Saying Goodbye to Mother

SAYING GOODBYE TO MOTHER

Written by Shawn Tetrault

At no point in this or any other world surrounding, is it to be perceived as understandable, that a still growing boy should be forced to bid a final farewell to his loving mother. Saying goodbye is among the most severe of inevitabilities that we all must face as we steer toward the end of life’s arduous journey. Yet It stands against the natural order by which we all have come to know, to be dealt fate’s most grim hand so early in development. A boy’s mother is meant to guide and care for him as he faces the trials and tribulations set forth by the transition from adolescence into adult hood. She is meant to bandage the wounds from every fall, and easy the pains of romantic turmoil. These are acts that I will no longer have the chance to know, moments that I will never share with mother. The mold breaks with me I suppose. The natural order need not apply.

The eternal specter has extended his cold and spiny grip through the thin and ethereal veil and swept her into a terminal dance, leaving behind a pile of flesh and bone that we must now condemn to dry earth. He took her far before her time, of that you can ask anyone. She was so full of life, until she wasn’t. Cancer, they called it. Not that I could really comprehend it’s meaning at the age of twelve. However, the harshness of the word was enough to get the point across. I’m told by relatives that it’s possible that she may not have even known that she was sick. To them I could ask, how it could be possible not to be aware of a softball sized cluster of damaged tissue that has invaded a section of your brain. Although, if I admit it to myself it would be spoken in mournful anger. My mind is not the sort to understand such biological intricacies. I guess it was wise to keep my thoughts to myself.

As you can imagine, the day of the funeral was the hardest that I had ever had to endure up until that point in my life, and my father wasn’t exactly helpful. He spent much of what felt like the eternity since her passing, planted firmly, and much to his comfort, at the bottom of a bottle. I half expected him to miss the services entirely in favor of positioning himself three pints deep at his most frequent pub. I arrived in my uncle John’s station wagon about a half hour before the services were set to begin, nursing a knot in the depths of my stomach that felt like a fist clenching around my vital organs. It took coaxing to even get me out of the car. Fear cradled my hand all the way beyond the large oak doors that adorned the building’s entrance.

The air dripped with the stench of embalming fluid lightly covered by a poor veil of dime store potpourri. The carpets were that unremarkably drab shade of maroon, faded by decades of grieving family members treading across the threshold to offer hollow condolences and last goodbyes. Hideous floral wallpaper, that had likely been installed during the early part of the seventies, adorned the walls surrounding me, leading me toward a sight that I was not yet ready to see. I swallowed hard as my young mind began to wander. I wish I could tell you that I drifted towards thoughts of the family dogs, fond memories, or even whether or not the now ancient glue that held that wallpaper in place would hold out long enough for us to concluded today’s service before it decided to finally peal itself free from the horse hair plaster. The sad truth is that I began to wonder what state her body would be in. I had seen a few horror films by that point. Would she be pale like a zombie, freshly risen from beneath heavy mounds of stagnant earth? Would she have begun to decay within the confines of that box, hair falling away and skin peeling back to reveal what lies beneath? You know, all the things that we all think deeply but refuse to acknowledge.

Uncle John was about as kind of a soul as one could be under the circumstances. He took the time to making sure that I was ready before taking me in to see her. Truth be told I didn’t want to see what she had become. This wouldn’t be my mother. Not in any way that I would have recognized her to be. Even Though I was still in the earlier stages of my youth, I knew this much for sure. I wasn’t prepared for my memory of her to change just yet. For god’s sake she was my mother, the woman who brought me into this world and nurtured me up until this point. How could I go on knowing that my last memory of her would be her lifeless shell, crammed in a box and put on display for droves of people who only really knew her in passing to stop in and gawk at? Uncle John convinced me that I had to see her, otherwise I would never have any real closure. Somehow, I never understood the concept of seeing the dead making the whole situation real for me. Following what came next, I can’t say that I will ever be able to find true merit within Uncle John’s words again, let alone in that whole notion.

He led me into the viewing room with strong hands, callus over decades in the carpentry business, firmly planted on both shoulders. The smell of sawdust was one I associated with Uncle John. I assumed that it emanated from between the wrinkles of his skin. I’m sure that he could feel my resistance to move forward with every step, but he made sure to keep me moving forward. Over a dozen rows of highly uncomfortable seating stand positioned like church pews leading toward the casket at the back of the room. Somehow years of old films had caused me to imagine a pine box resting on a stone slab up there, but what I was met with was a gorgeously polished black laminate finish and gold trimmings. A massive floral arrangement adorned the top of the presentation, just below the open lid where I knew she lay waiting for me.

Crossing the room was a journey into adulthood that I was and could never be prepared to take. Mother had raised me to be strong in the face of new fears. She would often tell me that I had to be ready to face anything that threatened to bring me down, because she could not be around forever, and that Dad wouldn’t be of much assistance either. The fist in my bowels squeezed tighter the moment I saw the casket with fresh eyes, causing me to very nearly wretch right there, adding another stain to the maroon carpet beneath my feet. Without thinking about the control over my actions, I found my hand gripping the sleeve of my uncle’s jacket. I’m not sure why I did it, perhaps to relieve some of the tension welling up inside me, or to help ground me within the severity of the moment. My mind raced with the terror that could be waiting just beneath the lid of the coffin. For a moment I even thought I saw Mother’s frail hand rise up and grip the edge, as if she were about to sit up to welcome me to the occasion. Although I knew this couldn’t be the case, that fact didn’t prevent the prospect as flooding my body with such fear that I began to tremble.

