The Long Goodbye (27 page)

I was glad my mother chose to be cremated. She wanted to be scattered in many places so she could remain in the world with the kind of expansive, uncentered love she had for it. But I've started to be sorrowful that there is no wellmarked place to go to be with her. A few weeks before Christmas, I had a dream about a body in a lot that no one had buried. Waking up, I thought: We need a place to put her, by a lilac bush or a weeping cherry. Liam called that same week and said, “I'm starting to feel that the frustrating thing about cremation is that I'm really wishing there were a place I could be with Mom's body, a place to think about her.”

 

 

Before we scattered the ashes, I had an eerie experience. I went for a short run. I hate running in the cold, but after so much time indoors in the dead of winter I was filled with exuberance. I ran lightly through the stripped, bare woods, past my favorite house, poised on a high hill, and turned back, flying up the road, turning left. In the last stretch I picked up the pace, the air crisp, and I felt myself float up off the ground. The world became greenish. The brightness of the snow and the trees intensified. I was almost giddy. Behind the bright flat horizon of the treescape, I understood, were worlds beyond our everyday perceptions. My mother was out there, inaccessible to me, but indelible. The blood moved along my veins and the snow and trees shimmered in greenish light. Suffused with joy, I stopped stock-still in the road, feeling like a player in a drama I didn't understand and didn't need to. Then I sprinted up the driveway and opened the door and as the heat rushed out the clarity dropped away.

I'd had an intuition like this once before, as a child in Vermont. I was walking from the house to open the gate to the driveway. It was fall. As I put my hand on the gate, the world went ablaze, as bright as the autumn leaves, and I lifted out of myself and understood that I was part of a magnificent book. What I knew as “life” was a thin version of something larger, the pages of which had all been written. What I would do, how I would live—it was already known. I stood there with a kind of peace humming in my blood.

On December 30, I went to a party at my friend Stephanie's, a reunion of friends. Maureen, a woman I had met earlier this year, took my hand and said, “I've been thinking about you, how are you?” She seems always to be saying what she believes, or finding a way to say what she believes, and so I told her about the ashes, about the difficulty of the anniversary period, and idly mentioned a quarrel I'd had with a friend.

Maureen said, “These are the eighteen months when you find out who can really go there and who can't. This is a vulgar way of putting it, and there are many wonderful things about our culture, but I'm sorry, it is a phobic culture. People do not want to confront the existential mess that is life. They want to check things off—OK, you're OK. And just because you can talk about your grief, you know,” she said, looking sharply at me, “doesn't mean you are in control of it, or that you know what's going on. You are in the ocean. And what you think, what you analyze, that is just the descanting of that ocean. Your mind is an ocean and it has scary things in it. While you may be able to analyze your grief at three p.m., that has nothing to do with how you feel at three a.m., in the dark center of night.”

Listening to her, I realized that I had been on some level confusing speech—or language—with feeling all year. I had thought, If only I can speak about this, I can understand it, or contain it. But language is the epiphenomenon of a phenomenon that is like waves. The waves aren't the whole of it. They are a small part of a larger entity.

The moment when I flash upon my mother's smile and face and realize she is dead, I experience the same lurch, the same confusion, the same sense of impossibility. A year ago collapses into yesterday in these moments. Periodically for the rest of my life, my mother's death will seem like it took place yesterday.

 

 

O
N SUNDAY after New Year's, I drove to New Jersey through bitter cold and high winds and got to my aunt's house in Holmdel just as my grandmother was walking up the driveway, picking her way over the hard ground. She wore thick baby-blue sweatpants and a matching blue jacket, and somehow the optimistic orderliness of her outfit made me sad. The pastels were like children's clothes. What must it be like to be eighty-two and have outlived your grown daughter?

I had made plans to scatter my mother's ashes today with her family. When I'd told my aunt Joanne that my dad, brothers, and I were going to scatter ashes on Christmas, she wrote to say my grandmother would like to have a place to visit my mother. “She keeps saying to me, ‘I just need to know
where
Barbara is, to have a place to think of her,'” Joanne wrote. I was embarrassed that I hadn't thought of this earlier.

Joanne and my grandmother had come up with a plan to bury the ashes at a spot near a bridle path on a horse farm where my mother used to go riding. It was now preserved land. Liam and Eamon had gone out of town, and my father decided he couldn't face another ceremony, so I went by myself, reflecting—as I drove—on the odd fact that we lived in a world where a mother might have to ask if she could be part of her daughter's interment ceremony. (The other night I saw a friend; we talked about her father's death, and what her family had done with the body, and she said, “I felt like we made a lot of mistakes. We never invited his siblings to scatter the ashes, partly because we were so focused on just getting our stepmother there, to the house. But can you imagine not being invited to scatter your sibling's ashes?” and she smiled ruefully. “We did the same,” I said. “I felt awful.”)

Usually, you step inside a Kelly family party and hear loud laughter and the blender busy making margaritas. This time, there were quiet hugs; on the table, fixings for sandwiches were laid out. As we mingled, my grandmother pulled me over and asked, “Are the ashes in a container, like a plain box?”

“Actually, they're in a Christmas bag,” I said. “My father put them in a bag for us; let me get it.” So I took the bag—a gold “Merry Christmas” bag, with shiny ribbon painted on—and set it on the sideboard. “There. She's eating with us.” I couldn't tell if my grandmother was appalled or not.

