What do you do after burying a parent?
I don’t mean for the rest of your life or next Christmas or even next week. I mean– after the funeral, after the cemetery and the platesfull of grief food that nobody actually eats. Directly after it all. The drive home. After the drive home. When it’s time for bed.
What do you do?
At this point the social obligations and quiet murmuring of inadequate words in the middle of a fake living room are done. There is nothing to do now but go on with the rest of your life.
In our case, my sister and I have lived in text tandem for years as we rotated slowly and ever more deeply from adult children to caretakers. Who was picking up the Chapstick she asked for? Hey, stop by the nurse’s station to see what they think about the swelling on her arm. Make sure to remind her that I’ll be away from my phone from dinner on. It’s the anniversary of Dad’s death tomorrow, so one of us should make sure we visit.
It was like co-parenting, but it wasn’t. It was an ever-shifting transfer of responsibility and assignment. Once our mother signed our permission slips for immediate return like the former teacher she was; now we stood witness as she strained to complete her name on the authorization for hospice care. She was in a lot of pain for a lot of years, and mentally perceptive until the very end, when the painkillers were upped again and she began asking us why she was in a different room again.
Hospice was simultaneously very fast and very slow. When it was over, we made the phone calls we were supposed to make and found the funeral clothes were were supposed to find. The nursing home didn’t push us to clear out her room, but we returned within two days to do so. We wanted her gone from that place in every possible way, utterly separated from the antibiotics and blood draws. She was bedridden and miserable and we didn’t want one molecule of her belongings to remain in so much as the same zip code.
This required a funeral procession of her items. We finished a process that began over twenty years ago when she and my father moved from the house where they raised us. Each removal distant from the West Side cul-de-sac home– condo, assisted living, full-time care– meant that fewer and fewer items remained with her until they didn’t even fill the closet of her assigned room.
We stacked her clothes and books and the shoes she hadn’t worn for over a year onto a cart and rolled it to the parking lot. A family vase she insisted on keeping in her sight was on board, so my husband slowly drove while I placed a steadying hand against it. My sister walked alongside clutching the birthday cards our mother left behind, unsigned, for her grandsons. We probably could have moved faster, but it seemed somehow unseemly.
As we passed the TV lounge, I pointed out a piece of paper that I hadn’t noticed before. The latest version of the Reds’ broadcast schedule was out, and someone taped it next to the screen. It was generally understood that this was a top viewing priority. At first I wondered why the staff was bothering to print out the spring training games at this point, but then I realized the date– Opening Day was less than a week away, and I hadn’t even noticed.
Five games of spring training remained between the day of our mother’s death and the beginning of the new season. A gap of three empty, long-stretching days without any baseball at all took place between the day she died and the day we buried her.
At first this seemed cruel, and then, upon further reflection, appropriate. It was a little Lent of baseball, a time to sink into the inertia pulling me away from the gym or Twitter pronouncements. It provided me with a quiet space to write the eulogy instead of walking around the apartment telling myself to write the eulogy.
It meant that I could practice right away– without distraction–the necessity of stopping myself from saving social media pictures of friends’ babies to give her two to four seconds of something approximating happiness. It was kindness in the disguise of empty cruelty, a few days to force the bulbs to bloom in artificial conditions before real spring truly began.
So today, when the Mass is ended and the last sensible Midwestern car has left the parking lot of the reception venue, my sister and her husband will close the minivan door on their three practically-grown boys and my husband will hand me into our tiny urban-friendly Chevy. We will drive to our separate neighborhoods. And we will not have baseball to numb us during the ride home.
With the matriarch gone, we are now our own organizing principle. She is no longer in pain, but ours has taken on a new dimension.
I have mentioned several times that I wished I were able to honestly look forward to Opening Day, but I assure you this is not what I meant. “She could not bear to watch this team in the regular season,” I’ve been telling people, because I discovered a long time ago that black humor, when served up as searing as possible, is ideal as a cauterization agent.
Now that I think of it, this team is so integrated with the lives of everyone who grows up here that when a Cincinnatian dies, a Reds representative should show up at the funeral to read out the team epochs that took place during the deceased’s lifetime. This ballclub is a group project and we should act that way more often. A roll call of this sort took place as Queen Elizabeth’s coffin was lowered into the floor of St. George’s Chapel, and it was a most effective integration of time and place. We need our own. At this point, we’ve earned it.
And this is what my mother and my father bore witness to:
- Jackie Robinson
- Big Klu
- Wally Post, King of the Suits
- Three ballparks: Crosley, Riverfront, and Great American
- Four All Star Games
- The 1961 Ragamuffin Reds
- The Big Red Machine
- 4192 and the Great Banning
- Waite Hoyt, Marty and Joe, and the Cowboy
- The Little Red Machine of 1999
- Opening of the Reds Hall of Fame
- Six MLB Hall of Famers
- Six NL Pennants
- Three World Series victories
That, my friends, is a good life.
