I'm rushing to get ready to meet my mother. Some things just never change. I don’t know why I'm rushing in this particular case though, the woman isn’t going anywhere. She is lying in a casket....ya, you read that right. She’s dead. Gone. Like, gone gone. Funny enough, it’s the first time she’s ever been on time to anything. Like mother like daughter I suppose, at least only in this case.
I haven’t seen her in a bit over a week. I really miss her. Even though there isn’t going to be much chatting this time with her, I’m super excited to see her. She has been my world, as I was hers. I’ve carefully picked out her outfit. I have chosen a purple dress with her three stoned necklace that she always wore, which was given to her by my grandma. I’ve topped it off with a shiny blush shawl. She is ready for a show, sparkles and all. It’s totally her.
You know how people talk about that woman who walks in the room that everyone stares at? That was my mom. What’s crazy is that she was just as beautiful inside as she was outside. She was magical. Sparkles everywhere, she was almost blinding. I am constantly told by her family and even strangers how stunning she was. My best look alive still doesn’t come close to her best look as a dead woman. I want nothing more than to be like her but even now can’t nail it. She was graceful, beautiful, popular and fun. I’m clumsy, look like my dad (he’s a balding 60 year old overweight man), and in high school I was unofficially voted most likely to kill a joke.
Taking care of my mother as she got older was rough, it wasn’t easy on any of us. Early Onset Alzheimer’s is no joke. Cognitive decline starts really slow, masking itself as forgetfulness or funny moments, but it quickly turns into loss of memories, loss of identity, fear, the inability to work, drive, eat, speak and maintain any personal hygiene. There was no typical day living with her disease. I was constantly adjusting to a new loss of ability. I was constantly grieving the mother I once knew...constantly. With the disease, you eventually lose control and awareness of your mind and body. “Good days” are rare and resemble a flickering lamp you wish would just work already. I remember tucking my mom into bed one evening; she warmly stared at me with a large smile,
“You are so beautiful. Who’s your mother?”
My father and brother sort of had selective acknowledgment of reality. Do you know the type? They didn’t want to see how ill she was or even acknowledge it for years. They justified their frustrations with her loss of mental capacity and physical ability as appropriate reactions to her “being difficult.” I recall various arguments between my parents where I’d have to furiously intervene reminding my father that my mother was in fact sick. Those arguments usually ended with a slammed door behind my father with my mother in my arms. I also won’t forget my brother’s literal absence in the face of any challenge with my mother. He was never around to help. NEVER. He decided being an accessory to his girlfriend’s life was more important than his dying mother, but that’s a story for another time.
I had no choice in facing the complexities of her illness. She was my everything. My she-ro was falling apart. I wanted to be just like her, at least my memory of her. At 19, I was riding the wave of her disease as her primary caretaker. My classmates were going to music festivals, dating, experimenting, and having fun. I was just trying to survive. I was always at zero but found myself bouncing between school, work and her. I know now that the Bermuda Triangle is real, I was completely lost.
There were endless nights of tears, failed classes, failed friendships, failed everythings. My body was dying because my heart was breaking. My health was non-existent. There was no time. I was spread so thin I nearly disappeared. I did everything I could to keep it together and be “normal,” but every smile had about 5,000 tears behind it. I wish I could have handled it all better. I was a limbless body treading in my own tears. I often thought of how my mother would’ve handled everything. She was the oldest of 6 siblings, first generation, first to go to college, and first to rush to put out any fire in her vicinity. She would have handled all the pressure like a queen, because she always had.
Ninety five percent of the time was bad but there were some quarks that came with the disease. I remember she often secured her pants with paper clips to make them fit better. Belts didn’t suffice for her, too intentionally functional. She also earned the nickname, “Little Mermaid.” Before she got ill, this woman looked at any large body of water like Godzilla was coming out of it. Sheer terror. After her illness, she’d grown her own set of fins. I try to remember the good times. It’s too hard to remember the bad ones. But it’s all over now and her sisters have really stepped it up in these last few months. They have been especially helpful with the arrangements.
