It Will Bring You Peace

There are two dead mothers in my house.  The first was cremated against her Mormon bishop’s wishes, but we were so afraid of being haunted that we followed her instructions to the letter.  The second arrived yesterday in a plain brown box my sister sent to our US post box.

When we crossed the border coming home, I didn’t declare the box.  I wasn’t in the mood to learn the legalities of importing dead people into Canada.  The less said, the better.  There is always a hitch somewhere. 

I emailed my sister to let her know the box had arrived but I didn’t have the heart to open it.  I thanked her for sending it.  She wrote back one line:  “It will bring you peace.”

As she recovers from her own health crisis, she says the easiest thing that comes to mind, whatever seems most normal when a mother dies.  Don’t question it.

There are four boxes in total, one for each of my mother’s children.  Ask us what’s inside and we will tell you.  Some of us will answer freely; some of us require truth serum.  Honesty was always our worst alternative and last resort.

My first memory of my mother is in a portrait studio that was running a special:  a free 8” x 10” portrait for any child 3 or under.  I was posed precariously on a table that seemed a mile high.  My mother was combing my hair. “How old is she?” the photographer asked. 

“Three,” my mother said curtly. 

“No, Mommy,” I corrected her, raising four fingers in proof.  “I’m FOUR!”

I remember being snatched off the table, the sickening stomach-sense of falling, and the abject fear of my mother’s sudden and dangerous anger.  The selfsame slipping down that precedes a panic attack, I learned later.

From that experience, she must have learned to coach me in advance of trouble.  When I went to kindergarten that same year, I was trained to say my father was self-employed in the likely event he was between jobs.  (No one ever asked.)  Whenever we had bean soup for dinner, I was reminded not to tell anyone because they would think we were poor.  (No one ever asked.)

It was the same for the big kids except they were assigned more and bigger lies to tell.  We felt collectively responsible for the reputation of our family while our parents continued down their reckless paths.

When I was nine, we moved into a new neighborhood, and I thought I’d reinvent myself as I’d always wanted to be:  an orphan like the Boxcar Children and Toby Tyler.  I was drawn to stories that assured me children could be strong and smart enough to withstand and survive on their own.

That’s why I told my Girl Scout leader I was adopted.  I’d always felt it in my bones—this couldn’t possibly be my real family.  It was all too easy to invent the back story to explain why no one seemed to be taking care of us the way I saw my friends cared for by their parents in ordinary, everyday ways.

Then my mother met my Girl Scout leader, who ratted me out:  “She looks so much like you that I just knew she couldn’t possibly be adopted.”

I don’t remember my mother being angry or embarrassed by this.  She thought it was funny, and she told the story for years afterward.  I don’t think it ever occurred to her to consider why I might prefer to be an orphan.  She had many stories like this, stories in which she accidentally told the truth about our lives while making fun of us.

She always said she wanted a New-Orleans-style jazz funeral.  She didn’t actually like jazz, but she’d been captivated by the climax of the 1959 film Imitation of Life in which a selfish, ungrateful daughter chases the hearse carrying her long-suffering mother’s coffin down the street calling, “Mama!  I DID love you, Mama!”  My mother would reduce me to tears by threatening that someday I’d be chasing her coffin down the street.  And then she’d laugh.

The hard truth is that at the moment our mother died, my sister and I were emailing between two countries, joking about funeral arrangements because we had no idea that our mother was in danger of imminent death.  My sister had just written “No jazz band.  No parade.  No lying in state.”  When she got word that our mother was “unresponsive,” she had to ask if that meant dead.

In our house there is a room for each of our mothers, decorated for their comfort and enjoyment when they came to visit.  One room is furnished in 1930s style, stocked with antiques, Depression-era quilts, and objects from my husband’s family that his mother enjoyed seeing and touching again.  The other room is blue, my mother’s favorite color, and on the wall there’s an art print of a mother and daughter.

Now there are two dead mothers in my house.  Their residue is inescapable.  I wait for the peace my sister promises, but I still feel like a foundling.  It was a lie, but it was the truest lie I ever told.