Anna in the Afterlife (13 page)

The secret was this. There
was
no end of the world. As long as you were in it, you were alive and the world was yours. Once you were buried, as Anna would be today, you weren't there to worry. One should relish, delight in, the thought of “nothing.” Eat it like candy. Savor it like hot fudge. Nothing was the absence of
everything
. “Nothing” meant
no more of this mind dancing!

And now strains of “The Entertainer” were coming down from the speakers on the chapel wall. Not any “Entertainer” but Anna's special rendition, played by her own fingers on her own piano. Heads were turning to discover the source of the music. Her granddaughters had a look of awe upon their faces as they heard Anna's own musical accompaniment to accompany Anna's funeral. How brilliant of her daughters to know that no music would suffice but that from Anna's soul itself. Hearing the music that was embossed in the very fibers of her being, she felt a flood of love overtaking her, a tidal wave, an ocean of joy that had no boundaries, no limits, and no conditions.

If music be the food of love, play on
, she reminded herself. For so long Anna had been starved of nourishment, had savored nothing for the seven years she was chained to the feeding tube, and now…this veritable feast! Her hunger was enormous, she blew up like a balloon, like the Goodyear blimp; she felt herself expanding to the bursting point, filling with the generosity and good will that she had fended off all her life. In a moment she would explode with this sudden unfamiliar love of all humanity and be scattered in a blaze of falling stars upon the universe below.

Her eldest granddaughter, Bonnie, took the stage carrying her violin. She announced softly that she would play a Celtic folk tune called “I'll Always Remember You.” The violin tones spread over the room, settling on their heads like a river of silver tears. Myra, Anna's youngest granddaughter, joined Bonnie in a duet, with Myra singing a Hebrew folk melody and Bonnie accompanying her. The guests of Anna's Life Reunion were wiping their eyes, one after another.

Then Myra stepped to the podium.

“I want to talk about how good Mom-Mom was to her grandchildren. We always called her
Mom-Mom
. When Bonnie was a little baby, she couldn't pronounce ‘Grandma'—it came out ‘Mom-Mom'—and that's how, halfway through her life, my grandmother got a new name and became Mom-Mom, the person we loved. Mom-Mom was not a soft or sentimental person, but she was very kind to us. Although we could see that she was formidable in her own way, she never intimidated us. When we were little, we visited her in her apartment in Fairfax. Her grand piano with the beautiful green antique lamp on it dominated her tiny apartment. She had a little tiny kitchen; the three of us would go in there and she'd put us up on the counter with our legs dangling. We'd sit there and she'd open the refrigerator and take out the Oreo cookies. She kept everything in the refrigerator, the cookies, the crackers, the cereal. I will never forget the delicious taste of those cold Oreos. I was always happy and excited when we went to visit her. I often wonder about the person she was before she was Mom-Mom, when she was a young woman growing up in New York. I never met that person, but I knew Mom-Mom and I loved her and I miss her very much.”

Thank you darling
, Anna wanted to say. She wanted to fly to her grandchild (who was trembling as she spoke her words, standing two feet from Anna's remains) and wrap her in the heat of the last movements of her seething molecules—which would shortly be dispersed to the universe.

Bonnie, still holding her violin, stepped up to the podium.

“I brought my wire music stand today, though I have a much fancier one now. Mom-Mom gave me this one for my birthday when I was ten years old. I've had it ever since. I'd like to share one or two small memories with you. One of the best things about her was being able to see her in her antique shop. When I was in college and had my own car, I used to go there and visit her. She would play the piano and I would play along the top line of the music…and she ignored her customers! When she bought her last car and was trying to remember a way to remember her new license plate, which was ‘600 TCI,' she said, ‘The 600 part—that's easy. The TCI, well, Tough Cookie I.' It worked!”

Anna had forgotten all about that. Wasn't it strange how others carried in their memories facts about your life that you, for the life of you, couldn't have recalled?

Now Jill, her middle grandchild, stepped up to speak. Though no one knew it yet but Anna, she was two months pregnant with Anna's great-grandson. Jill glowed with her secret—she was grieved less than the others because she knew that Anna's replacement was on the way, a new vessel of life, replete with the family talents, to have his day in the world.

