My mom’s been gone for 2 years, 2 months, and 27 days. It’s not like I keep track or anything. I can just pause and do the math, an admirable feat considering my brain usually stutters and doubles any numbers it tries to hold onto. But that tether, that beacon, that clarion that revised my orbit and redefined my Self–that’s so, so easy to calculate.
Songs remind me of her. Smells make me turn, searching for—- Old people with walkers. Old women with stooped shoulders. Jergens Cherry Blossom lotion. Some days drown me with memories. Other days I can’t recall her voice, or the ball is off the button and I can talk objectively, even analytically, about her. This is not one of those days. None of the days, really, are those days.
What happens when I’m alone for too long is all the edges go soft, and I start to seep through the seams of my psyche and become way too thoughtful. Today I did a hard thing, a necessary thing, a thing that brought me in line with death as the partner who walks with us all, all the time. We distract ourselves away from it, and it waits, understanding, knowing what we will ourselves to forget: as brief as a spark we are. Eons of time roll around out there, expanding, whorling, folding and bending in and exploding out again, but we? Bang, pffft, done.
In the time it took me to walk back to the back to assure my (aging) eyes that the thing on the still-green grass was indeed a dead racoon, my coffee pot brewed a full belly of morning roast, the temperature rose a degree, the blue jay informed the whole wood of my business, and a lone Cooper’s hawk watched curiously. I’ve seen dead things, sure. I can barely drive to work without dodging at least one flat squirrel, one rolled possum, one defragranced skunk. But this was different. This creature was perfect. Not a mark, not a blemish, no white foam, no rolled eyes. If it wasn’t stiff it could have been sleeping, paws tucked up, ears tufted and perked. Perfect.
No one foraged this body. It wasn’t old, wasn’t damaged, was just dead. Passed through the veil, jumped over the bridge, shit the bed, flew the coop, kicked the bucket, et cetera. It couldn’t just stay there. I mean, that felt wrong. Disrespectful. Nothing had foraged it, so maybe it was sick. I couldn’t just leave it there. I couldn’t get the snow shovel under it, so I got a stick, which broke, so I got a bigger stick. Snow shovels in New England never get put away, at least not at my house. They just linger, like Death, waiting until it’s their time again. So at 7:13 when it was 52 degrees on December 10th, I shoveled my first dead racoon and shrouded it in a royal blue plastic tablecloth, the kind I use for school stuff, then put it in a plastic bag, then another plastic bag. It (he?) was heavier than its size, as if the weight of all that living had turned to cement in its bones. I cried the whole time, cried about broken bodies and broken ties and broken baby girls who don’t ever, ever want to grow up.
The week before my mom died she talked a lot about the little bit of nature she could see out her window, about the colors the sky got up to near sunset, about the little birds that hopped around under the feeder, about the robin’s nest that was in the large tree in the rear courtyard of the rehab place. There is no rehabilitation for age, but damned if they didn’t try their best. *Do the exercises! What exercises? The ones written on the wall here. Oh, I thought that was a menu.* Sometimes Death has shitty timing. Like, dude, what’s up with your watch? People in the middle of having sex and BAM–time to go. And then people like my mom, stuck for too long in that feeble vessel, all used up but still there, still there. She told me on Saturday the 10th at 12:30 that the mama bird was filling her up to make her nice and strong, and that she could almost hop up to the top of the tree. Me, with no foresight, didn’t understand.
My mom died with her mouth wide open. I’d like to think she climbed right out and flew away. If it’s true that we keep doing this until we evolve into love, she won’t come back. She doesn’t need to. And me, feeble and damaged and sad, look hard for love, bump into death, and stick out my chest with my heart, still beating. Still beating. Still heavy. Still here.
Tribelet of Hoodlums 