It’s a strange experience when you look upon the corpse of a loved one. With all of the work that the parlor performs to help make the deceased look as appealing as possible, it almost seems to eyes that are not conditioned to such things, that they are just lying there perfectly still. You almost imaging them leaping up to scare everyone at a moment’s notice like the whole event was an elaborate April fool’s prank. Maybe that was just wishful thinking on my part, for this is how I felt when I finally looked upon her face.

They had dolled her up heavily in ways that she never would have allowed in life. I’m sure the thick pancake makeup was required to help mask the fact that all blood had left her face, most likely coming to settle somewhere at the bottom of her. That is, if they hadn’t bothered to drain it from her completely. This caused me to wonder what they did with the blood after draining it. Did it just wind up in a drain somewhere, or were they secretly vampires who had found the perfect niche to mask their inhuman need to feed? There’s no need to worry, I took a glance at her neck so that I could rule out the obvious fallacy. Mother had once sported a smile that many described as being able to light up a room. It was a shame that she could not share it with us on the on day that we all would need it more than any other. Instead her ruby lips rested solemn against her jaws, portraying such emptiness. She was nothing more than flesh now, yet somehow this set me at ease.

As I stared down upon her wilted form I couldn’t help but feel mildly intrigued by the veil of serenity that enveloped me. Perhaps it was just a case of my young mind attempting to guard itself from a situation that it was not yet ready to process. Much like the way certain people will laugh in the sneering face of disconcerting news. My mother was gone from here and I had missed my chance to say goodbye. Speaking the words on this day, to the vacant husk before me, would be just as hollow and meaningless. Uncle John urged me to bid farewell then and there. He promised that it would help ease my grief, but when the moment came I thought better of it. There was no need, for she could no longer hear my words. Yet somehow even though I knew she was gone, I still felt her tether when I looked upon her face.

I let go of Uncle John’s had and reached for hers, which were neatly folded over her stomach. Her skin was nearly frigid to the touch, yet she still felt as she always had to my senses. It was merely as if she had spent some time out in the chill of winter. I knew as I grasped her lifeless fingers that I would come to miss her more then my words could come to express, though I never would allow this to show around my family. Those moments were reserved for my solitude. Each night when I closed my eyes I would see her face, and she would gift me with her comforting smile. Unfortunately, it was never the same. I never felt as connected to her as I had in life, and I yearned for that connection once more.

As the years slipped by since that day and the pages of the calendar fell away into the streams of time, that feeling only grew more prominent within the depth of my soul. The internal demand for that paternal connection became all-encompassing when weighed against things like passionate flings, romantic relationships, or even elementary friendships. None of these standard human traits could hope to fill the void that her loss left within me. I held them sure enough, but I feel that it had become more of a way to maintain appearances and stave off the glares of concern that the relatives I still conversed with would often give. Their pity proved worse then the loss itself. It took thirteen years following the funeral services, but it was all of these things compounding, that led me down route thirty one during the dead of an August night, when the blissful fog sat suspended in the lightly humid air, barreling along the lonely highway toward Oak Park Cemetery.

It didn’t take me long to find her head stone, even while stumbling through the veil of night with only the faint glow of the moon to guide my solemn steps. They planted her alone, isolated to the far end of the ground, tucked beyond a thicket of trees in a fresh patch all her own. She would have liked it this way, but sadly I could not let her go. I knelt before it’s cold, grey, marble, face, the heavy etching of her name staring back at me. My heart weighed like an anvil in my chest, sinking down deep into the bowels of my gut. “Devoted wife, loving mother, lasting friend,” phrases picked from a hat that could easily be found on thousands of the surrounding grave sites. A strike against her memory reminiscent of a slap in the face. The realization of it was enough to bring me to tears. Each one rolling down my warm cheeks and falling into the well-groomed turf below. She did not belong in this place. She deserved so much better.

My hands fell upon the earth before me. Each blade of grass entwining like lost lovers in the space between my knuckles. My fingers sink into the soil beneath gripping the lands as my distress morphed into frustration. My emotion state forces ignorance toward each granule of dirt that slips itself beneath the fingernails. I lost myself to my sorrow in a way that I had never allowed myself to, even after so many long years. My fingers burrowed deeper as frustration took a violent turn to rage, building and swelling until I ripped back my hands, dragging large fists filled with moist earth. I cried out, not in blinding rage, but in the blossom of some carnal need for clemency. Before I knew it, my hands were tearing into the muck again and again, shredding through the soil like a rabid dog searching desperately for the marrow he had left buried deep below. I don’t even recall how long I had remained out in that plot, but when the morning light finally ascended beyond the horizon, breaking free from the darkness and erasing the starlight from the cloudless sky, my bloodied, and mangled mitts struck the hard surface the rested six feet below.

That night was two years from the moment in which I sit currently, in quiet contemplation. My mind still drifts back those daybreak hours as if they were my last. The fading memorial aroma of the freshly cut grass will fill my nostrils, while the feeling of dirt and tiny pebbles lingers beneath my nails. Sometimes I’ll wonder if some remains, imbedded somewhere deep below the surface. These days, the same vile essence that saturated the soils of Oak Park discharges from the guest bedroom. It has begun to saturate the house, staining the carpets with its wretched stench and engraining itself deep within the hard wood surfaces. I can no longer entertain guests, of host family functions of any kind. A plus side, given that I never enjoyed having my personal privacy invaded by outsiders. There are days where I regret allowing Mother to move back home, but the site of her soft smile is enough to make it all worthwhile.