I called mom to tell her about K.’s dog, she’s too sad to make the call herself, doesn’t want to burst into tears. My stoic family.
Hi mom, I say. It’s me.
Hi hon, she says. What’s the matter sweetie?
Surely I’m not crying every time I call, I laugh, and she laughs.
No of course not but your voice…my mother’s intuition, she says, and I feel a lump in my throat at this evidence she really does love me, after telling myself for so long after the hard years that she didn’t.
As a matter of fact, your intuition is right on, I tell her, K’s dog P__, has died. They put him down on Wednesday at noon.
Oh, mom said, we knew when he got sick, K. called and cried a little. Dad and I felt so bad for her.
There followed a tricky discussion of K.’s love for a complicated dog, a literal street rescue, that everyone else was justifiably terrified of. My sister is an angel, always picking the dog no one else wants, or will have, and you just know she is deserving of so much love when you hear people like me and my mom do strenuous verbal calisthenics to show our sorrow for her, in the face of the death of a dog that hated everyone that wasn’t his people, of which there were two - K. and her husband.
He even hates *you*? my husband asked, disbelieving. Even me, I confirmed. Dogs come to me like I’m their queen but not P__, he was a one woman dog all the way and if I dared look at him from anything but the corner of my eye he would issue a warning rumble. It was terrifying staying at K’s with the dog silently contemplating tearing out my throat just two flimsy doors and twelve feet away. But she loved him like nothing else, and now we are sisters in grief.
Mom told me stories of her dad and I told her how sorry I was, that me and K. didn’t understand the grief she experienced losing her dad at just 8 years old - just like your own V., so small at the funeral, the shape of his head so clear in his short hair cut and giving me a pang, a miniature of yours, the very same neck.
I used to be able to talk about daddy no problem but now sometimes I cry isn’t that strange, mom said. And she told me some stories of him, dead at 42, and what it was like for her mom with three young girls, a widow not even 30 yet, her big handsome head of the factory union husband suddenly gone one day, literally from one minute to the next. Which of course is true of all of us, but in his case, truly literal - a freak accident felled him, no illness that provides an off-ramp for the living to gradually confront the sudden total goneness that is death.
She remembered the story of you and the suit, how you refused to buy one just for my company Christmas party and then on the way home said Guess what I checked and I was the worst dressed guy there! and laughed and laughed and then did buy a suit, but not right away. Mom didn’t know that part and we had a good laugh. We thought very highly of C., she said, her voice breaking. He was a really good man. She feels a lot of sadness for your kids, losing their daddy like she did. I remember everything about him, mom said of her dad. Everything - his voice, the way he smelled, his laugh. She sounds younger when she talks about him.
V. will remember you. I know you worked hard to not show them the pain you were in. Of course at the end it was evident. Maybe not as shocking to them, seeing you decline in increments, as it was to me when I saw that last picture of you. I told mom about it and I cried as I am now, writing about it, how can a memory of a picture hurt this much. How I wish I could have just come to your side to say I loved you, held your hand. I told mom about the last email and she was happy I sent it, thinking it might have given you some comfort. I broke down and she just quietly listened, making those mom sounds she has always been so good at over the phone.
I told her about hearing the Coldplay song on the radio while driving, thinking I should call Father N., then seeing, at the next crosswalk a priest walk past in flowing robes - she actually gasped at that. I told her how I wrote to Father N., and how that led to a phone call. I can’t help laughing a little because she can’t quite square my atheism with my actions but to her credit she stayed with me in the conversation and it is quite actually wonderful, something I just wanted you to know, another thing you’ve done for us. You were so angry with her when she stopped speaking to me for years. Parents don’t do that, you said.
But now after all those hard years, mom and I have reached the calm waters of understanding. We finish every call with “I love you”, something you probably never heard either of them say even once to me, in all the twenty some years we were together - it just wasn’t their way. Our grief for you has melted away what little boundaries remain and now there is nothing but love and support, all intentions good.
I thought she was unflatteringly worried about me going to the funeral. She brought up the divorce, more than once. It was hard to know her purpose. Once upon a time I would have gotten really upset and projected all kinds of meaning onto those comments of hers, but grief has made me more efficient in where I spend my emotions. I couldn’t muster the energy to get upset and the strangest thing happened, I suddenly realized that maybe the only reason she said those things was because she didn’t know what to say, because what is there to say? You died way too young, it’s fucking unfair, and everything about it, every angle you look at it from, it is a tragedy.
I remember K. long ago telling me how mom suddenly spoke up one day after the holidays, saying Did you notice, she didn’t sit in his lap even once. Her intuition so strong it told her there was a problem before either of us had acknowledged it, to ourselves or to each other.
Bye mom I love you, I say, and she says I love you too. Bunches, she adds, very uncharacteristically. We are awkward at this, and repeat ourselves as if to make sure the other knows.