$15.00 |
|
CATEGORY C—TOTAL |
$165.00 |
|
TOTAL A, B, & C |
$2,085.00 |
|
Services, Merchandise and Cash Advances |
|
|
State and Local Taxes |
$7.56 |
|
BALANCE DUE |
$2,092.56 |
REQUIRED DISCLOSURES:
Direct Cremation
A direct cremation (without ceremony) includes transfer of deceased within 50 miles; basic services of Funeral Director and Staff; refrigeration (for the first 24 hours); cleansing, handling and care of unembalmed remains; dressing; use of facility and staff for private viewing by next of kin (up to 1/2 an hour); and transportation to crematory, crematory fee (for processing time greater than 48 hours from time of arrangement conference, excluding weekends and holidays). If you want to arrange a direct cremation, you can use an alternative container. Alternative containers encase the body and can be made of materials like fiberboard or composition materials (with or without an outside covering). The containers we provide are cardboard (with no pillow or bedding), basic container (totally combustible containers) include pillow, bedding and with or without fabric covering, hardwoods (either natural or stained finish) with crepe or velvet interior.
This package includes Paradise Memorial Crematory, Inc.’s cremation fee.
The deceased Helen Brown
Will be held at Messinger Indian School Mortuary
7601 East Indian School Road, Scottsdale Arizona
Until final disposition.
Melissa Pritchard
(Print Name of Responsible Party)
Date 4-06-08
Time 16:45
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE LASSWADE, MIDLOTHIAN SCOTLAND
—Ut honesto otio quiesceret
Soon after the death of my mother, I found myself at an international writer’s retreat held in a Scottish castle named Hawthornden, an hour outside of Edinburgh. A short walk from the castle, part of a 120-acre woodland estate running alongside the River North Esk, is the cave that sheltered Sir William Wallace, the Scottish hero made famous by Mel Gibson’s portrayal in the film Braveheart. Hawthornden Castle is part ruin, a thirteenth-century medieval castle with a warren of Pictish caves below it, hand-carved of rock and said to have hidden Robert the Bruce, Bonnie Prince Charlie, and perhaps William Wallace. The habitable half of the castle was built by Sir William Drummond, Cavalier poet and friend of Ben Jonson, Michael Drayton and other literary figures of his age. Hawthornden Castle has been an International Writers’ Retreat since 1985, and writers, selected several times a year for monthlong residencies, live in rooms, working behind doors marked boswell, brontë, herrick, jonson, evelyn, shakespeare, yeats.
In filling out my application, months before, I had whimsically requested the use of a typewriter. Because of the noise such an antiquated machine would presumably make, I was separated from the row of writer’s rooms on the third floor, rooms accessed by a staircase as tightly spiraled as a nautilus shell. Instead, I was put into private quarters on the second floor reached by a short climb from the first. The name on my door was Shakespeare.
I had come to Scotland to write, but I had also come to grieve. Our culture is skittish of mourning, impatient and awkward with bereavement’s uneven process. Friends had been exceptionally kind, but the overall message I had gotten from society, the environment-at-large, was make haste, move on, pay bills, earn your keep.
SHAKESPEARE. My wailing room, done in dark red, dark green, and ivory, housed a benign monster: an immense, pillared, wood-canopied bed hewn of heavy timber so old and dark it appeared black. On the headboard, formally painted in golden lettering, was the year 1651, and the initials p h and m h. Set off by hand-carved floral and geometric patterns were human figures, two male, one at each end of the headboard, and one female, in the center, her arms crossed beneath her naked breasts, fingers encircling each erect, if slightly squared, nipple. The room had a mantled fireplace, a wardrobe and a plain desk set before a large pair of paned windows overlooking a sea of forest, an unseen river, the North Esk, rushing along below, and above, a Gainsborough sky with shifting, scudding wreaths of silver and white cloud.