“I especially remember and admire Mom-Mom's independence. In the years when we knew her as children, she ran the antique store alone, went out ‘on calls' every weekend, carried furniture onto the sidewalk in the morning and back into the store at night. She was always well-dressed, chipper, energetic. She braved the LA freeways to visit us. She sometimes dropped in on a surprise visit, arriving at the back door bringing a bag of food and treats, delighting us. She was glamorous: she wore skirts and elegant shoes and a pin on her collar. She was modern and decisive: she liked her hair white and short. She didn't like to cook and ate her meals out. She loved her grandchildren and let us know it. And we loved her.

“It was very hard to see her lose that independence. My mother and aunt worked very hard—to their limits—at the impossible task of trying to make her last years easier.

“My grandmother as I knew her was courageous, independent, and beautiful. Her talent with words and music gave pleasure to us all, whether in a Chopin nocturne, her virtuosic Scrabble playing, or in a sharp and witty retort. We will miss her. But she is part of us all.”

Anna had tears in her eyes, herself, she who never had patience with sentimental ceremonies. But the woman her granddaughters were painting seemed far more generous and loving than she knew herself to be. Could it be she had been wrong about herself? That she was really as wonderful as they said?

Now her youngest daughter was beginning to speak—her baby girl who had had such grief in her life.

“I wish this gathering today could be for one of Mom's recitals. In a way, it will be. We'll hear her playing more of her own music shortly; I think she'd love to go out in a blaze of Chopin. Mom was a brave trouper. For seven years she was held behind enemy lines in the nursing home, a prisoner of her body. But between the shrieks of ‘I want to die!' was the motherly advice: ‘Sweetheart, did you have lunch? Sweetheart, I wish you could meet some nice man. Sweetheart, you're so pretty.' She, till almost the very end, had the ability to laugh at jokes I would tell her, sometimes at her expense. Once she asked me, ‘How come my mother doesn't visit me?' ‘Well, Mom' I told her, ‘Let's see, Grandma would be about 125 years old now. It might be hard for her to catch the bus.' She would laugh and I loved the playfulness we shared. Beside her wonderful ability to play the piano was her way with words. She loved Scrabble; seven-letter words were a piece of cake for her.

“At the end of our visit, we would say our good-byes. She would always say, ‘Thank you for coming,' and I would reply, ‘You're my mom, you don't have to thank me.' I would open the outside door to the parking lot, turn, and wave, and she waved back, often with tears in her eyes. But this last time, New Year's Eve, with Mom deep in a morphine coma, close to death, I turned and waved just in case. I love you, Mom. The biggest gift my mom gave me was that I am lovable and I didn't have to do anything or be anything but myself.

“Looking through my mom's papers, I came across a note my dad had written her many years ago. ‘Dear Anna, after twenty-five years I still think I picked the right one.' Well, that was written thirty-eight years ago and finally the two of you will be joined again today. I love you both.”

When Carol stepped down from the podium, Anna had serious second thoughts about dying. If she was really that beloved by her grandchildren and her children, maybe she should stick it out a while longer!

Janet took her turn to say her piece, recounting how an old man in the nursing home had said to Anna, “You won't want to die if you find the Lord,” and Anna answering, “Is he so stupid that he's
lost
?” There was a rumble of laughter from the audience, and Anna had to smile herself, remembering the old geezer's reaction. Janet then said, “My mother told us she wanted to be buried with Chopin's music, and indeed, today she will be. In a very important way, my mother has been my muse and my inspiration. She was a force, a mystery, a support, a wonder. I don't know what it's going to be like in a world where I can no longer say ‘I'm going to see my mother.' “As Janet stepped down from the podium, wiping her eyes on a handkerchief, once again Anna's rendition of “The Entertainer” burst forth from the chapel speakers. The guests began to smile and tap their feet. She was impressed all over again with her skill on the ivories. How glad she was that her children had forced her to play for their tape recorders on various occasions; otherwise her music would have vanished forever. Following the ragtime piece was Chopin's Nocturne in C Minor (not her best rendition, Anna thought, but pretty substantial) followed by “Sunrise, Sunset,” that heart-twister of a song that made you face how old you had grown and how the young were there to replace you. None so old as Anna, however, who was glad to say she had taken on the title of nonagenarian before bowing out.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the funeral director said, “do not stop to greet the bereaved till after the interment at graveside. Please stand, one row at a time, and file past the deceased to pay your respects.”