I really love color. It’s the reason why I don’t want anyone wearing black at this viewing. She was bright in every way. Unfortunately her viewing isn’t. Everything is sooo...brown. I don’t know why churches always have to look so dire. It’s not like we need further reminders of our mortality, especially considering Jesus is nailed to a cross at the altar. Even with that, nothing says death more than medium oak piews, on medium oak floors, with medium oak walls.
The only visual relief is the flowers and my grandmother’s suit. Damn, is it YELLOW. And I’m not talking like mustard yellow. I’m talking like if a highlighter had to highlight something kind of yellow. With her yellow suit and cow-licked hair, she resembles a pissed off peep that didn’t get chosen for Easter. My Aunt Dolores won’t let me forget how difficult it was for her to get my grandma into that yellow suit. My grandmother only wanted to wear black but my aunt wanted to honor my wishes that we treat the viewing as more of a celebration. You can hear an occasional,
“Ma, ya parate!” (Mom, stop it!)
in between the whispers of conversation.
Their bickering over the stupid suit is constant. My aunt’s whispering screams are always followed by a laugh. I love her laugh; it’s loud enough to mask all the tears in the room. I forgot to mention my grandmother has dementia. Somehow she's able to fixate on the yellow suit but totally forgets her eldest daughter is lying in a casket about 20 ft away from her. The relationship between my aunt and grandma feels familiar. Feels like home, the kind you can’t wait to move out of.
Aunt Dolores is strong, she doesn’t let anyone forget it either. She makes her struggles well known. Her idea of a strong woman is a woman who is willing to tolerate anything: an abusive husband, a career she hates, children who don’t appreciate her, siblings who won’t help with their mother. She completely defines her existence by being of service to others with serious resentment, because she is strong. Not everyone is cut out for life like her. I never quite understood her in this way. I also want to be strong but not in her way. There’s something about her life that feels so powerless. Why tolerate so much that doesn’t serve you?
My other aunt, Lucia, is also here. She is the youngest of my mom’s three sisters and my favorite. She’s the closest one in personality to my mom. She has the optimism of a first grader, which makes sense considering she actually teaches first grade. She always tries to find the bright side of things. She makes this very clear as she proceeds to reach into the casket (ELBOW DEEP) attempting to make my mother’s corpse smile more......Yup. (I know). She’s asking me to hold her purse. She needs both hands because my mother’s face is “too stiff.” She bites her lower lip as she takes her thumbs and places them on each end of my mother’s mouth, moving each end in an upward motion with hyper focus.
“Why is she soooo hard?”
She seems to believe my mother’s corpse is the consistency of Play-Doh. After a few attempts, she stands up straight and takes her purse back from me. She makes a slight dent of a smile but only on one side. Now it looks like my mother is smirking like she just told a dirty joke.
“She never frowned like that when she was alive. She always had a smile. She should be smiling more.”
Who knew first grade arts and crafts actually come in handy? Apparently Aunt Lucia did.
Aunt Lucia isn’t below any attempt to see the glass half full, clearly. She tends to not see things as they fully are. I guess when you’re in first grade for 25 years; it skews how you look at things. Things are bad or good, black or white, up or down and Aunt Lucia usually makes her choice quite clear. She wants things to be happy, even when they are clearly quite sad. She wants to see the bright side of things so badly that I’m wondering if it’s the reason she’s gone legally blind. I on the other hand am always in favor of truth, no matter how foggy.
Finally there’s Aunt Alma, she’s the eccentric one, very new age. Most aunts take their nieces shopping, she takes you to get your cards read. Most aunts buy you concert tickets for your birthday, she buys you an hour with a man named Sparrow. Don’t worry; he’s just a psychic. Anytime you’re with her, she does something wacky. She receives more side eye than anyone I’ve ever known. Her latest is traveling to Central America for ancient bones that are only found in that region and that apparently have special powers. Some bones hang around her neck and the others on her rear view mirror.
