A year after my mom’s death—August—I’ve just had a round of radiation for some new cancer in my spine—and now we’re on the Cape, back at the flagpole: Gin for Jan, I’m calling it, a circle of Adirondack chairs on the bluff. She loved the cocktail hour. Some of my closest friends are with us—Tita and Drew, Adam and Melissa—but otherwise it is just our new little family unit: me and John, our kids, my dad, Charlie and Amelia.
Anniversaries make me nervous—the way you are supposed to be able to summon your feelings about someone or something because they match up with a day of the year. Sometimes being in the exact place helps, because it summons the intangibles of smells and the way the light looks.
Following that logic, we should all be gathered tight in her stale bedroom—but being here on the island evokes plenty. Not only her death—do her ashes still somehow surround us in the grasses?—but her life. We are all slightly sunburned from a day at the beach, we’ve been taking turns in the outdoor shower, we are sipping wine from mismatched cups, the pack of kids—six boys—are running wild by the boulders, concocting a play they want to put on for the grown-ups tonight: Revoloosh On!, a sort of improvised Hamilton off-shoot featuring mostly dramatic battle scenes. We have promised to trek down to their roughshod amphitheater out by the compost pile to be their audience as soon as we’ve made it through the first round of drinks.
“Have you been able to feel her at all?” I ask Charlie.
“I guess if feeling the absence of her is feeling her, I feel her,” he says. “I keep having the sense that we’re waiting for one more person to sit down to dinner, to enter the room. Like she’s in the bathroom and she’ll be back in a sec.”
“Yeah, I’m having that exact feeling a lot, too,” I say. “And the feeling that I’m getting away with something that she is about to call me out on.”
Family vacations were often the time where she most liked to keep it real. You’d be relaxing in the hot tub together and all of a sudden she’d start saying, “You know what I’ve been meaning to talk to you about?” and in an instant you are whirling through a universe where is it obvious to everyone but you that you have been failing at life in some deeply subtle but disturbing way, where wearing socks with holes in them is fundamentally disrespectful, where you have irrevocably spoiled your children by allowing them to negotiate for dessert after they have clearly violated dinnertime rules.
I can tell my dad has been feeling it, too: Should we go off on a picnic, even though we’re getting a late start? Can we spend the whole day reading by the window? Did anyone sweep the kitchen today? No one is here to tell us what we should be doing. I keep decluttering the coffee table in the living room from a place of fear.
“I can give you a thorough talking-to, if it would make you feel better,” Charlie jokes.
Usually my parents slept in my dad’s parents’ old bedroom, but this year he chooses to sleep in the bedroom that was his grandmother’s. So John and I take my grandparents’ quarters—a big west-facing room with a private bathroom, a view of the bay, a nice draft when the predominant wind blows, and a screen door leading out onto the porch.
I sit on the edge of the bed and examine through the faded mirror on the dresser the mass of curls on my head, livelier than usual in the salt air. My face is tan; I’m wearing a tank top. I don’t look sick.
“I’m definitely going to die in the winter,” my mom told me once, a few years ago. “Summer is so kind. Winter always seems like it has it in for me.”
Now I can feel her sitting right here on the bed with a book, late in the afternoon like this when the light shifts and the breeze picks up, my dad headed down the path for some predinner fishing just offshore in the boat. She is everything but absent. As a little girl—and even a teenager—I loved to come and find her here, to have her to myself, even though I knew it risked being told about all my latest shortcomings. Just to sit with her and enjoy the quietness around her—the way so many children seem to love to do with their mothers without understanding how we disturb that quietness with our very presence. Just now, I hear Benny galumphing down the hall toward me: “Mom! Where are you? I need to nuzzle you!”
* * *
The visceral anniversary of her death doesn’t come until after summer has officially passed, and of course it comes as a surprise. The end of September. We are home from the Cape. The kids have returned to school. Charlie and Amelia have just arrived in town. They’ve decided to escape the Western Mass winter and come live down here for a little while at my dad’s house while Charlie works on finishing his dissertation.
