I see a lot of my mother's family in my brother's face and body type. I used to see a lot of my father's family in my face and body type. The older I get, the less I resemble any but one aunt in my mother's family. She was an unattractive old maid. At death, her breasts were so long that the family who took her clothes to the undertaker remarked that if one could have put mink skins on her long saggy fat breasts, they could have been used to create the appearance of a mink stole. They decided on a closed casket funeral.
The undertaker got into the act. He said he was reminded of those suede bags of buckshot, some of them quite long, used to weigh down blueprints to keep them from curling when one was making modifications. My relatives started it, not the mortician. I think he went along with the flow out of embarrassment at first and then because he got tickled by the black humor.
FWIW, they made her face up, my mother, my grandmother and one of my aunts. The other aunt was in Colombia at the time, as she was most of my life growing up, except for visits to renew her US passport and to shop.
So there I was at the funeral home with a person who hadn't liked me in life and whom I hadn't been old enough not to not like her back. At 12, I was the one who tied her shoes (she wore those ugly square heeled raised one-toned black shoes that laced over the instep), buttoned her best navy print rayon Sunday-Go-to-Church dress and turned down her collar and pinned her jet glass broach across the top button, and threaded her belt and buckled it just the way she did. I found her hymnal and Bible and put them under her hands, too. She detested me. I've often wondered what she'd have made of the respect, and the fact that I choked down my fear of handling a dead body to do it.
She thought I was snippy uppity, too forward (though I seldom spoke, when I did it invariably irked her), too bookish, too pretty, too "polished" thing. I didn't look down when she glared at me. I'd stare right back at her. Her best oldmaidschoolteacher glares did nothing to me, and that pissed her off. She *was a school teacher for 41 years. The city's school teacher had to force her into retirement. She didn't go gracefully. She was angry to be thrown away. She never forgave the school system for that, either. She lived to break up her sisters' and brothers' marriages, made her inlaws lives hell because no one was good enough for them, in her opinion. Not that her siblings were good enough for her, either.
One of my aunts had a cat named (like mine was decades later) Kittipuss. Mom and the other sister used to take this poor cat and dress him up and put rouge and eyeshadow on him because, like a dog, he'd go to the bus to meet his beloved human every day after school. Of course it embarrassed her to have this snow white cat sashay to the corner smeared with rouge and bright blue eyeshadow, wearing a floppy cloth doll's bonnet, oblivious to the smutsch on his phiz, waving his luxurious plume in complete welcome.
My aunt Neil HATED cats and hated Kittipuss in particular. Whenever she came into a room, Kittipuss would get up from wherever he was lolling, stroll up to just out of kicking range, look up at her, glare, put his ears back, then turn slowly and stalk slowly out of the room, with his tail erect and his ears
forward.
Of course Kittipuss was 15 years dead by the time I was born. I wish to hell I could have seen that. I can vividly imagine it. But I didn't dislike Aunt Neil. I think she was a product of her box, her limitations the times, whatever. I stared her back, but I acknowledged her as a complete human being, which is more than she did me. Had she lived into her 90s, by then I'd have been fully adult and my *projection is that we'd have come to an accord. Maybe that's why it occurred to me to insinuate myself into her burial preparations. I can't
remember how I came to be there, only that I *was there, and that the women involved hadn't wanted me there, because they thought it might be inappropriate for a child to be involved in preparing the dead.
I never caught Aunt Neil's eyes twinkling, but there are times when I think that she used to shut herself into her room and have a quiet laugh at some of the things people thought offended her. I could be wrong, though.
My mother was appearing in dreams to me all last month. In every dream she was telling me "Don't forget to...." and I never remember what she was telling me not to forget or forget to do when I'd wake up. It's odd because the dreams are about things here, not in Texas; and she flatly refused to be here. She never came to visit, though she was invited many times. When we were flush, I'd offer to go down, help her pack and fly back up with her. No dice. Never came. Never witnessed that I was happy. Had to remain in denial about it, I think.
I let her ruin the happy, too, sometimes. More than sometimes. She made it clear in a dozen ways, small and large that she detested that I'd married, whom I married; that I chose someone to be with over her. It seems to me that in her books being courted and having beaux was one thing, but marrying someone was a betrayal of one's momma.
And we weren't close when she passed.
By accounts she was well cared-for and gently handled and kindly treated as she deteriorated and died. By that I mean she probably wasn't impersonally handled, not as she drifted toward death, nor in extremis. No one, out of their mind, who dies well-coiffed, with both a pedicure and manicure, without bedsores or a bruise on her, other than that of her post surgical hip and bruises from an IV for the period before she died -- and even dabbed daily and on the morning of her passing with her favorite Chloe is likely to have been "disrespected."
My great aunt Neil wasn't in her shell after she passed. Neither was Mom.
Neither is anyone's anyone when they're dead.
So what if the mortician got a bit silly. The relatives started it, no one was standing around pointing at her remains and laughing uproariously. People say uneasymaking things when someone close to them or close to someone they care about dies. For all that Neil was abrasive on all of us, no one replied to her with equal nastiness when she was breathing and no one handled her body flippantly. I keep remembering how Mom and I were the day Dad died and my brother chose to sit in that house guarding it from the cop who was guarding the body from "interference" by people he was *ordered to suspect having murdered him, while we went to pay cash, to get him picked up, and transported to the funeral home and were bullied (unsuccessfully to some extent) by the young ass at Restland to spring for an expensive coffin when he was being cremated not viewed, and to buy a plot he didn't want to be locked in. He wanted his ashes scattered. Mom and I came up with leaving them in the Caribbean so they could drift under sailboats going from island to island with the currents and wind. He loved sailing and boats as a boy and a young man. He often said if he hadn't married he would have been a boat bum. His words, not mine.
And we were giddy over that choice coming home from the bury factory. We were drunk over our choice to drop him overboard from a boat into a sea he said he didn't get to sail enough when he was young. We were giddy about his joking for years about Aggie funerals with only two pallbearers, one for each handle of the Rubbermade trash can. And of course, under that we were torn up with grief.
And we still had the fucking PO-lice to deal with coming home. That's another story, however.
When Neil died, according to her wishes and because it wasn't illegal in the early 60s in Texas, the mortician took her to embalm her and then brought her back to the house in the coffin for a viewing. That's what she wanted. The
service was held IN the house, then she was transported to the cemetary and buried. She did not want to be prayed over in the church she'd attended all her life because the only pastor she liked had retired (told to leave and he retired) the year before. She was literally laid out in the dining room, on the old mahogany dining room table in that oak coffin with the brass handles, in her Sunday best, viewed then interred 11 miles away.
I figure that since the family went through all that, and it wasn't cheap all that extra haulage and arrangements, and she had a TINY pension and no savings by then, and everyone chipped in, if there were some giggles, it was understandable.
I'm reminded of that Mary Tyler Moore episode (entitled "Chuckles Bites the Dust") in which everyone at the TV station is telling Chuckles the Clown jokes the day he dies and up to the funeral and Mary's furious with everyone at WJM for their horrific puns and wisecracking and laughter. The day of the funeral however, she breaks into giggles at the service and when singled out to stand up and "laugh for Chuckles" she bursts into loud uncontrolled sobs.
There's a reason that episode won an Emmy for best writing the year it aired. Humor after a death, even at the expense of the dead, is very common. It doesn't always denote disrespect, even when it's "disrespectful" humor. It's lighting a match in the dark.
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