What Happened After My Mother's Death

Truth and Comfort in a Time of Mourning

I. My Mother’s Bones

Watching a man crush my mother’s bones was as real as it has ever gotten for me.

My mother had died suddenly. She had gone into a coughing fit over the kitchen sink, fell backwards, and hit her head on the tile floor.

After her memorial service, I told the funeral director that I would be there for the entirety of the cremation. He said it was not normally done. I told him I didn’t give a damn what was normally done, and that I would stay by mother’s side the whole way, however uncomfortable it made him, me, or anyone else.

I was too aggressive with the man, but I needed my anger, not only to steel myself for just such resistance, which I had expected, but also to prepare myself for the trial ahead.

While my family went back to the house to receive condolences, I watched the cremation.

I watched the mortician fire up the furnace, put the box on the conveyor belt, and roll her in.

I stood by the machine for two hours as it roared at 900 degrees and incinerated my mother’s body.

I watched over the attendant as he shoveled my mother’s bones out of the furnace.

I sat by him as he scooped the bones into the cremulator and listened as the machine ground them into powdery ash.

I watched as he shook the ashes into plastic bags and then put the bags into the urns.

It was done.

II. Doctor My Eyes

Only it wasn’t.

I returned to find my parents’ Lake Havasu home full of family friends, most of whom I hadn’t seen since high school. A vaguely familiar face would rise up suddenly into my field of vision, offer his condolences, and turn away before my memory would click, and I could recognize the speaker.

One face with a nose disfigured by cancer suddenly appeared before me. It took me a minute before I realized it was Dewey, a neighbor whose son had killed himself several years before.

At that point, something began to go wrong with my vision. It shook, narrowed, and darkened; my eyes seemed on the verge of shutting down. I made my way directly into a bedroom, laid down on the bed, and closed my eyes.

I was overwhelmed. I felt like Saul, struck blind on the road to Damascus by the unbearable light of truth. My doctor said it was just the cortisol and adrenaline shooting through my veins from such an emotional morning, which had restricted the blood vessels that supply the eyes. I had been on the verge of psychogenic blindness.

I have a Ph.D. in fiction, an advanced degree in the art of make believe.

I have read, written, and taught stories all my life. I’ve made my living at it, as a writer, an editor, a teacher. I’ve probably spent half the hours of my life living in the imaginary worlds of novels, poems, films, cartoons, and TV shows.

My belief in stories, my commitment to the power, glory, and yes—truth—of fiction has often put me on the defensive, especially among my more practical friends.

But this was no time for stories. I had insisted on attending all phases of the cremation because I felt it would be disrespectful to turn away, to soften the blow, to comfort myself with a story of my mother’s eternal soul rising without first experiencing fully her mortal body disintegrating.

If I was losing my mother, I wanted to be there for it. I didn’t want a story. I wanted reality.

III. One Last Rodeo

Only I needed comfort as well.

Before my mother died, I had made plans to visit my parents in Lake Havasu, and I had timed the trip so that I could go to the Havasu Rodeo. I had already bought the tickets, so I kept my plan in place, thinking my father could use the company.

Two weeks after my mother’s funeral, therefore, I flew back to Havasu and went to the rodeo. I had paid for good seats, right beside the bucking chute, so I could get the full force of the bulls breaking into mayhem.

As I approached my seat, however, I saw an extraordinarily large woman seated next to my spot, taking up more than her fair share of the bleacher. “Shit, this is not going to be comfortable or fun,” I thought. “And she’s probably an idiot.”

It was just the kind of attitude my mother, while she was still alive, would have cut off at the knees. My mother had her faults, but making uncharitable assumptions about people and acting superior to others were not among them. She didn’t like to see such unkindness in her children.

So I went out of my way to be nice, if only to keep my mother from haunting my judgmental ass.