For the thirty days I lived in this room, the only sounds I heard (even better when I flung the windows wide and fresh, wind-scrubbed air poured in) were birdsong—wrens, warblers, magpies, woodpeckers, kestrels, and others—the murmur of the Esk, and trees, an ancient woodland of oak, ash and elm, and hawthorn as well, tossed by an occasional tempest of wind, leaves flashing white and green, a sound like rough surf. Gentler sounds came from the kitchen, directly beneath my room, when the Scottish housekeeper, Mary, prepared hot porridge and coffee in the morning, and later in the day, as the French cook, Alex, slid dishes out of cupboards, chopped vegetables, conducted a muted clatter of pots and pans, her efforts sending the tantalizing savor of what we were to dine on that night drifting up the curved stairway. The spark of guilt I felt, being given such private, spacious quarters because of a typewriter I would end up never using, was quickly extinguished. Given my suppressed mourning, my blanketing sadness, this room, away from the rest, was perfect for sorrow.
The Reformation-era bed, the atmosphere, ascetic, no modernity beyond electric lights and decent plumbing—no e-mail or Internet, no phone, no television or radio, no cars—the quiet, the forest, the light—my books and my pens—my meals prepared (a basket of food left outside my door promptly at noon, a tea tray in the afternoon), laundry done, linens changed weekly—my only assignments to sleep, eat, walk, write (though no one ever inquired as to one’s progress), and converse with four fellow writers during dinner and in the upstairs drawing room afterward, where we took up reading Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, eager, each evening, for the self-induced tragedy of Michael Henchard—this cradled way of life, a childhood without chores, I called it, became a place where sorrow unveiled itself. A place thick with tales of Picts and Celts, Romans, Druids, fairies, Knights Templar, Grand Master Freemasons, Gypsies, and the pagan Green Man, with castles and ruins of castles, forests with paths wending along rivers, steep precipices, meadows pearled with sheep and lambs, lanes flanked by wild rose, foxglove, saxifrage, horsetail, bluebells. Ghosts presided too, lively and miasmic, haunting chapels and caves, appearing on forest footpaths and in Hawthornden Castle. Spirits disporting themselves as misty presences, as lights going on or off, doors opening and closing on their own, and once—we all saw it—a lamp flying across the drawing room. In my state of loss, I found such capricious afterlife cheering.
SHAKESPEARE. My first night, I fell into a quarter-sleep (the birds, still singing? the light, why so much?) tempered by a soft incredulity at my good fortune. My second and third and fourth nights passed in sporadic weeping, harsh bursts of grieving. Womb of my own dear self, source and friend, my petty quarrel and perpetual conflict, the one I had grown so intimate with in those final, terrible months, She was gone, a common word that had assumed grave, terrible, stony weight. Gone. Vanished. Gone. Invisible. Gone. No more. Gone. Incorporeal. Gone. Departed. Gone. Disappeared. Anglo Saxon, gan. As if she had never been. There was nowhere on this earth I could ever again go to find her. She was ash in my home now, powdered and tamped into a hideous shoe-polish-brown box, weighing little more than a feather, and slip-covered in a purple-velvet pouch, reminiscent of Royal Crown liquor pouches, something in which a member of the mortuary staff had solicitously handed her to me. My father’s body, cremated by the same mortuary five years before, had not been pouched; his squared remains, as brown as his surname, dad-in-a-box, had been handed to me inside of a white shopping bag. Lord & Taylor. As if he were a purchase, which in some sense and by then, he was. I mentioned this to the mortuary staffer, confessing too that I had stashed my boxed father behind my six published books, hidden him in my library these past five years. As a result, I was given a velvet pouch for him, too. I left the mortuary, my mother tucked (my, what square, hard edges you have!) into the crook of one arm, the royal purple pouch for my father in my summer straw purse. Driving out of the parking lot while calling one of my daughters on the phone, I would have been immediately killed had not my second daughter, in the car with me, shouted for me to stop before we were slammed into by an oncoming, speeding four-wheeler. We laughed—yes, like hyenas!—at the idea of being killed exiting a mortuary, one dead mother in the car.
