My family has a thing with cemeteries. It baffles me. My relationship with burial grounds has been limited to the shortcut to my hometown’s train station and moody strolls as a teenage goth. Other than writing a few poems in a notebook, listening to Depeche Mode, and moping around, my time spent within their gates (fortunately) has totaled less than the number of hours I’ve spent de-icing my freezer. My family, on the other hand, visits them regularly.

I’ll squelch the image that holidays with my kin are like a Munsters reunion by saying that they go with flowers. Their trips aren’t nearly as self-indulgent or covered in eyeliner as my high-school meanderings, my relatives simply go and pay their respects to friends and loved ones. They do it often, not only on holidays or anniversaries. This has always seemed peculiar to me, but it’s never been something that I’ve had to confront directly. Well, except for the one time my cousins and I visited my grandmother’s grave on Thanksgiving and I kept waiting for a bloody hand to rise up out of the dirt.

I’ve never understood mourning traditions, and this perplexity only grew when my mother’s mother passed away. The way I saw it, grandma died. She was coated in three-inches of makeup and buried on an afternoon in early September, 2002. That was that. Going and leaving flowers months later, while a completely respectable idea, never appealed to me. It just felt like driving fifteen minutes to endure a stretch of awkward silence. So, much my to my mother’s chagrin, I confined my grieving to fits of tears and muttered conversations with my grandmother’s spirit, which usually just looked like me talking to myself in the car en route to work. While possibly not the most productive way to cope, it didn’t feel like a waste of carnations. And I figured that if grandma was looking down on me from some puffy white cloud in the ether, she’d probably want to give me a stern talking-to anyway. Best to avoid hanging out where her body was buried, lest she rise up and criticize some of my lifestyle choices.

Over this past year, I’ve visited my mom’s gravesite once, and I practically had to be kidnapped to do it. My uncle and I left some flowers, said a prayer, I burst into tears, and we left. It seemed like a really unnecessary way to ruin a perfectly decent afternoon. I didn’t want to go back to that place. At least the last time I was there my mom had been above ground in some sense, still laying in her Pepto Bismol colored coffin, with everyone who loved her around. Within a few months, it had just become another cold spot of hard soil, now with a few browning spider mums on top of it.

I looked around. There were gravestones with plastic poinsettias, faded in the sun. A few had wreaths with garishly bright ribbons. One or two, presumably fallen soldiers, had wooden crosses with poppies in the center. A handful had stones perched on top of them, honoring a Jewish tradition that represents permanence. Many had flowers in various stages of decay. It all seemed so depressing. I didn’t want to leave anything for my mother’s body. I wanted to continue to talk to her when I was alone, cry when I saw her picture, and call her family on Sundays. More importantly, I wanted to forget the fact that the hands that brushed my hair and ironed my shirts for twenty-eight years were six feet under a clot of dirt in Westbury, New York. The brutal reality of this whole mortal coil thing is something that her death forced me to face, and then run from. The past year has been filled with a lot of existential pondering and "crises of faith," and no fucking $12 bouquet of flowers is going to make me feel better. Roses or dahlias, they certainly won’t change my mom’s situation. After all, if any part of us lives on in death, I can guarantee that she would feel completely pissed off that she couldn’t tidy up once the flowers passed their prime and the leaves started piling up around her tombstone.

I figure that after a year I can’t cite missing my mom as a justifiable reason for staring into space or getting teary when I hear Hall & Oates. I’ve tried to maintain such an aura of stoicism and impenetrable rationale while shuffling through the funeral, sale of her house, and the bevy of legal issues that come once a person gives up the ghost. It’s anger at my own sorrow that makes me squirm when presented with the idea of visiting her grave. Why should I pretend that I’ll only feel sad there, performing some sort of misunderstood ritual by tossing a corner market arrangement by a rock etched with her name? I don’t want to have to acknowledge the fact that this sadness has been an unspoken presence in my life since the moment of her diagnosis. It trails me like a shadow. It’s not as if I can just summon appropriate grief within the wrought iron gates of a cemetery. If the ritual is supposed to work tandem with emotion, then I should have been laying flowers at every Italian bistro, pet shop, or art gallery in this city. Those are the places where I feel the loss of my mother as sharply as I do when I look at her photograph, and more profoundly than I could at a burial ground. I still don’t understand the notion of flowers.

Archaeologists in Scotland found a bunch of perennials at a gravesite dating back 4,000 years. And while the majority of bouquets I’ve seen in cemeteries look like they’re that old, it can be assumed that leaving flowers is imbued with a sort of antiquated ceremony. I’ve never been able to think of something I’d feel comfortable leaving behind. A card would be stupid. No one would read what I wrote, except for a curious groundskeeper or an unusually literate squirrel. Stuffed toys are already creepy enough, leave them exposed to the elements for a few weeks and I guarantee that, if I were the occupant of that grave, there would be a complaining zombie carrying it to the trash. The stones that are a part of the Jewish tradition are beautiful, but my mother was Catholic, and my Jewish father has already told me he’s being cremated and left by the beach. Some people place pennies on gravestones, which is an observance that dates back to Benjamin Franklin’s time. It’s said to bring luck, or to echo the sentence emblazoned on the back, "In God We Trust." This makes a little more sense to me, since coins have been associated with death throughout history, most notably with silver being put over the eyes of the deceased to pay the underworld’s ferryman of Greek lore. I could leave my mother some of my pocket change and believe that it will give me good fortune. But this seems more superstitious than solemn.

