The Things We Leave Behind

When we’re young, we’re conditioned to imagine the body in one simple, intractable way. Two arms and two hands to express, hold, wrench, caress. Two legs to stand, one head to hold high in times of joy and to hang low in times of sorrow. The body is whole. The body is one thing; one continuous mass of flesh and bone, one system of nerves and sinew, blood and organs. The body lives. It contracts. It sees, it hears. Sitting there in the pew there at the front, friends and family behind me as I stared at the urn, its golden rim sparkling beneath the light of the stained glass above it, I wondered if that made sense. I wondered, watching the the lovingly placed strip of faux-pearl climb the curve of the vase and wrap around it, as if embracing the end itself, what the body was. What it could be. There were no hands inside it. Not anymore, anyway. No feet or eyes, no nails, no beating heart or twitching muscle. Just a sullen pile of ash, the last request of a woman I’d known my entire life. When the man at the podium stood to speak, his grey hair too reflecting the same twitching, marble light that caught the side of the urn, he did so to talk about God, the great mystery of life, and death. He didn’t look at the urn. He didn’t look at me, or at my mother, or at anyone in particular, but to the rafters, where I assumed he had hoped God would be watching him through squinted eyes. No other voices were present.

She didn’t want to suffer when her time came, and she didn’t want to be put in a box. My mother sat next to me in the car: simple dress, nothing fancy, she’d been at work hours prior. She had watched her mother die three days prior while I was miles away, staring at the ceiling, thinking about nothing at all. She sat there next to me in the cold and told me, barely containing the rush of emotion behind the thin lid of her eyes, that her mother only asked for two things when the end came; water, and God. According to my mom, when her mother looked at the ceiling there and asked if God was with them, she answered yes. I didn’t question it. Not only was I not there when the minute hand on the clock by my grandmother’s bed clicked for the final time, when I heard her final words, I didn’t move. I’d known about her passing the same amount of time she did but while the reality of it hit her like glass on a hard floor, and shattered her about as easily, it flew by me without a pause.

Distance does strange things to people. If she had passed in her sleep ten years ago, when I lived only six minutes away and saw her face almost every afternoon after school I would have been there at her bedside. I would’ve knelt there and wept for days until I could do nothing but convulse, as though I were being pierced in the back. I didn’t then. When I was younger, when I didn’t have a car, she would take me back to her home until mom had gotten off of work. We would sit there in her living room watching television — british detective fiction, her favorite — talking about anything. When she began having breathing problems and she showed up one day with a tube of oxygen next to the gear shift in her car and plastic tubes running up into her nose, I didn’t question it. She was still there. Her body still took oxygen in and blew it out. The mechanical noise echoed, but a breath was a breath: I was in no position to judge. Despite it being a problem for her, despite the expression on her face clearly showing the world how uncomfortable she was being outside, away from the security of her home, she did it anyway. I didn’t understand how much of a risk that was for her until I saw what used to be her nose, her lungs, her feet and her thin, loving smile swirling in a pile of ash inside the urn.

Did my lack of emotion make me a bad person? I desperately wanted to ask. I wanted to ask as we stood there, my mother and I, in what was the last place I had seen my grandmother alive. Her home, her living room, possessions put into boxes, reams of paper listing out in plain text everything she ever owned, when she bought it, who she bought it from, and how much she paid for it. Fifteen thousand dollars worth of coins, a collection that spanned three decades. Books she read once and then left to gather dust on the shelf next to decades worth of Christmas ornaments. Down the short hallway from the kitchen was her office, or what remained of it; she never used it. In that room sat one desk and two soft chairs, a nightstand separating them. Her John Grisham novels lay neatly stacked on the nearby shelf. Everything else had already been stowed away, prepared for travel. Ready to be moved to their next home, perhaps a storage room, or somewhere in our living room where we could appreciate them. Standing in the empty room I took a breath. As my eyes closed I hastened to think if she lingered there with us, or if it was just me.

My mother told me that she has her normal days. Days that, perhaps, she’s relieved that the suffering didn’t go on for too long. But she also admitted, behind a veil of anger, confusion and guilt that she had days where she would give anything just to have her sitting there in that chair again, watching television, smiling as she did. I loved her too but I couldn’t feel the weight of her absence on my shoulder yet. When I had my opportunity to ask again, if my lack of tears meant I somehow didn’t love her as much, I held my tongue.

I felt it would’ve been cruel to wonder openly.

Thinking about it, I hadn’t seen my grandma alive in three weeks, just before she was put in a nursing home, two weeks before she moved nursing homes after a fight with the administrators, and three weeks before we all found out that she had a tumor in her brain that had somehow found its way into her lungs. I knew her mostly through the stories that my mother told me about her, then, and in the months and years before. I knew her through the lacquered, wooden display that she left behind. Inside it was a folded flag and a plaque, inscribed from the Department of the Army, thanking her for her service. She wasn’t a soldier. Rather, she spent most of her life as a contractor at the Rock Island Arsenal, constructing helmets that would be used by Apache helicopter pilots in the Gulf, or Iraq, or Afghanistan. Before that she owned her own business, monogramming things, mostly cartoon characters. I kept the memories to myself as my mom finished her story. When she began to cry, like I knew she would, I put my hand in hers and clamped it tight. I’d never known how strong she could be, but the force of her sadness nearly bruised my hand. I didn’t tell her that, just like she didn’t tell her mother about the cancer. She wouldn’t have wanted to know. She wanted me to know that I shouldn’t be sad; she wouldn’t have wanted me to see her that way. What way? I asked.