My parents, bagged in grape velvet, like tacky purple stuffed animals, sit side by side (sit? repose? lounge? tumble-bumble? decay? What does one say of dust and knobs and shards in a box?) in an otherwise empty chest of drawers in the guest room, guests now, waiting their flight to Honolulu, where, in an outrigger canoe ceremony (as they had requested) my sister and I will sift them like ingredients, blend them into the kelpish, blue-green broth of the Pacific.
I, on the other hand, am loath to let go. Can I not keep some little of their ashes, commingled? (“We are such stuff as dreams are made of…”) But in what? Where? And why? All at once, the logic of earthly interment is apparent, a specific place to visit, to show up at on holidays and bring flowers, to erect a granite stone or marble pillar or angel. A family gathering spot, a somber picnic ground. But my parents were not religious in any conventional sense; they were affluent gypsies, and in this age of global warming and impending environmental catastrophe, burial in the ground is passé, outdated, wasteful of precious space and vanishing hardwoods (for coffins). Cremation has environmental cachet, ash is green, even if it lends itself to moments of Beckett-like absurdity and comic pathos, like “Jack,” my mother’s teddy bear. For the five years she flailed miserably on after my father’s death, “Jack” kept her company, a teddy bear in a blue print Hawaiian shirt, with a plastic Baggie holding a few thimblefuls of my father’s ashes sealed up where the bear’s imaginary heart would be. He was with her at the end, snuggled beside her in a hospital bed, his little eyes gleaming loyally, if blindly, his ash-heart thumping for her, his Hawaiian shirt faded, and at her demise, at her dissolution, at her burning, her auto-da-fe, “Jack” was there too, turning to flame in her enfolded, emaciated arms.
Father, Mother, Childe Forlorne
ROSSLYN CHAPEL
One night, in the drawing room at Hawthornden, I heard the story of Hardy, how his heart was cut out of his corpse, kept first in a biscuit tin, then interred at the cemetery where he had requested his body be buried (the rest of Mr. Hardy went to Westminster Abbey, sadly demonstrating the plight of being torn asunder, like a saint or martyr, by one’s own fame). In the section of the church known as the Lady Chapel resides the earliest known stone-carved “danse macabre,” sixteen human figures each dancing with a skeleton. Every inch of this chapel is obsessively carved with Christian symbols as well as gargoyles, Norse dragons, angels playing bagpipes, Lucifer tied and hanging upside down, and over one hundred heads of Green Men, male faces sprouting foliage, a Celtic symbol of fertility. Rosslyn Chapel is a book in stone, written in Celtic, Masonic, Templar, Pythagorean, Gnostic, alchemical, and biblical texts. The Stone of Destiny is rumored to be buried in the chapel, as is the Holy Grail and shards of the Black Rood, or True Cross, carried from the Holy Land by William “the Seemly” Sinclair. Christ’s mummified head is said by some to be hidden inside the famous Apprentice Pillar; these tales abound and inspire theories, one wilder than the next. Stories of the Devil’s Chord, of an Astral Doorway, of UFO sightings around Rosslyn, have given the tiny chapel a supernatural charisma attracting thousands of visitors. I am a visitor too, and Rosslyn Chapel, with its danse macabre, is more than a site of religious miracle and mystery. It is my second (silent) wailing room. Its graves, its symbols, speak of resurrection, of the infinite many gone into the dark.
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE
Where better to grieve than in the same castle where a famous Scottish poet, Drummond of Hawthornden, born December 13, 1585, mourned as well? He grieved the loss of his parents, Sir John Drummond and Susannah Fowler; he mourned poor Miss Cunningham of Barnes, his betrothed, who died on the eve of their wedding. He married, much later in life, a Miss Elizabeth Logan, because she bore a tender resemblance to Miss Cunningham, and of their nine children, six perished, giving him more occasion for grief. Drummond’s fine sonnets, still subjects of scholarly research, all carry the strain, the gentle rumination upon death in them, an emphasis we might find morbid today, insulated as we are by the near-promise of a medically enabled old age. But Drummond lived in a time when death’s gait evenly paced, if not outpaced, life’s. What better spot to mourn than in the castle of a poet known for his many epitaphs and sonnets composed for departed friends, a poet who, thinking himself near death at age thirty-five, wrote to his good friend Sir William Alexander a sonnet ending with these lines:
To grave this short remembrance on my grave:
Here Damon lies, whose songs did sometimes grace
The murmuring Esk: may roses shade the place!
