Chippings

Last night the rain started about an hour from my mom’s house and was preceded by biblical clouds of some low-flying insect peppering the windshield. Running the wipers succeeded in creating two smeared arcs of wet bug matter and frustrating visibility. The elements seemed about right, metaphorically, in light of my destination and situation: incomplete clarity in the face of deaths messy aftermath complicated by rain.

This morning, in the house, the rain comes in trickles through fog and rattles down the metal gutters. Besides the intermittent warm-up and eventual roar of furnace—which seems over-burdened by the task of warming the house, it is very quiet and still. I have been moving around this morning from cupboard to shelf to odd letter-filled box to odd-stuffed animal-filled box. All the while in black underwear and consuming cup after cup of green tea. In the half-light I half expected to see a ghost—half hoped I would and, yet, entirely glad I did not. Seems she isn’t here and I’m relieved by my rationalization that my mother isn’t trapped in some sort of purgatory and being made to walk the halls in one of her old polyester negligees precariously balancing a Salem Light about to ash on the white carpet.

Pawing through things, peering into closets, their upper shelves stacked with Mousetrap and faux wreaths, I’m left with questions. Little ones. Simple ones, I never asked. People in photos I remember mom pointing to, but whose particulars are gone. I’m grateful for the names and places I do remember, if only minutely, it ties me to something bigger, something I am a part of ---something shrinking in front of my eyes---something like the moon being crossed, eclipsed and covered by the shadowy body of time. I feel sorry (and helpless) for these sepia-toned eyes staring out from the white-bordered photographs—imploring me to remember, to stop the steady advance of shadow falling over their page in time.

Death advances and is always at work. Composting. Slowly turning things over. Death moves in stages. People die in front of us, but live on. Eventually all the relics, all the hard-working, memorization and note taking-- the family historians slip off, fall off and, themselves, die. The part they held, the descriptions, the stories are gone. People die off slowly in small chippings. This morning I reached for my mom’s curly-corded phone (the one I always begged to replace with a cordless) (the one with the same number for 40 years). I would call my oldest friend as I had done a million times. I would stretch the 20 foot cord across the kitchen and into the laundry room, its curls now pulled straight, the plug straining to stay seated in the handset. I’d close the door, pinching the cord in the jamb, relieving the pull, to stand alone in private conversation.

I punched in his number, each time my finger pushing in silence. Holding the phone up against my cheek, I redialed, but, the line was dead.

Tomorrow

Yes, tomorrow I return to the family home. Where I grew up. The place my parents bought for 64K when I was eight. The place with the diving board and endless lawns. The place where my mom died with her mouth stretched open and dry after days of rattling her way down cancers death. The house is for sale, in escrow, actually---and I'm conflicted.

My Mom died 10 months ago--my brothers and I rolled her into the December mornings fog atop a cold metal gurney. Mom lay in a red naugahyde and zippered bag lined in red fleece. I didn't understand the bag, beyond its intention of covering and taking away my mom. Red was surprising. Red was hot and bloody and flush and pulsing. Nothing standing or lying there that morning was any of those things. She was twig thin and brittle. She threatened to snap. She was dead.

The house has sat empty and haunts me, both as something I long to keep and simultaneously imagine burning down into low columns of black ashed two by fours. Cremating her home and all the things filling it, refrigerator magnets and all.

Tomorrow, I pile into moms car, the blue Acura my father bought her in 1998 as a birthday gift. Dad died 12 months later, mom kept the car, held it as a testament to him and their bizarre love. She wanted me to have it. Smells like mom, like peanuts, mint lifesavers and leather.