“If she had any regard for your feelings, she would have understood that your priority is to your family,” Marcela insisted, then clarified, “to your children.” And it was a fair point. I knew my mother was angry with me. If dying while estranged was her final punishment, perhaps I should have been grateful she hadn’t done anything more horrific. Which of course she had. But I didn’t know that yet.
“I wish you were here,” I sighed. It was perfectly reasonable for Marcela to want to stay behind, but if there ever was a time to ask her to be unreasonable, this was probably it. But I hadn’t, so was forced to navigate this shit show by myself.
“Me too,” she said. “But a graveyard is no place for children,” she reminded me. My wife was unshakably decisive. Just like my mother had been. Had I known that when I married her? Is that why I married her? Because, after growing up being told what to do, think, and feel, subconsciously I craved it?
I finally got my tie tied. It was pissing down rain, but the burial would be quick. The funeral director said he could only give us five minutes for remarks—he had squeezed my mom in between two other services. If I had more to say than “Goodbye, farewell, thanks for the memories,” I would have to do it on my own time. Which was fine, because what I wanted to say to my dear, departed mom was probably best done in private anyway.
I never said it out loud, but I often wondered why my mother even had kids. We always felt like a nuisance to her. My childhood was a constant chorus of “Be quiet, your mother’s on the phone; Don’t hug me, you’ll muss my hair; How should I know what’s for dinner/when the movie starts/what we’re doing for your birthday—ask your father.” We never got an “I love you” or an “Attaboy”; good behavior was rewarded with marble money. And she never apologized with words or hugs, only things. When Mom couldn’t come see me in the school play, she bought me a guitar. When she couldn’t come to my guitar recital, she bought me a ski vacation. When she couldn’t come on the ski vacation, she bought me a car. My friends all told me how lucky I was—and in many ways I suppose I was. I had everything a kid could want. Except a mother.
Mom had chosen a plot at the top of the hill, so she could look down on everyone, obviously. My father had been cremated, so she was all alone, which if not what she wanted was certainly what she deserved. When we arrived at the grave site, her coffin was hovering above the grave on some sort of platform attached to a pulley system. None of us had thought to bring flowers, so we just stood there like statues while a poor chap in rain gear turned the crank that plunged my mom into eternal darkness. I was grateful for the rain because it camouflaged my sloppy crying face, and I could tuck my sobs under the roar of pounding water.
In retrospect I don’t know why I was crying. My mother was a miserable old lady with nothing more to give, and who only wanted to take. The only possible explanation was that I was crying for myself—not for what I had lost, but what I suspected I was about to.
CHAPTER 27
* * *
WINNIE
Mom was buried at 10:00 a.m. on a Tuesday. Mistress of all domains, our mother had prearranged everything, including the weather—freezing, pounding, suffocating rain that assured her burial would have a backdrop of maximum drama. Her coffin was basic black, closed, and in the ground in five minutes flat. No pomp. No service. Like her approach to raising children, she just wanted to get it over with.
We went straight from the graveyard to the will reading. As my mother’s fancy Beverly Hills “neutral third party” later explained, no one who was named in the will, or was a close relation to parties named therein, could be the keeper of it. So he had been chosen to do the honors. Neutral Third Party’s law firm was predictably stodgy, and the parking offensively expensive—but God willing Mother provided for that when she summoned us here. Charlie wore his suit. I wore a hoodie and Converse high-tops—not to be rebellious, but because they were in the back seat of Charlie’s car and dry. If Mom had wanted us to look nice for her will reading, she should have ordered better weather.
Charlie and I entered the conference room to find Nathan and his parents—my uncle Roy and his wife, Aunt Rita—already there. Roy was our mother’s brother and possibly the most boring human being I had ever met. At family gatherings we would all wait to see where he sat and then race to find chairs as far away from him as possible to avoid having the meal ruined by his mind-numbing questions: How’s school? Are you working on any interesting projects? I did a （sublimely inane） project for school once . . . If there was a correlation between being tedious and virtuous, then my uncle Roy had to be the most morally upstanding man on the planet.