His famous prose piece, “A Cypress Grove,” a mystical meditation on death, was written in a cave inside a forest alive with roe deer, red fox, pheasant, rabbit, squirrel, and badger, near green meadows wandered over by horses, sheep, and cattle, in green, rain-swept air thick with stories of battles with Romans and Norsemen, of the Crusades, its monks and knights and ladies, of brutal warfare with the English for freedom, of Druidic wisdom, the teachings of the Celts still whispering if one stops to listen, in the ancient, black-limbed oaks, the gorse and Scottish broom, the flowering hawthorn, wild rose and foxglove, the springing leap of roe deer, or hoarse, raucous chorus of ravens, all of which accompany me on each daily walk, walks as healing as shakespeare, with its bed, its desk, its silence, its green view, the comforting sounds, beneath my feet, of food being prepared, nurturance delivered to the minds and souls of the resident writers, this writer, laboring, sorting her way to sanity, solitary, danse seule, in shakespeare.
ROSSLYN CHAPEL
A poem of stone…powdered with stars.
—THOMAS ROSS, 1914
I have walked fast this morning, the sky the bright enameled blue I remember from childhood. I left Hawthornden late, so I must walk fast, three kilometers through woodland glen and meadow, to be at the chapel for the Eucharist Communion at ten-thirty. I arrive barely in time, hot from an hour’s walking, smelling of boiled wool from my green sweater, my hair turning to sheep’s wool.
The service, preceded by organ music, is old-fashioned, sedate, as though we have all day, and the hymns we sing, found in our faded hymnals, are by George Herbert, Alfred Lord Tennyson, William Blake (For Mercy has a human heart and Pity a human face). In the organ loft above us, the morning’s psalm is sung in plainchant by an unseen parishioner. Even in June, the stone chapel is bleakly cold, and the flames from white candles waver from unseen drafts. It is easy to float backward centuries and see the chapel broken into, seized as a stable for Cromwell’s warhorses when he laid siege to nearby Rosslyn Castle, to smell the sweat, dung, and straw, to hear the rough shouts and curses of soldiers rather than the sweet singing of a dwindled, aging congregation of Scottish Episcopalians.
The grace of history, the dead, are those I feel most kin to now. The living seem removed, through no fault of theirs; they are meant to live and to savor all they can, and there will be that again for me as well, but for now I am more at home with the dead, with those who grieve, or with those who remember, with the Reverend, and the lay reader, as I cup my hands to receive the Eucharist, kneeling at the altar, below the statue of Mary, placed there in the age of Victoria. Layers comfort me. We walk upright awhile, then are divided, the lute from the player, the flesh returns to the sea or the earth or the air, the spirit becoming, perhaps, Light. A friend said of my mother, weeks before she died, she is scattering into Light. He was exactly right, and that is what we are all doing, though more slowly now than she—scattering into Light, in line to take our greater place, to be those distant stars, or a presence on the stair, unseen but felt, or that splashy violet bloom of azalea, or that midnight call of owl or nightingale, or that uneven fringe of cerise light on the horizon, or that deer, springing silent into the glen, or that pheasant, startled, flushed from its hedgerow or the black church cat, William, winding himself around the legs of the Reverend as he gives his Sunday announcements, his “adverts,” for the church barbeque that afternoon, or for the archbishop of Brazil soon to visit, for this is the cat’s home too, this chapel. We kneel above nine knights in the chapel vault, unopened for centuries…the story goes that when the vault was opened, and a small party went down to see, someone touched the first knight, laid out in his armor, a bell, a candle, and a book beside him, and the body, at the touch, inside its metal casing, fell to dust. The others were left undisturbed; the vault was sealed. I kneel this Sunday, June 15, Father’s Day, my knees resting over the dust and bones of the St. Clair Knights Templar, five generations, my head bowed by the weight, growing lighter, of my own mortality, aging communicants on either side of me, devout, Scottish worshipers, growing lighter too as they keep their weekly covenant of flesh and blood, as the notes of “Ave Maria” soar like sweetest birdsong above our head, the sounds of Katherine Longville, of French Huguenot ancestry, mother of three, her boys home with their father, singing “Ave Maria” just as she had sung it the Sunday before for the wedding of a local couple, young Katherine Longville, who manages to keep up with her singing lessons every fortnight, for her boys, she says, are growing fast, and she too is only here a while. We are all engrailed.
