Prepare a Place For Me

There was only one reason why my father would be calling me.  My mother must be dead.

He explained how it happened, how just last week he had given up taking care of her at home, that for the third time, she’d gone limp in the bathtub and he’d had to call the fire department to come lift her and take her to the cherry wood bed they’d bought as newlyweds 64 years before. He apologized to me.  If he hadn’t been holding their ancient wall phone, he would have been wringing his hands.  She had only lived a week in the Alzheimer’s Unit and he had visited every night, he said, taking tapes of the music he thought she would remember and playing it on the ancient Press Play tape player they kept in the basement.

He was sure she still knew him.  He told me how she had kissed his hands when they last said goodbye.  She had taken both of his hands in hers and kissed his hands.  I couldn’t imagine it. It was my mother whose hands would be kissed.  It was my mother’s impossibly soft cheek and the smell of her face powder and English Lavender soap that drew us to her seeking the blessing of kissing her. Alzheimer’s had changed a lot about her.

The realization that I was, temporarily at least, sibling in charge hit me hard after I got through Chicago traffic and on to the smooth raceway across western Michigan that is I-96, mile after mile of rolling countryside with no interruptions except the tiny roadside wineries giving free shots to interstate drivers.  I found every possible reason to delay. I sampled the wine, hunted for snacks at massive truck stops, and even pulled over to check the old Michigan map to make sure I hadn’t suddenly forgotten how to drive home.  What was I thinking being the first responder on the scene of a catastrophe? That was my brother’s job. I stalled as long as I could, going the speed limit and not a mile faster, but eventually I made it to my folks’ driveway and within thirty seconds, my dad was standing at the screen door.

“Thanks for coming, Janice,” he said, like I was the last guest to leave a dull party.  To add to the oddness of the night, my father then hugged me.  I was 53.  My father must have hugged me before this night, but I don’t remember it ever happening.  So when my father hugged me, I told him I needed to go to the drugstore right away.  “What do you need?  We probably have whatever you need here,” he said.

“I need to buy make-up, Dad.  I left home without my make-up.  So I need to go to the drugstore and buy stuff, you know, like mascara,” I answered. Barely having put my keys down on the table, I grabbed them back up and started toward the door.  “I’ll be back in 15 minutes.” As I walked out the door, I heard the familiar screech as he pulled the lever to bring up the footrest on his La-Z-Boy rocker.  He was sitting in his chair where he belonged, I thought.  In a minute, he’ll turn the TV on and resume watching CNN with the sound muted and then he’ll pick up the book on top of the stack next to his chair and start reading where he left off when he’d heard my car in the driveway.  I knew exactly what he was doing. I felt relieved that he was doing what he always did.  He wasn’t crying or hugging me.  He was being himself.

The drug store had that fluorescent weird feeling that all stores have when it’s eleven o’clock at night and no one is there except the girl working the check-out and the guy in back restocking the Fritos.  I walked up and down the cosmetics department.  L’Oreal, Maybelline, Max Factor.  I stuck at Maybelline for a long minute looking at the mascara and wondering if they still made the little red plastic boxes with the tiny brush and bar of dark color that required a little squirt of spit to moisten.  I remembered the little box in the right hand drawer of the cherry wood vanity, sitting atop an embroidered guest towel that my mother used as a drawer liner, and next to the mascara box was the eyebrow pencil she used on her beautiful, business-like eyebrows, and, sometimes, to give herself a beauty mark low on her right cheek. In the evenings, she would sit at her vanity table with the small lamp casting a yellow light in the darkness of her room, a place so serene and cool and off-limits, and she would paint her nails red leaving perfectly lined half-moons.  She was as ephemeral a person as ever lived on this earth and she was not going to be there when I went home. Was she?

We talked about my mother’s funeral.  “Whatever you think is right, Dad,” I kept answering whenever he asked what to do.  Should we have a graveside service or a full-fledged funeral?  My father, one practiced at snap and sometimes life-changing decision-making, was clearly stuck.  For the first time in his 88 years, he was indecisive.

“John thinks we should just go with the graveside service.  Not that many people would come to a service at the funeral home.  Do you think that’s right?”  He had just hung up the phone after the third or fourth phone conversation about this topic with my brother, stuck in bad weather across the country.

“I think that’s fine, Dad.” I didn’t really think it was fine.  My mother deserved the whole funeral shebang.  Plenty of people knew her and liked her.  I didn’t want anything about her funeral being quick or cheap.  I held my tongue.  I had been estranged from my parents for ten years until just a year ago.  It wasn’t my place, I thought, to have an opinion.

We picked out a casket together and the clothes that my mother would wear.  I took off my pearl earrings and asked the funeral director to put them on my mother along with the locket my dad had given her 65 years before when they were engaged.  Later I drove back to the funeral home to make sure they knew to curl my mother’s hair.  In her Alzheimer’s fog, she had taken to wearing a baseball cap over her straight hair.  My father may have remembered her curled hair but he couldn’t do anything about it.

Dozens of people came to her wake.  My father stood in the center of the large room, my mother lying in her open casket off to the side, and he talked to everyone as if he was hosting a cocktail party.  He talked about golf and bowling, two things they had done together.  He greeted former employees from their Ben Franklin store and listened to their stories about how wonderful and kind my mother had been to them.  He looked toward the door every few minutes to see if my brother was there.  But he never showed, still stuck in bad weather in Oregon.

I prepared for my brother not being there the next day when we would follow the hearse 90 miles to her hometown and bury her next to her parents on a hill in the cemetery where, during our estrangement, I had seen their headstones already in place, waiting for them.  That night I searched the house for a Bible, looking for the verse that had the words, “Let not your heart be troubled.”  My mother said this to me, so many times, but her version was “Let not your heart be troubled, Bunky.”  And so I endeavored to find this passage in the Bible with the idea of reading it (without the Bunky part) at the graveside the next morning.  I wanted someone who knew my mother to say something at her burial, not just the pastor at the church in her hometown who she didn’t actually know.  I could do this, I thought.  I can be the child who does this for her mother.

I found the Bible on the bookshelf in the TV room, the inside inscription with my brother’s name. Of course. Late that night, my brother arrived.  We set out the next morning from the funeral home, driving in a tiny caravan to the cemetery where I sat on a folding chair next to my father holding the Bible with the passage marked. I said to myself, over and over, “Let not your heart be troubled.  Let not your heart be troubled.  Let not your heart be troubled.”  And I held on to the Bible with both hands.  At the end of the service, I stood up, walked across the grassy hill and handed the Bible to my brother.  “This is yours, John.”

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Things My Mother Taught Me  http://reds-wrap.com/2012/03/17/things-my-mother-taught-me-partly-on-purpose/

The Power of I am Sorry:  http://reds-wrap.com/2012/02/15/the-power-of-i-am-sorry/