IN PORTLAND, OREGON, at the end of a residential lane filled with tidy Craftsman-style houses and cozy bungalows, Hazel Jamison stood outside one particular house, carrying three GARAGE SALE signs under her arm. The sale was scheduled for the weekend, and that gave Hazel four more days to finish organizing her mother’s worldly possessions and pricing them.
“She was a bit of a pack rat. She never married, so she never had a husband to sort of keep control of the clutter,” Hazel had told her employer when asking for the time off. “I know crafters will love what she has—yarn and cloth and old clothes and antiques and all sort of bric-a-brac. A couple of sewing machines. A couple of boxes of knitting needles. A couple of bushels of yarn for future projects. Nothing all that valuable, but I don’t simply want to pitch it. She had a knack for finding things that other people thought were useless and turning them into something beautiful and wonderful.”
She entered the home she had grown up in and where she had not lived for nearly two decades.
Not much has changed. Still the same artwork and sofa and lamps. The rug might be new.
As she walked from room to room, she began to make a tally of what was left to process—what she would sell and what was obviously headed for the Dumpster that was coming at the beginning of the next week. Whatever did not sell in the sale and was too far gone to donate would be dumped.
“And there’s a lot of junk hiding out here,” Hazel said to herself. “There’s still the attic and the garage and the basement.”
She walked into her mother’s bedroom, also mostly unchanged over the last few decades. There were a few pictures of Hazel, snapshots, tucked into the mirror—Hazel in grade school, Hazel in high school, Hazel with her college cap and gown.
She sat down at her mother’s dressing table and picked up one picture, a small photo, trimmed to fit a tiny square frame. It was a photo of Hazel and her mother at a county fair somewhere—early dusk, a Ferris wheel in the background and both of them with goofy, happy grins on their faces, both holding on to large pink puffs of cotton candy.
Hazel looked at it for a long time and began to softly cry, shedding the tears she had not shed during the last brief burst of sickness that took her mother.
I needed to be strong for her.
She placed the picture back on the table.
Since there was no one else to do it for her.
There had been no one to help with any of this. Not really. Yesterday she’d watched as a pair of not-too-interested workers manhandled the stone above her mother’s grave in the Skyline Memorial Gardens, overlooking Portland, although from that spot Hazel could only see a line of trees to the north, which in the summer blocked the views of the city and river.
Some plots offer better views. Hazel found that notion endearingly odd.
The setting of the stone took less than ten minutes. Both men had nodded, with practiced solemnity, as they gathered their tools—shovels, pry bars, levels, and the like—and motored off in the cemetery’s golf cart. The sedate puttering as they rounded the curve and disappeared from sight was oddly suited to the sedate location.
I imagine cemeteries are pretty quiet places most of the time. How often do people visit gravesites? Or play raucous music?
She remembered looking down at the small granite rectangle containing her mother’s name, her date of birth, and date of death.
Hazel had the monument company add a single Bible verse to the stone. “Make it as small as you can,” she had said. “My mother would kill me if she knew what I was doing, but since I’m paying for it, not much she can do at the moment.”
The monument company representative must have encountered such requests with regularity, because it had been met with not even the slightest hint of a raised eyebrow.
“What’s the verse?” he had asked, pen poised in midair.
“Jeremiah 29:11.”
“That’s on a number of markers.”
Hazel had felt obligated to repeat it. “‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’ That’s sort of been my life verse, you know.”
The agent had nodded, offered a comforting smile, then added, “We’ll use an actual Bible for the quote—and we ask which version you prefer. We always do. In the past, you wouldn’t believe how many people get a word or two wrong, then want us to make changes after the stone is cut.”
The representative, whose name Hazel knew but quickly forgot, had leaned closer and said softly, “It’s not like a computer. We can’t autocorrect engraving on granite.”
“No, I am sure you can’t. And thank you for being thorough.”
And now she sat picturing the engraved words.
They had all been there.
She looked out the window of her mother’s room to the sky, the sun breaking through a dense cloud cover, shafts of light dancing along the quiet and overgrown lawn.
Now I am alone, Mother. All alone.
Just like you always wanted to be, isn’t it?