In the woods where Drummond wrote, I write. Along mossy paths in the woodland glen where he walked, I walk. Where hearts were carved out of flesh, thus is my heart carved from my own chest, and carried, by me, to the chapel at Rosslyn, to be laid down, laid down too in the cemeteries I walk between, a permanent seeding of graves on either side, I, the living creature, sailing between so many dead with all the pride of uprightness, straight-up-ness, of breath, motion, thought, my gay distinction from poor-them, poor-dead, sorrily prone and purblind. Yet with my grandparents gone, aunts and uncles gone, parents gone, mother most recently, with all gone and but one sister living, my privilege narrows, my distinction dims, my allegiance shifting to those on either side of me, rather than with those walking all around me, strolling on a fair Saturday in June, families, visitors, the young, all of us on our way, pilgrims threading the path between two graveyards, to Rosslyn Chapel.
BETWEEN TWO GRAVES
Death is the sad estranger of acquaintances, the eternal divorcer of marriage, the ravisher of the children from their parents, the stealer of parents from their children, the interrer of fame, the sole cause of forgetfulness, by which the living talk of those gone away as of so many shadows, or fabulous Paladins.
—“A Cypress Grove,” WILLIAM DRUMMOND, 1620
Written in Stone
“Lead, kindly light”
“At rest until He come”
“Sadly missed”
A Thimble of Dust
In Loving Memory of
Helen, aged 9 and 1 2
And
Alexander Simmons
Aged 8
Who were tragically drowned in
The South Esk
On 26th August 1932
In memory of Jemima Arnott
Accidentally killed in an
Explosion at Roslin Gunpowder Mills
17th June 1925
Aged 20 years
Guy Justly
The dearly loved child
Of Colonel Oliver and Mary Nicholls
At Rosebank, Rosslyn
26th February, 1850
Aged 7 months
“Of such is the kingdom of heaven”
Certain names catch at one. Christina Grieve. Tibbie Porteous. Fanny Law. Euphemia Todd. Proudfoot. Or an advertisement at the bottom of one monument: GIBB BRO’S. ROSLIN GRANITE WORKS, ABERDEEN. It isn’t fair. We pause, our imaginations held, by the special tragedy of young deaths, or the mixed triumph of old deaths (the oldest a woman, age 102), or by the waste of the young in wars, or by parents left to grieve a child, or by the young husband left to grieve his wife, by the young killed in accidents, by disease, drowned. Less dramatic births and deaths, those whose dramas are recessed, we pass by. The sheer numbers of the dead render us frugal: we portion out sympathies.
Here Lye
Anne Watson spouse of
John Sturrock merchant
In Edinburgh, Who died
The 17the of May 1782
Aged forty years
Underneath this stone Doth as…
Could…which…
Alive did vigor…
To…beauty as could…
What is it that draws us to linger over half-ruined inscriptions, puzzle out dates, to the romance of old cemeteries, stones sunk, overtipped, inscriptions blurred to unreadability, moss, scabs of lichen and rotting leaves overtaking the imperturb-ability of marble, the endurability of granite? One gravestone, fallen to the ground, is so covered over by an inch or more of grass and buttercup, a thick green hide, it could be mown. Near it, an angel of marble, once celestially white, soaring upward, now gray and black, tipping sideways and hidden beneath an overgrowth of hawthorn, a Cadbury biscuit wrapper obscenely prosaic by its base. All this is homily in stone, all this is what we are coming to ourselves, those of us who stroll with solemn pleasure among the dead, finding poetry in the biblical or sentimental or stark inscriptions on the stones, yet glad too to end our reverie, close the iron gate, and walk the graveled hill back up to the chapel or inn or tea shop, glad to turn our thoughts from a sweet melancholic ramble to our appetites, our calendars, our health, our families and friends, the petrol level in the car, the need for a drink or to take a child, or ourselves, to the bathroom. We need to pee, or to kiss and hold hands, or to help grandmother into the car, for we are, with thrilling vengeance, alive.