Honoring a person’s memory can be as simple as yammering to their imaginary ghost in your kitchen, as I do, or it can be elaborate, like dedicating a mass or leaving an ornate wreath on a grave marker. I can’t judge how other people preserve their memories, even if I don’t get it. It was only about a week ago that I started to understand in my own way.

I knew that the anniversary of my mom’s death was coming up, and I figured I’d have one of the occasional basket-case days I’ve had over the past twelve months, the kind where I lay on the couch listening to The Cure’s "The Figurehead" on repeat in the dark. But instead I had the urge to visit my mom’s grave. Another reason why this is extra weird to me is because I dedicated a shelf in my closet as a little altar to her and our other dead relatives. I mean, I have a convenient place to go if I want to cry and light a candle and feel sad. But this time I want to get dressed and take the train out east, flowers in hand, in order to commemorate the day. While this is a really strange impulse, sort of like I decided to eat an entire jar of pickles or watch a hockey game from start to finish, I respect it. I’m going to go with my uncle and stand there in that uncomfortable quiet. Although I can’t guarantee it, I’m pretty sure I’ll be waiting for a hand to rise up out of the dirt.

I have to give myself some credit, I put on a brave face. Raised on Henry Rollins and windmills thrown in pits, I was always a tough kid. When my parents split, I handled it with a studied, tearless resolve, calmly aware that whatever legal drama that was about to unfold would be far better than more years of animosity and arguing in the house. As a goth teenager, I only cried if I got eyeliner in my eye, using the aesthetic of mourning and melancholy as accessories, along with a pair of sturdy combat boots and a metal lunchbox. As with a lot of feisty, overly well-read sixteen year olds, I had a tendency to replace pain or sadness with anger, as though yelling or breaking juice glasses was more noble than curling up with a box of Kleenex for a good old-fashioned howl. As an adult, I held onto the belief that sorrow was tantamount to weakness, and processing anguish was something solely reserved for people who had that kind of time.

Last March, my mom was diagnosed with cancer following a routine scan to figure out why her back and stomach were bothering her. As they called us to the doctor’s office to share the results, we knew it was bad. Doctor’s usually tell you what you need to know over the phone, ’cause they have long afternoons of golf to get to. When we went into the exam room and were told that my mother’s liver was covered in metastatic lesions, I felt as though my skeleton caved in, but I pursed my lips and asked the doctor the necessary questions as though I were interviewing a writer for House. I looked at my mother, so small and shocked, and I knew I had to rise up and take charge. Not because I was so close to her (although we spoke frequently, we didn’t really get along) but because she didn’t have anyone else to be there and step up. It felt like the right thing to do, and moreover, I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t. Selfish, I know. Over the following five months from her diagnosis to her death, I made a point to try to keep myself together, and for the most part, I did. It took a lot of yoga, a lot of aggressive music, and several Yankee games, but I was able to stay sober and present for my mother, without casting more than a fleeting internal glance on how I was feeling. I figured I’d deal with it later.

After mom died, I had to execute the funeral arrangements, clean and sell her house, get rid of cars, animals, things, and find a place to live. I didn’t have the spare time to get all soggy and snot-covered. A lot of people observed that I didn’t seem to be grieving. They asked me if I was okay in that tone that led me to believe that they thought I was about to skinny dip in the East River wearing some concrete Converse. I kept saying that I was fine, that it would hit me later, when everything was done. I didn’t believe a word of it. To me it was just lip service to get the perfume-soaked old broads off my back, and to shut that stupid hospice grief counselor up. I was fine. I’d read Camus and Hesse in grade school, I’d learned how to cut through emotion with logic, to temper desperation with reason and philosophy. I. Was. Fine. Similar to the way women mourn in Bali, I tried my best not to cry, as though that were a humiliation, a demonstration of how incapable I was to cope and take care of what needed to be taken care of.

