Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Why Don't We Wake The Dead?

I am the youngest daughter of a woman who left the planet on this day, July 23rd.  Every year since her exit, I note the day is coming by wearing a weird T-shirt or just praying for a moment or two or like today, driving west to the cemetery because I could.

My sisters probably don't even remember the date and we have different ways of looking at the obvious.  My sisters had a different childhood, in many ways more violent than mine, almost a decade later.  My wee self caught the breadth of our mother's sinking into alcoholism's clasp and it was darker in some ways, less violent physically, yet no less about surviving it.

And so it was that I cut the last of another wave of deep red roses from the bushes in the backyard, hung a load of laundry, ate lunch and put on the radio for our old dogs.  Driving west I thought of a few things but mostly the muggy, overcast day today, not unlike July 23rd in 1991.  I am sure I was focusing on my own piddly life at the time, unaware that my mother was to die, alone in her living room, that very night.

I didn't have much to say once I parked the Mini at the gate of the cemetery today and walked up the steep slope to my mother's austere grave.  I thought there might be something more as I placed the red roses as a way to honor the dead, someone I knew very little, yet someone who deserves some kind of remembrance, regardless of her great shortcomings. 

There wasn't.  There just wasn't much to say and that is a good thing.  That means I have done my work with regards Mom, and really, her grave is not befitting someone who was so complex, so restrained yet so sloppy when she was drunk, someone who read voraciously about everything yet someone who left no letter or no will for her three children.  At least, that's what her husband said. 

Ah yes, the husband.  Even at my mother's grave, I realized that if he visited this desert of a memorial which he alone created, he will see those roses and he will know who left them.  He will see that I am still here, even though her grave marker, a strange hunk of stainless steel with some kind of "you're the love of my life" secret code that he left on the face of it, never claims children marked he life.  I guess I do feel astonished at the selfishness of others even in death.

I wonder if we could wake the dead, what questions would we ask of them?  If we could have our own time to finally say all that hadn't been said, what would it be? For me, I would simply ask Helen, "How do you like the roses Mom?"