This passive place a summer’s nimble mansion,
Where bloom and bees
Fulfilled their oriental circuit,
Then ceased like these.
—EMILY DICKINSON
Last Sunday, walking along the river path to Rosslyn, I came upon an injured magpie. It had tucked itself into some leaves by the side of the path, and as the sun broke over the soft green maple leaves, and with the rush of the river nearby, it seemed a not ungentle place to die. The earth is made of the dust of creatures lived before. We walk carelessly upon the dead, the world a rounded grave.
Mother, Father, Childe Forlorne
All this has laid a softness around my grieving.
In those last hours, my mother’s laboring to die seemed like my own fight, as a younger woman, to give birth. The inescapability of it, the solitude, no matter who was there, the sense of magnitude. I wanted to know, to ask if it was like giving birth, this prising apart of the flesh and the soul, but something stopped me—reserve, fear, lack of temerity, respect for my mother’s profound passage. When it was time for the hospice people to help, when I mentioned the seeming labor in this dying business, they said, oh yes, we think of ourselves as helping to birth people into the afterlife. Like midwives? Yes. Like that.
And I worried. For the eleven months she had lived after the stroke, my mother, paralyzed, smart as a whip, and fully conscious, could speak but one word. Yes. Even when she meant no. We communicated telepathically, or through touch, or my bad jokes, which made her laugh, or with her eyes and her yes and my prattling on. Was sitting with her, watching documentaries like Winged Migration, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, or Ten Questions for the Dalai Lama on my laptop, or my taking her out into the care center’s garden in her wheelchair, enough? Was spooning bits of whipped cream with chocolate sauce into her mouth—the last thing she ever ate—enough? Was washing her face with a warm, then cool, washcloth, combing her sparse hair, putting aloe vera chapstick on her lips, massaging her temples and ear lobes, then rubbing lavender lotion on her face and hands, enough? Were these the proper rituals for death’s hand-maiden? Love made me clumsy, tripping after the one who led the dance.
Hours before her heart stopped, my mother bolted half-up from her bed where she had been resting, struggling to breathe from the pneumonia, and grabbed hold of my sister’s hand, staring at her with a look of terror my sister later refined, upon reflection, as a look that said, “Is this it, then? Is this death?” It was an intense, eyes-wide-open look, and the violent grip on my sister’s hand, the strength of this frail, eighty-pound woman, a baby bird nested in white industrially washed linen, was so painful, so tight, my sister would have had to pry her fingers off if she had needed to. A death grip? I asked. We looked at one another, newly understanding the phrase.
We didn’t want her to be afraid, so we asked the hospice nurse to give her a bit of morphine, a drop under her tongue, sublingua. She visibly relaxed, closed her eyes. Dozing, one might say, but for the struggle going on, the battle being lost. My sister tried to read a book she had brought; I tried to grade student essays. Who were we fooling?
When she opened her eyes twenty minutes later, we had music on, something she liked, instrumental, spiritual. I stood over her, smiling, and picked up her left hand, the paralyzed one, all bone now, and swung it gently back, forth, up, back, forth, up, as though we were waltzing. We’re dancing, Mamma, I said. She smiled, then gave me a twinkling, openly flirtatious glance I remembered from childhood, the look she wore at parties, the look that had drawn so many young men to court her before I was ever born, and then, surprise upon surprise, my mother winked at me, a girl with all the world before her.