I don’t understand why she is taking so many pictures with her phone here. Seems a bit unkosher (even for her) but she’s snapping away. Snap, snap, snap. She’s taking pictures of walls, corners, random people, my mother (luckily she now has a smile, well, smirk). There is no direct focus. Any subject is good enough for her.
“Why are you taking photos?” I asked.
“Ay mija, there is this lady who took pictures at a funeral and when she got the developed the dead person’s ghost SHOWED UP IN THE PHOTOS!”
“Ya but you can see your photos instantly on your phone,” I replied.
“Mija, you neeeeeever know….I saw it on YouTube.”
“....(side eye).....” I have no words.
It really always seems like Aunt Alma is never quite in the same realm as the rest of us. She is obsessed with ghosts, spells, crystals, everything not of this world. She is always trying to connect to the “other side.” Apparently she wasn’t always like this though. I guess she miscarried in college and that’s where it all started. Her first love was a hippie named Fern, who made Fabio look basic. Fern left Aunt Alma after she lost their child. She always says everything is in “God’s hands” but she makes it her personal mission to influence “God’s plans” in any way that she can, hence, the crystals and spells.
It all feels like a lot of work to me, to change God’s plans. If there is a plan, changing it is a battle I probably can’t win. I couldn’t with the one with my mom. I could never concern myself with any plan other than taking care of her. I didn't have the luxury of having a plan beyond that. When you watch your loved one die over the span of nearly a decade, you learn to stick to one plan, because that’s all you have the bandwidth for.
There is a point of slight relief seeing my mom’s best friend Esperanza here. It’s near the end of the viewing, as she comes up to me. It’s like old times, just the three of us. It’s been some time since I’ve seen her. While my mother had her swift decline in her last few remaining years, Esperanza’s family had some losses themselves so we haven’t seen each other much. She is like the sister my mother got to choose. She is really intelligent, a doctor, with a spirit similar to my mother’s, very alive. She has helped out my aunts through the viewing and funeral arrangements. Esperanza was even there for me through the last few weeks of my mother’s life as my aunts were rightfully losing their cool.
I have always liked and admired her, first mostly by default, because my mom did. As I’ve grown older, I really understand what my mom saw in her. Esperanza does what she wants, when she wants. She has nothing pulling at her. She is free.
At 19 she was already divorced and ready to leave her parents to do her own thing. She was from a small town in Texas where she knew exactly what her life would have looked like by just taking a look around. Even with that, she believed that somewhere something more awaited her. I can imagine it well.
When I look back at how everything played out with my mother, my she-ro, the anchor of my immediate and extended family, it feels like a twisted dream. Seems unreal. If she had never gotten sick, I would have been like Esperanza in her hometown, looking around with my path being directly reflected back to me, living a life that mirrored my mother’s. My mother was indeed graceful, beautiful, popular and fun, but she was also stuck.
Stuck taking care of her siblings, stuck with her child-like husband, stuck to overextending herself, and stuck to the idea that she was happy with it all. While she was busy making everyone else happy, she never stopped to check if she was in fact happy. Eventually she lost herself completely. She started it and the Alzheimer’s made sure of it.
But she’s gone now and I’m trying to figure out what the heck this all means for me. I wanted nothing more than to be just like her, because when you’re the daughter of the family celebrity you don’t have the option to try to be anything other than just like her. Everything and everyone pushes you that way. With her gone, my only plan has been destroyed.
With no plan in hand, I am floating. I am completely unanchored, but for the first time I can breathe and Esperanza is my witness. She holds my hand,
“The mortician wants to know if you want to keep anything that your mom is wearing? Specifically the necklace with the three stones? I know you always loved your mother’s jewelry.”
I reply, “No. That’s hers...I’ll get my own.”