They have a new dog—Luna—a young, bouncy pit mix that likes to get in the middle of everything. She hardly ever stops moving, and she’s still recovering from a run-in over the summer in the woods with a skunk. Charlie and Amelia can barely control her.
The second night after they move into town, Luna and my Dad’s geriatric fat beagle Clyde get into a nasty fight over some food, and Luna rips Clyde’s face up pretty badly: chunks of flesh torn from his snout. Clyde, already well on his way to complete dementia, becomes completely incontinent. The house is a minefield of puddles and piles of shit, and Clyde is too fragile to undergo what it would take to patch his face. The next morning, my dad decides to put him down. The vet offers to come out to the house.
My dad calls me: “We’re doing it in about ten minutes.”
“Okay,” I say, jumping in the car, texting John a jumble of autocorrect nonsense at the stop sign. “Luna a Soul Train Clyde; running to my dad’s; herbed late; patting him down; FUCK. None of that. We have to put Clyde down. Long story. XO.”
Already the first signs of déjà vu are setting in.
When I get to the house, I can tell Charlie is kind of a mess, and Amelia seems freaked: They’ve had Luna shut upstairs all morning, and Clyde is wandering around listlessly in the garden.
“This is so awful,” says Amelia, sitting at the patio table with her knees wrapped up under her chin.
Charlie wipes his nose.
“It’s kind of fishy,” I try to joke. “Every time you guys come to town, someone dies or almost dies.” We all look at each other, but no one is moved to laugh. My dad and the vet show up.
The way the vet hugs and greets me, I can tell right away she thinks I’m my mother. We look alike if you don’t know us very well, and I’m sure my cane isn’t giving me a youthful air.
“Oh, poor Clyde!” she gushes. “I’m so sorry today is the day! He has lived such a great long life with you all.”
“Thank you for being here,” I say. My dad is being characteristically quiet. We’re all standing around looking guiltily at our feet. I keep kneeling down and petting Clyde compulsively—more than I normally would—because I can tell my dad is totally checked out and I feel like someone should.
“Are we going to do it out here on the patio? It’s such a nice day!” says the vet, “Do you want to bring his doggy bed out here? He might like that.”
“That’s a really great idea,” I say, and my dad runs inside to grab the urine-steeped cushion, the deathbed.
We don’t plan it this way, but at precisely noon—the bells on the campus church tolling—the vet injects Clyde, who lies on his bed as we awkwardly circle around him, with a very hefty dose of pentobarbital into his veins. After a minute or so passes, she checks his pulse, decides to give him another shot, and then he is gone.
The vet, of course, does not know that the color of the scrubs shirt she wears and her haircut and her general vibe remind us all overwhelmingly of Patty, my mom’s hospice nurse. She doesn’t know how we gathered here out on the patio the morning after my mom died—these very chairs—and felt the first day without her creep into being, how the sun felt so similarly crushing and yet warming. She doesn’t know of our loss at all. In fact: She thinks my mom is me.
“You’ll find grief is very strange,” she says as Clyde’s paws and jowls stop twitching. She is unmarried, has just lost her fifteen-year-old dachshund this year. “You think you have a handle on it, and then you don’t at all.”
When she hugs me goodbye, she squeezes my arm. “I’m glad to see you’re doing well. I heard you were very sick. God is good.”
After she leaves, Amelia and I sit on the patio. My dad and Charlie dig a big hole in the yard on the other side of the garage by the fence where Clyde loved to lie in the forsythia. We watch them heave Clyde’s body from the dog bed into the earth, and then fill the hole back up.
“Won’t Luna want to dig him up?” I say to Amelia.
“Probably,” says Amelia darkly.
But my dad is on it—covering the wound of dirt with some junk from the garage: some pieces of plywood and a ladder.
“That should do it,” he says, never exactly one for aesthetics.
“Rest in peace, old dog,” I say, hugging my dad.
I have never been able to say that phrase about my mom. It feels morbid and clichéd. It’s etched on a Styrofoam gravestone that the boys love to stake into the front yard every Halloween. But of course, it’s what I wish most for her, for myself: Rest in peace, Mom.
“Rest in peace,” my dad says, climbing into his beat-up van to head back to work.