I leapt for the phone when it rang at 3 a.m. I woke my sister, who already knew. I had wanted to be there, to hold her in my arms, to murmur to her like a lover. (I felt. I wanted. I!) Her greatest fear, she once told me, was of dying alone. But she hadn’t died alone, had she? We had all been there in the days preceding, and a nurse she’d liked, whose name I can’t recall, was with her as she “passed” (the current euphemism). The hospice people say it is extremely common for people to “take their journey” (another expression) when everyone has gone home, has left the room. When we are with them, we hold on too hard, we won’t let them go.
We drove the ten minutes to the care center, no traffic, the hour before dawn, took the elevator to the third floor, turned right past the dining hall, then left down the hall to her room. helen brown, said the sign by her door, a symbol beside it that meant “danger of falling.” (They used to find her on the floor, having rolled somehow out of her bed; so they lowered her bed each night so that it was only an inch or so from the floor, and put gym mats down to cushion her fall.) The overhead fluorescent lights were on (ugh! turn them off!); flowers bloomed on the windowsill, stargazer lilies. The artificial Christmas tree from Walgreens which I had put up five months before and never taken down because I thought the colored lights and shiny ornaments added some cheer, and because I did not know what else to do with it, was there. The black and white photograph of her great-grandmother Zadrow, her grandmother, Fredericka, her mother, Rose Louise, and herself, little Helen Lorraine, five years old, hung above her bed.
She lay on her back in an overwashed gown of faded blue, her mouth gaping open. My sister said, “Can’t we ask them to close her mouth?” We went to the nurse’s station, asked, and were told they had tried, but that her jaw, loose now, as happens with death, kept falling open. We pulled the bed sheet up over the mouth that frightened us.
I asked for time alone with her. Corpse? Mater Magnificat? Oh, Mamma. I knelt by the bed, fell to my knees before the altar of my mother. I sensed her spirit, free, prised loose, and spoke aloud. I wept. I kissed her cheek, stroked her fine, soft hair. I went back to the nurse’s station, asked for scissors, came back and snipped a lock of her hair, tinted light brown, her weekly hair appointment a last feminine pleasure.
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone, They shall have stars at elbow and foot…
—“And Death Shall Have No Dominion,” DYLAN THOMAS
When I was fifteen, my mother, who knew I wrote poetry and burned Chinese incense in my room but did not know how many times I rode my bicycle to the cemetery behind our house, and wandered with solemn pleasure among the graves, gave me, for Christmas, a collection of poems by Dylan Thomas. I imagine her choosing this book for me, wanting to please me. She was not a literary person, she did not read poetry, yet she made the gesture within herself to understand my nature. She wrote, rather formally, in red ink, “A Merry, Merry Christmas to our girl, with love from Mother and Dad.”
A female Anna’s hummingbird appeared in my garden the day after her death. It hovered outside my study window, looking in at me for a long, suspended time. It came back the next day and the next, hovering before that same window as I sat at my desk. And one final time, as I sat in my garden, praying to her to show me a sign that she was free now and approved of how I was handling all the earthly details of life, for I was missing her terribly and falling under my burdens, the hummingbird appeared, this time hovering, hanging in the air, inches from my face. It stayed for a very long time. The next day, I hung a feeder in the tree outside my study window, but it had disappeared. There had been no hummingbirds in my garden before and none since.
According to Tibetan Buddhist teachings, the spirit has enough energy, during the first hours and days after death, to give signs to the living, but after that, the spirit moves on, signs fade, then are gone. Gan. My mother loved birds and fed them all, especially her elusive, iridescent hummingbirds.
The day before she died, I gave her two bouquets of stargazer lilies, pink-striped perfumed trumpets, the last blooms she would ever see. One month later, a clairvoyant came up to me and said, I see your mother has tiny little birds flying all around her—hummingbirds!—also, she says to thank you for the lilies you gave her, they have always been her favorites.
Mommy. Mamma. Gan.
Journeying through the world
To and Fro, To and Fro,
Cultivating a Small Field