I asked the fat lady where she was from. She had moved to Arizona from N.Y.—just like my mother. I asked her what she did. She worked at a community college—just like my mother. I asked her what she did at the college. She worked in the registrar’s office—just like my mother. She was also Italian—just like my mother.

I laughed—to keep myself from crying. The uncanny parallels were surely coincidences, but they came so fast and furiously that I couldn’t rule out the possibility of a visitation.

Maybe the dead can only visit us, I said to myself, through the living. Maybe on the other side of this woman’s eyes, my mother was watching me, snuggling into this woman’s ample behind to enjoy one last rodeo with her son.

Whether a coincidence or a visitation, it didn’t really matter. I felt my mother’s presence in the woman, and before I knew it, the woman and I were chatting merrily and making jokes. We groaned in unison when one cowboy was thrown from his high horse face first into the dirt.

It was a great rodeo.

When it was over, and we said our goodbyes, I couldn’t help but watch the woman as she ambled away with something of a cowboy’s swagger, like a marshal who has just cleaned up a frontier town.

IV. The Gift of the Heart

It was a somewhat comical, bi-polar response to my mother’s death: one part scientific cool, the other, New Age woo.

On the one hand, I wanted to face my mom’s death squarely, braving the fact of body, bone, and ash. On the other hand, I needed her loss wrapped in some coverlet of beauty, if only to keep my heart from breaking.

We possess art, Nietzsche wrote, lest we perish of the truth.

In this conflicted state, I entered my mourning. My first day back at work, a student came to my office at 7:30 a.m. Anna, a 28-year-old Hispanic woman, wanted to be first to offer her sympathies. She took my hand in hers and said, “Your mother’s here, always, because she’s in you.”

It was not an uncommon sentiment, but the way she held my hand when she said it was just what I needed, a small truth offered with a big heart.

A couple of days later, on line at a coffee shop, I ran into the mother of a friend, a middle-aged Jewish woman. Nikki asked me how I was doing, and when I told her my mom had just passed, she didn’t say a word. She reached out and simply held my cheek in the palm of her hand.

It was the most natural of gestures, full of sympathy, but bold, as actions from the heart can often be.

When trying to offer my condolences to the grief-stricken, I’ve been a bumbler. I’ve always admired the socially graceful who know just what to say at such moments.

But these two women had more—the simple gift of heart, the secret of true comfort.

V. Descansos: “Resting Place” or “Peace”

Every time I winter in Joshua Tree, I see them, mostly on highway 62 on my way to the grocery store or the national park. They rise up suddenly in my peripheral vision, and I can’t help but look at them: descansos—roadside memorials the Hispanics build to honor loved ones killed in accidents.

Descansos are homemade shrines crafted from humble materials, each one bearing the quirky individuality of the family who made it and the character of the deceased.

They are beautiful. Usually they are built around a central cross of wood, which is hung with mementos and surrounded at its foot by brightly-colored, plastic flowers. The whole shrine is usually contained by some border of rocks, fencing, or edging.

It’s the mementos I love best, the little things friends and family leave for the loved one: a bottle of Casamigos Blanco, a bag of Albert’s Fruit Chews, a Yankee’s baseball cap.

The subtle influence of the descansos moved me, a couple of weeks ago, to drive from Joshua Tree to Lake Havasu City, where my mother died.

I headed straight for the Lake Havasu branch of Mohave Community College, where my mother used to work. Her coworkers had created a little memorial for her out back. It was nothing much—a bench, a plaque, and a stone. “Just a quiet little space for a very special friend,” the plaque read.

It did my heart good to see it again. The stone said, “Remember,” so I remembered. I remembered all the things I loved about my mother—her gift for handicrafts, her love of people, her bad-girl taste for smoking, drinking, and partying.

I remembered all the things that happened after my mother died and how her death exposed my heart—its need for fact, however terrible, and its longing for fiction, however unlikely.

For a moment, she sprang back to life, in all its terror and beauty, stood beside me, and put my heart to rest.

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