One Year

Dear Mom,

It’s been an entire year since that May 22 that you died.  I’ve gotten pretty much past the vision of you gasping for air when I got back to your house after taking a two-hour break that morning.  It was not a sight I ever wanted to see, and it stayed in my head for a long time.  Now, 12 months later, it isn’t the paramount picture I have of your last few hours.  What I remember now is sitting on the bed by your side, stroking your head, while your granddaughter, Carolyn, laid on the other side of you, curled around your head and your great-grandson Alex laid next to you.  Stanley was at the foot of the bed.  He seemed to need a little more distance.  We talked to you and waited for your last breath to come.  We knew you were leaving us very soon.  As you took that last breathe Stanley and I said, nearly at the same instant, “Poor little Mama.”  Carolyn and I began to cry and I took your rings off your finger—I didn’t want them to be there when the people came to take you away.  I put them on my finger and they stayed there for days.  Alex put the picture he’d drawn of a rose on your chest.  He did it so sweetly, with so much sensitivity.  He really cared about you, even though he’d not known you very well.  I guess he knew that you saw the artist in him that very few others had seen yet.

Your skin turned the most gorgeous ivory just after you died.  You looked like a beautiful angelic marble statue.  I will never forget how you looked at that moment and I hope it will one day replace the gasping-for-air picture that floats in every now and then.  Strangely, Carolyn and I had the same impulse—to go through your jewelry to find a token, something to hold of yours in the days to come.  Alex wanted a large pin, Carolyn looked for a pendant she remembered you wearing.  I only remember the act of looking, not what I took.  All of the practical things that had to be done came after that.  We had to call Hospice and Michael.  Eventually the funeral home people showed up—one guy who looked like a plumber with another guy who looked like a ghoul!  We went into the kitchen when they took you out of the house, turning our backs, not looking.  There was paperwork to do, pills to destroy, decisions to make.  I remember very little of that.  I was relieved and devastated at the same time.  I had known you were dying for several months, I suppose you knew it too, though you kept promising me you were going to get better.

I’ve dreamed about you many times in the year since you left.  In the dreams you are younger, not sick.  Dad is there, too.  You are together and healthy.  I love those dreams—they are like a visit from both of you.  You would be happy to know that Stanley finally ended up in a nice apartment.  It took a long time—he didn’t move until April—but he is at Bremerton Garden Apartments with a view of the Manette and Warren Ave bridges—where Aunt Carol lived for awhile, way back in the sixties or seventies.  He is happy there and says his kitty is, too.  I am reading your diaries.  I know that you left them for me to read and I am thankful you did.  I am learning so much about you that I didn’t know and they keep me connected to you in a wonderful way.  I just wish I had the earlier ones from the 50s and 60s.  What happened to them?  Did you get rid of them?  Did they burn in the fire in 2002?  I’m in the seventies with you right now.  Your diaries are like novels to me, real page-turners, more fascinating than I ever thought they’d be.  It will take me a long time to read through them, but that’s okay—you’ll be with me longer that way.

We sold your house, Mom.  I don’t think you’d be very happy to see what they’ve done to it so far, but they have great plans, so in the end it will be okay.  The mother of the lady across the street bought it.  She wants to “bring it back to its origins, the Twenties”, she told me.  But in preparation for that they’ve cut down the lilacs, the magnolia, the pink dogwood, even the huge camellia bush.  I think they left the wisteria bush, but they also got rid of all that awful ivy and cut down one of the big fir trees that was threatening the house.  The yard looks huge now, bigger than I ever knew it was.  I’m going to have to let go of it pretty soon, but I keep going by there to see what else they’re going to do and if I approve.  The year of getting the house ready to sell caused me to have a possessiveness about it that’s hard to get over now.

I think that’s all I wanted to tell you.  It’s Memorial Day weekend and I’ll take some flowers to your and Dad’s crypt up on Cemetery Hill, like I’ve done every year since Dad died.  I should go more often, but you guys aren’t really there.  It’s only your ashes.  Stanley has some of your ashes in a heart I got for him and I kept some, too.  You are with us every day. I hope you approve of how things are going.  We miss you.

                                    Love, Chris