Anna watched as her family, as well as the shades and ghosts of her past, walked down the aisle and up a few steps to the stage where the coffin was displayed. They made a circle around her final remains. A few patted the cardboard of the casket. Her sister bent down to kiss the lid (the hypocrite!). Her granddaughters were sobbing and clutching one another's hands.

Anna remembered what one of her aunts had written in her eighth-grade autograph book. “May your life be like a snowflake, that leaves a mark but not a stain.” She saw today that she had actually made a sizable splash. With everyone missing her and crying, she felt almost sentimental herself.

There was no mistaking the significance of the pyramid of dirt that stood beside Anna's grave:
Dust thou art and to dust thou will returneth
. That mountain of dirt, gouged up from the belly of the earth, would shortly be pressed down over her remains. Anna tried to imagine how, exactly, her disintegration would come to pass and how long it would take before she was mere fodder for worms. Not that it bothered her—it was appropriate that her body, broken beyond repair, would finally be consigned to oblivion. Nothing as ugly as she'd become should furthermore be seen in the light of day. She was pleased to know that her vanity was intact and had lasted well beyond her last breath.

But all this rigmarole about death, all this pomp and circumstance! Anna wondered where it had originated, the solemn digging and burying and dirging, all the hushed verbiage about grieving and closure and “life must go on.” What an elaborate pretense that the dead body was sacred (burned or buried, it was nothing more than refuse) and that it must be marked by burnished bronze or marble or carved angels and visited over the years with flowers and tears and wails.

What pained her was to see her three beautiful granddaughters standing at the rear door of the funeral coach as her coffin was pulled out and each of them was assigned a handle. Then the pallbearers—the girls, Anna's youngest grandson, one of her sons-in-law and a hired hand from the cemetery—made their way down the hill. She could see the anguish on her granddaughters' faces as they realized whatever was in there bumping and sliding about in the box was their former grandmother. It was brutal, really, this ceremonial torture. Better to have it end with no witnesses and no speeches.

Her casket was laid on metal pipes that were connected to pulleys. Though Janet and Carol had respected her wishes for no rabbi, Anna could see that some signal was lacking for continuation of the ritual. The Mexican workers at the pulley controls were waiting for the sign. The guests were looking around for the next segment to begin—and there was only silence.

Anna understood that a rabbi would have served to produce this transition, yet she still believed she was right in not wasting $300 on some meaningless gibberish a rabbi would babble.

A man wearing an embroidered yarmulke on his head stepped forward to the graveside—the husband of Janet's childhood Brooklyn friend. It was convenient for Anna that his parents had given him a good Hebrew education, for he quickly dispatched the whole business by saying the Mourner's Kaddish very quickly—satisfying the Mexicans and the guests and maybe God and even Anna (who at least, since it was free, didn't turn it down because who knew whether or not it might open some doors for her in the afterlife.)

The Mexicans turned the pulley wheels, the ropes hummed, Anna's body was lowered slowly into the deep rectangular hole, and the sun came out on the hills beyond the freeway.

The cemetery representative made a little speech about “Now you are invited to step forward to these shovels and make your last gift of kindness to your loved one. Tradition tells us this is the ultimate act of charity you are able to offer to the deceased, since it is one she can never pay back to you.”

“Charity,” Anna heard her sister Gert mumble. “When did my sister ever do an act of charity in her life?” In any case, Gert came forward first, Anna's little sister, now an old woman of eighty-eight, fat in the belly, wobbly on her legs, thick in the chin, sour in the face. With almost a look of vengeance on her face, she grabbed one of the shovels in the dirt and flung her clod of dirt over Anna's coffin. Two more dull explosions of dirt hit the casket and she stepped back, satisfied. This burying of Anna meant that Gert now had moved up to the top of the line, the place she had always been jealous of Anna for occupying. What a hopeless privilege, Anna thought. All it meant was that you were the next to die.