Category: Duct Tape and Prayers

As Tracy noted earlier today, we now all understand why people say it doesn’t sink in until after the funeral. There’s just so much to do! And today, I found that my sense of time was just amazingly distorted – I kept checking myself, while I was out running errands, whenever I had to write the date or think about the day of the week. It’s Tuesday? It’s really only been a day? A single day? It already feels like so long…

Thank you all for your kind words. My sister also reads this, and I know she also appreciates your kindness.

Some have asked if they can/should send flowers, or make donations somewhere in Mom’s name. If you’d like to send flowers, let me know and I’ll give you the address. We’re asking that if people opt to donate, they do so in Mom’s name to the hospice service that provided such amazing care in her final weeks of life – we would have still kept Mom home, if at all possible, but Kaiser Hospice made it so much easier for everyone, and they obviously deeply care about the work they do.

Kaiser Foundation Hospital Hospice Program
Kaiser Foundation Health Plan of the NW
2701 NW Vaughn St Suite 140
Portland, Oregon 97210

After my maternal grandmother, Momo, died, my blood aunt on that side of the family washed her hands of the entire clan, and disappeared. She was angry, angry at a lot of things. Ways she thought she had been wronged, ways she had been wronged. She had cared for Momo almost exclusively for the last years of Momo’s life, with little input from a large Catholic family. The family, from what I remember and what I heard, just sort of assumed my aunt would care for Momo, since my aunt was a nurse. Therefore, it just made sense, right?

My aunt took close care of her mother until after the funeral, and then said some very choice words to her siblings, and vanished.

An impulse, after last night, I could understand. Emotions run high, and you get stuck. You hold on to anything but the grief, because the grief is there, threatens to overwhelm you, drown you, drag you to a depths you might not climb out of. Anger is raw, external, directed away and out.

Of course, it doesn’t help that that side of the family can hold a grudge like I’ve never seen…

I’m drifting. I blame the sedatives.

I’m not so concerned, tonight, about stupidity or the family falling apart. My family is amazing. I’ve talked a lot about my sister because she reads this (even when she’s irritated with me), and we don’t really have the relationship, yet, where we just come out and talk about raw emotions. We’re working on it, but for now it’s easier for me to talk about her and for her to see the compliment rather than me simply tell her. (Gee, do you think perhaps my family has a problem accepting compliments?) I haven’t really talked much about my father, and hardly at all about my brother. And then, of course, there’s the cat – a marvelous and strange story in itself to tell. Add in geographical fun with photographs an religion, and there are some interesting things to talk about.

But I can’t get my mind off the sniffling I can hear all around me, or the sound of my mother blowing her nose. The sound of Tracy blowing her nose. The same sound.

The morgue has come, my mother’s body gone.

I have her earrings on now – three pearls embracing a diamond.

I have on her jade and gold Kuan Yin.

Hers.
Mine.

We have showered, a matter of needing to be clean for Tracy, a small part of ritual for me.
I’ve picked out long sleeves, white satin, embroidered and white for her top.
Silken light blue pants.

A surprise greets us down in the sickroom.
Mom’s face has changed – her mouth is no longer hanging open, refusing to close. Instead, she has a smile, a beautiful smile, and an amazing, serene expression.
The final proof we needed – she has gone some place else. Better.

Tracy and I talk softly to her, telling her what we’re doing.

She’s cold.
She is so cold.

We take off the sheets, throw them away. We take out the catheter, throw it away. We take off her socks, throw them away. Rigor mortis has set, and we cannot move her as easily. So we cut her out of the nightshirt she had been wearing.
We throw it away.

Her gaunt, naked, bruised body before us, we take the softest of baby cloths and water, and we clean her skin. We move slowly, from foot to head, my sister on the left, I am on the right. We each take a turn washing her face, and then we repeat the process with lotion.

We have to cut the nightshirt to get it on, but that’s okay. The sky blue pants go on easier, but not without some comedy – around this point, my sister begins to giggle and sing “I feel pretty, oh so pretty” through her own tears.
Her giggles are contagious.

Tracy picks out the colour of lipstick, and I slowly apply it to my mother’s smiling lips. My sister lifts the body slightly and I brush her hair, smoothing it back into a more calm, less Einsteinian mass. With scissors, I cut a small lock of hair from her temple, where we have been brushing her hair back as we assure her of our love, our permission to go. Wetted lightly, I twisted it into a knot and placed it in the locket with hair from almost a year ago, from when she cut it all before chemo.

The final touches. Tracy finds soft blue and white socks that match what Mom is clothed in, and we each place one on a foot.

I uncork the Chanel #5, a Christmas gift for years. One of her favourite scents. I place it upon the now still pulse points of my mother, and along my own. Later, the bottle will go into my own things.

The tears have stopped. So has the giggling. We stand, on either side of her body, admiring our beautiful mother one last time.

We get Dad, and quietly cover her to her chin with a soft white blanket.

The morgue will be here at 10.