Over lunch, my grandmother and I sat together and she talked about e-mail. She'd recently gotten an account. Her screen name is BigMamu. “They dragged me kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century, but here I am! Honey,” she continued, genially, “take this bag. It's got your Christmas presents.” Shit, I thought. We hadn't gotten her anything. My mother always went in on something with her sisters. None of us had thought to do that. We were bad grandchildren! But she was still talking, about the gift, a throw of some kind. “It reminded me of your mother,” she said. I was puzzled. A throw? But she continued, and I understood—“It says ‘Joy' and it has an angel embroidered on it.”

My grandmother rarely talks about her hardships. I have never heard her complain about anything. Last year at the funeral she had said, “I know Barbara's with Jesus Christ.” But I could see how hard-won that conviction was. As Joanne passed the dessert around, my aunt Janet and I chitchatted about movies. My grandmother remembered how the last time they all saw my mother, she had been reminiscing about the way her old dog Duchess used to pull her around the neighborhood on her bike. “She'd just get on her bike and off Duchess would run,” Grandma said, smiling. “One day Duchess took off after a squirrel and Barbara tumbled off her bike, and she really hurt herself.” She paused and looked down at her hands. “I remember that. Barbara really hurt herself that day.”

There was much back-and-forth about routes to the farm—
But that way would be a half-hour slower!
Joanne exclaimed to Mary Ellen.

“Can I have a spoon?” my grandmother asked over my aunts, who paid no attention. “Joanne, will you please get me a spoon to bring with us?”

“You want a
spoon
? So you don't have to touch the ashes?” Joanne said. “I think it's OK to touch them. It's
Barbara
, for Christ's sake.”

“It is the windiest day,” Jackie said. “I got up this morning and said to Nick, ‘Today's the day we're spreading Barbara's ashes,' and the wind howled. He said, ‘With any luck, she'll just end up back in our yard.' ”

We milled in the hall, bundling up. As we walked through the living room, Grandma picked up a throw and said, “See”—and she pointed to a robed angel blowing a trumpet—“this is the angel. That's Barbara. Though I don't know if she's playing a trumpet. Or maybe she's learned,” she mused, “and now she's showing off.”

She turned to me and said, “That Barbara. She could do anything she put her mind to. I didn't even know her. She had such a quick mind. When she was a little girl, she was always off playing quietly. And I'd say, ‘What are you doing, Barbara?' and she'd say, ‘Nothing, Mom.' What was going on in that mind? It was impossible to know. Did
you
know her?” She peered at me.

What could I say?

“Don't forget the ashes!” someone called out.

“That would be perfect!” Mary Ellen said. “Barbara would be laughing:
You bunch of idiots are standing out in the cold, and here I am back in the toasty house.
”

 

 

The plan got disrupted from the start: Mary Ellen set off on her own route, not Joanne's. The snow was coming down hard.

“They know each other so well,” my grandmother said. “Those girls know when to argue and when to agree and then do what they want to anyway.”

“Your mother was the master of that,” Jackie said, looking at me in the rearview mirror. “It's like she said that day in the hospital: ‘It's simple. I know what
no
means. And so when I say no, people listen to me.' She said that was the secret to her life.”

Suddenly I knew where we were. It was the road we used to take to go to my dad's parents' house. We passed their street and went on, over a bridge, up a hill, and took a left on a dirt road, passing skeleton trees and a red horse farm.

“You're going to like this spot,” my grandmother said, looking back. “It's a big evergreen by an overlook. Horses go by, and you can see the water. In the morning, the river glistens like a million tiny diamonds in the sun. This is a good day for us to do this. She was a winter baby, an Aquarius, like you. I would bundle her up in her snowsuit and out she'd go and come back hours later.”

“I'm glad it's snowing,” Joanne exclaimed, as we piled out of the cars, the snow swirling around us. “It makes it special. You know it snowed, last year on her birthday, February third, and now it's snowing today, as we put her ashes to rest, on January third. I think it is her way of saying she's with us.”

Uncle Nick raised an eyebrow. “Amazing what will happen,” he said. “Snow in winter! A miracle!”

“Let me have my magical thinking!” Joanne protested.

We walked down a path high on a hill to the wooden walkway.

“See, you can see the water,” Joanne said.

“And this is a horse path,” Jackie added. “So horses will come by her all day long in spring and summer.” They started down the path.

My grandmother lingered. I went to take her arm and walk with her.

“I know you miss your mom,” she said, looking down at her feet. “And that's OK. I miss your grandpa. For years, I missed him all the time.”

“Do you still miss him?” I said.

“Yes,” she said quietly. “Mostly I'm just sorry about everything he doesn't get to see and do.”

My grandfather had died before I was born. But to her, he was still a complete and total presence, or, rather, absence. Just as my mother would be, should I ever have children: an absence I thought about all the time.

The observation deck was small, with a bench and a striking view of the river—a shining circle of ice in the distance—and the farm and trees below. Next to the deck was a robust evergreen, tall, but not as tall as it would get.

“See? That's the tree,” Grandma said. “Isn't it pretty?”

And it was.

“I have a prayer to say,” she said, as we all took our places by the tree.

My grandmother read a prayer for my mother's soul, leaning over the railing, my cousin Lindsay by her side. Then Joanne read a poem my grandmother had picked out, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's “A Psalm of Life,” which I had never read before. I imagined that my grandmother took the end of the poem as a kind of road map for her own mourning:

We stood in a moment of silence. I held up the bag.

“You go,” Joanne said.

“No, today is for you.”

“Oldest to youngest,” one sister said.

Joanne took off her gloves and plunged her hand in the ashes. She knelt in the ground, where one of the husbands had dug up some dirt, and said, “I love you, Barbara, and I think about you every day.”

Jackie and Janet both had tears in their eyes as they bent down. Mary Ellen took a handful and let them go, saying, gently, “Rest in peace, Barbara.”