Back in Jersey City, I took a breath and reached into the mailbox. Lately, I’d been able to make it through most days at work without crying, but every time I got home I would find a pile of envelopes addressed to my mother, and the tears would have me gasping for air before I could make it inside my apartment.
This time, though, I found an envelope with an insurance company’s logo on it addressed to me. I took a breath, then ripped it open, unfolding what turned out to be a life insurance statement. I started blinking, trying as best I could to see the number before the tears already pooling in my eyes rendered every digit a blur. I stepped into my building and held my hand over my mouth. The force of the scream made me double over as if I’d been punched in the stomach. I’d been told to expect a check, but nothing could have prepared me for the amount printed on the dotted line.
A few months before she died, I had agonized over whether I could afford to give my mother the $800 she had asked for to help fix her car. I finally did after a coworker reminded me, “You only have one mother.” My mother was gone now and, in her stead, I had a check worth more money than either of us had seen in our lives. A cruel joke. The overdrawn checking accounts for the sake of groceries and heart medication. The doctors’ and dentists’ visits put off for too long.
Though for years at that point I’d thought of her failing health as inevitable, staring at the number on the paper in my hand I saw that a different story had once been possible. It wasn’t always necessarily going to end this way. If she hadn’t been living paycheck to paycheck, maybe she would not have needed to smoke so heavily to deal with her stress. Maybe there had been earlier avenues of treatment that would’ve spared her congestive heart failure in the first place. Maybe she could have been able to go back to school, gotten her college degree. What if, what if, what if…
I couldn’t tell which hurt more: the onslaught of ideas about what could have been, or all the memories I had of what actually happened. My mother crying in front of her altar because she couldn’t afford to send me to NYU. My mother sitting across from a banker who had denied her for yet another loan. My mother pacing in line at the grocery store, hoping her debit card wouldn’t be declined.
And now this check was in my hand, bought and paid for with her life.
I climbed the steps to my apartment and slid back down to my knees once I was in the kitchen. We could’ve had more flowers at her funeral. We could’ve decided on the casket with the rose-gold handles. We could’ve buried her in a designer gown with diamond rings on every finger and black pearls around her neck. Instead, my mother would wear the suit her sister picked out for her until the fabric disintegrated and succumbed to the dirt and worms. My ears rang with everything we could’ve done, everything we could no longer do. I would never get to bury her again.