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| My Mom. |
I couldn't help but think about my mother as my father's funeral neared its end. We were in what I always think of as the Heavenly Hoo-Hah part of the service, when the preacher envisions the deceased getting back together with those who have died before them - and with their blue-eyed Jesus - and everybody dancing around, shouting hallelujah, praising God and grinning those irritatingly smug, giddy, Born-Again Christian grins.
Of course, we were always Presbyterians and didn't hold much truck with either giddy or born again, but the preacher was a borrowed, overwrought Methodist and he was going on about imagining the gloriously happy reunion between my recently dead father and my dead-since-2006 mother. I could only imagine my mother shouting, "Oh, no! Not him! Not yet! I need more time!" and running the other way as fast as she could.
I chuckled.
My parents were married for 63 years. There were some years of happiness and many years of fearful co-dependency (often confused with loving care in her final few years). And there was almost never any time alone.
My mother shared a bed with three of her sisters until the day she married; my father's bed was in a bedroom with his parents' and his brother's beds until that day, too. For nearly all of the next 63 years my parents slept together, 47 of those years in a small house - a kitchen, living room, three bedrooms, one bathroom, all gathered tightly around a short hallway - where life was crowded with children, grandchildren, relatives, damaged children, damaged children of relatives, homework, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, junkies, and where a few minutes alone in the bathroom were all the privacy anyone ever knew.
And it was noisy in that house, like a whirling kitchen blender full of marbles.
My mother realized too late that she probably would live out her life never having any quiet time alone. It was something she said she needed, something she told me over and over that she wanted, but something she said my father never would allow her to have. He was a very controlling man and she let him do it. I suggested that she was a grown woman who did not have to ask her husband's/my father's permission to find a place of her own. I even said I would help her find such a place, but she said, "He won't let me," and that was that. She asked for help but was afraid to be helped. That was the saddest part.
Alcohol helped her for a while and finally a debilitating illness gave her some relief. But she spent many years as an angry woman in a crowded, noisy life in a house she said she never liked. My last words to her when she died in April 2006 were, "You don't have to be angry any more." And she was able to be alone. And quiet. For a while. Death is not necessarily a bad thing.
Then after eight years my father died. And the preacher stood by his grave (next to her grave), prattling on about salvation, knowing the Lord, etc., blah-blah-blah, and imagined that wonderful heavenly reunion between them, which he seemed to believe could be taking place at that very moment. I could only imagine that my mother wouldn't find it so wonderful, that her idea of heaven just might be a place without my father in it. At least not for a while yet. And I could imagine her watching him stride happily toward her and - giddy, goofy-grinned Christian graveside visions notwithstanding - turning to flee, praying as she ran for a little more quiet time alone. Perhaps my father would call out to her as she ran but she would not stop. Not this time.
And if I believed in such things, I would hope her prayers were answered. And I would smile.
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| My Mom. With heavenly attitude. |
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