She didn’t want a service either. I never heard why. Maybe because a service would be tacky, or because a room full of people she hadn’t seen in years crying over her memory would disturb her. When I woke up hours before I was set to leave to a blizzard in front of my deck, I took my phone and called my mom to let her know. She laughed and, while she recovered herself, I squinted at the white blanket outside and waited for her to explain. The service was originally planned for the previous Saturday. Weekends, she figured, would work with most peoples’ schedules, and she would be right. But, as she mentioned earlier, her mother never wanted a service. She wanted a celebration of her life instead which, in grandma’s terms, meant everyone going to a bar and eating and drinking until someone, probably one of mom’s guy friends, did something stupid. When she began to explain, she said that the Saturday when they had originally planned the service, it snowed just like it did now. When she rescheduled, she said that if it snowed again, in her words, “Mom was pissed.” It didn’t just snow; it was a torrential rainfall disguised as a snow shower. After she hung up and I went outside to wait for the car, I looked up too, waiting for a clap of thunder, a sign that she was really up there, swaying the weather with her anger.

I have a history with funeral homes, one that I didn’t know about until recently. My grandpa on my dad’s side worked for over forty years as not only a funeral director, but as an embalmer. I never asked him about the process because the thought disturbed me; being so close to my own mortality. But when we finally came in for the service, after all of the quaint furniture and flowers, the first thing I saw was the urn. I never heard why she didn’t want to be buried either. The ground seems appealing enough when you weren’t there to know you were being buried in it. But she asked, instead, to be cremated. Rather than having an open casket funeral, her ashen body held in her final place of rest was there for all to see, flanked on either side by white flowers. Above it, a bridge of red thorns connecting the two flower vases and above that still, a stained glass painting. A white dove, with an orange beak, surrounded by a field of emerald green. I thought the light that came through it looked artificial. It seemed like there was a lamp there, for effect. Before I could find the pew I had to stand there and watch the light streak through as, at my back, the sound of footsteps, and the creaking of the door broke the stillness.

When my mother told me for the first time, I was caught completely off guard. The first thing I heard was her feet on the floor, and the swinging of the door. She had sent a message earlier that she was in the area and wanted to know if I was out. I was. She lives two hours away. She works two hours away. For some reason I didn’t put the pieces together until I saw the shade of red beneath her eyes as she came closer. When she decided to keep standing after she hugged me instead of sitting. When, after I pulled back, her hand clung to my shoulder to keep my attention. As soon as she said the words, “she passed last night,” we both stopped breathing. I broke it first. No crying. It was more like dry heaving. The muscles in my stomach tightened violently with every breath. I wanted to cry; I should have been. But when I turned I remembered that there were still four people who weren’t me or my mother standing there eating, making food, glancing at me, painfully. I held myself together just enough to walk outside and see her off. When the friends she came with gave me their condolences I told them thank you. And when they drove off, I crossed the street, moving away from the quiet moan of the engine.

I tend not to handle funerals well. But each one I’ve seen, for other great-grandparents and distant family friends, they all had a box standing at the end of the room. A box with a corpse inside, ready to be put in their hole and sent away, forever. I got to my seat last, walking alongside my mom and her lifelong friend as the roll of conversation turned silent as we walked down the aisle. At the head of it was a man I didn’t know, someone who my mom had been talking to for a week to prepare the ceremony, and the urn, standing there on the pedestal. We sat, and as the man went about his business, talking about the word of God and the nature of death I sat there with my hand gripping a ball of tissues. I didn’t want to cry then, not in front of everyone, even though I knew deep down they would understand. I did a good job of that, until his talk finished, and replacing him at the podium was my mom, with a notebook. Two nights before the service she looked at me from across her living room and asked me if it sounded alright. I said yes. Naturally, she decided to rewrite it. She tells me she doesn’t know how to write a eulogy, and I tell her I don’t either. I say, maybe just write a letter to her.

The letter, in hindsight, was more effective. We must’ve switched places emotionally when she began to talk because where she had been slowly fading between stoicism and sadness I was quiet. But when she spoke, my hand, the one that had held my tissues, clenched tighter and tighter in a vain attempt to fight away the prospect of me falling over on the seat and letting every minute, every hour, every day’s worth of pain that I’ve kept in my ribcage from falling to the floor in the middle of her final tribute. It trembled with the weight of it all but, as her words went along, my eyes turned back to the urn. The body. I can’t remember when I last saw her alive, physically, but in the moment between the end of my mother’s goodbye and the beginning of Elvis’ version of “Amazing Grace,” the hand went still. The hand of the clock ticked away in the distance.

I never wanted to know about the embalming process because of the finality of it. The invasiveness of it. How someone’s hands could be stuck so far inside the crevice of the ribs, how all of the blood could be so callously placed aside, replaced with chemicals meant to stave off the inevitable decomposition of the bone into powder, or the muscle into paste. The ashes weren’t the body. They couldn’t be the body. But in the urn, wrapped in the gold and the pearl, shadowed by the light and framed by the flowers she could still stand there, and talk. When my mom closed her notebook the onlookers clapped for her. She went back and forth for days on whether or not she would actually get up in front of them at all. I told her she would be fine. When she joined me at the pew I fell against her and, outside, I could see that the snow had finally stopped. Everything was left white, and in the wake of her anger, something else.