There is a staggering amount of things here. Her apartment- my apartment, for now, logically if not literally- is full of things that she liked and stuff she used and stuff she didn't use, crammed into the apartment's closets. Mom and Dad spent years driving a motor home all over America and into Mexico. They knew how to keep things simple, only minimally cluttered and in tiny amounts because of the lack of household surfaces. But here: her apartment, the one she bought after she lost Dad, is full, and we'll have the regular amount of purging to do before we can sell it. It keeps surprising me.
I keep thinking about comforting. Everyone wants to help me and my sister: there's pie and unasked-for prayers and offers of company. If I accept one of these, I'm afraid I'm doing it more for the sweet person offering it than for myself- it's a bit painful to think of these sincere well-wishers being left holding a rejected offering. Sometimes I want something and sometimes I don't. Ninety-five percent of the time when I do, I feel comforted.
There's one thing that bothers me: the offer of fantasy. People have said- via the usual social media channels- that she's an angel or in Heaven or that it's ok because she's with Dad, her husband, her best friend for 44 years. That last one...slays me. To think of her with her husband, together and (why not) young and healthy again, looking at each other with laughing fondness as in many of the pictures we have of them together before we were born and they got busy. My sister and I grew up with them looking at each other like that, so we know that was the tenor of their relationship even if there aren't as many like pictures from the family years. It...kills me, to think it, because I don't know for certain that's what is happening.
We tell each other those stories to comfort ourselves, of course, not because we have any real knowledge; yet I keep wanting to ask anyone who provides that particular vision for proof. There must be proof, I want there to be proof! The thought of them together at last and happy as they were and unconcerned because they either understand everything now or because they don't care, they did a good job in life, a good job as parents and they're done...is so lovely and so weighty that it feels dangerous to me. I'll believe it when there is some proof, and I'll give forty gold pieces to anyone who can find it for me.
The need for some real, almost-tangible foundation for that belief is a legacy of Mom's, ha ha ha! She was a rational woman and didn't stand for much of that spirit-talk in her lifetime. She was a Quaker, semi-devout, doing good deeds and joining committees when asked, yet when we talked about God she always said she had no words: it was too big a concept, too unknowable to express. She confessed she had barely an idea that God was there, and she practiced listening every Sunday she could. So this skepticism is bred into me by the very woman who's death is the source of all this fantasy-talk about posthumous reunion. That small irony makes me smile, now, because I know that Mom would have laughed at it.
She raised me. I know what made her laugh. She was my mother for forty-six years, and there's my proof.
No comments:
Post a Comment