Two days ago I was walking to a cafe to do some work. For the past two weeks or so I’d had nightmares every night. Not always graphic ones, like zombies eating my dog or Rush Limbaugh flashing me his genitals, just uncomfortable dreams, ones that made me wake up restless and exhausted. Some of them about my mom, most of them just about random shit. On my walk I was wrestling with this fatigue when something happened, something inside of me broke, I guess that’s the only way to put it. I couldn’t stay at the cafe. I went home. I was agitated, frayed, unable to focus. I looked at my apartment, everything having been moved in and unpacked, Simon’s issue of The Economist and his gloves on the chair, my books all lining the shelf. I saw the photograph of my mother holding me, one of my favorite ones. According to my mom’s handwriting on the back, we’re at the zoo. In the picture I’m an infant, reaching for the camera, while my mother smiles, holding me at my waist. I started to cry. For four hours I collapsed into a drooling, mucus-spewing mess. (To be fair, I didn’t help myself out by listening to The Magnetic Fields and Cat Power while this was going on.) I struggled to work, but found myself staring at the screen, the window, the floor, sobbing. Even in my days of alcoholic emotion, where I’d break the nearest plate to emphasize a point, or make out with somebody’s girlfriend to express joy, I’ve never felt overwhelmed quite like this. Trying to rely on logic to pull me away from the puddle of fluids I was creating, I struggled to think of a trigger. I couldn’t. Still can’t.

In normal people, responses to grief can be really intense. Breathing problems, cotton-mouth, appetite issues, and nightmares are commonplace. Repetitive motions to try to ward off or avoid pain can occur. (I will admit to a vigorous shaking of my head when I have a particularly vivid memory.) Hallucinations are even reported in certain cases of early grief. Basically, it’s scientifically proven that it’s okay to lose your shit. But six months later? Is this a sign that I’m one of the ones who starts a motel and harasses people with a knife in the shower?

I’m not sure what the grieving process is, or what’s considered normal. I’ve lost a grandmother, a dog, close friends, and I’ve always processed it as an event, just like writing about something difficult. I answered the questions in my head, the who, what, when, where, and why, and let that serve as an epitaph. As though understanding something disarmed its potential for an emotional response. As though telling myself that death is just a part of life and it happens to everyone, move on, would get me through the loss of my mother without much more than ten minutes of yowling in the pew of a church next to her bright pink coffin. Maybe for some of us mourning isn’t something that we do in a house of worship, or among the company of friends and family. I’m beginning to realize that I can only really be vulnerable in my solitude. Which is makes sense, when I think about it. It used to be that I could only be vulnerable when I was talking to my mom.

In Ethiopia, grieving family members are given assistance by a community group called an edir. The edir cooks, cleans, and donates money to the family. Many cultures respond to death by helping: feeding the family of the dead, planning a funeral, hosting a party, performing religious rites. I didn’t feel let down by my mother’s Catholicism or by the community of people she surrounded herself with, they were like worker bees, plying me with baked goods and teary-eyed stories. In response, I felt as though I needed to be there for them. My mother was the kind of person who refused help even when she needed it, and, like my stature and love of Neil Diamond, it’s something that she passed on. Perhaps the other day was some sort of delayed response, the "later" I kept waiting for, a moment where I was alone and there was nothing to do other than work and sit and think. It’s in those moments that I realize I won’t hear her chopping basil while listening to Cher, or smell her Obsession perfume as she puts on her coat, or hear her gasp for air in the way she did when she truly laughed at something, never again. I’ve suddenly come to realize that this isn’t a vacation, she isn’t coming back. My mind and my insides have slowly grown accustomed to the tiny moments of defeat, I go to call her, I can’t, I try to plan a visit to her house, it’s no longer hers, I want to send her an email, but I don’t even know the password to her account to delete it. When she was dying I told her that I found myself mentally treating it like she was going on a trip,  like a cruise or a Caribbean adventure. "Me too," she responded. "Isn’t that funny?"

Although I’m not taking this route, if you’re struggling with the loss of a loved one, grief counselors can be helpful. If you belong to a temple or church, your clergyman or staff there will have resources for you. Groups like GriefShare can help you find a support group, there are even ones that are based online like GriefNet. Contact your local hospital for other support group options, and, of course, if your loved one had hospice, grief counseling is available for a year or more following death. Most cities have grief counselors available as well, the best thing to do would be to look up a nearby mental health practitioner or a counselor certified by the American Academy of Grief Counseling who can help give you guidance and strength to get through the aftermath.

My mom was a collector of things. Well, maybe collector is too highfalutin of a word; my mother accumulated stuff. Demitasse sets, oversized sofas, martini glasses, cookbooks, Christmas ornaments, dogs, bags of Swiffer duster handles. She passed away at home, surrounded by the objects that had attached themselves to her life like metal filings to a magnet. At four feet, eleven inches tall, what she lacked in height, she made up for in clutter. I was overwhelmed by the prospect of what to do with so much stuff after she died. It was like being a toddler abandoned in a Walmart Supercenter, if Walmart Supercenters sold only objects acquired by grandparents. I figured I’d host a gasoline dinner party and serve canapés of lit matches, until somebody suggested a tag sale.

Before I crash-landed in the suburbs, I had only known about tag sales from riding my bike past open garages filled with street-side souvenirs and haggling neighbors. Simon had bought a beat-up baseball mit from some drunk guy standing in front of his house in Oklahoma, and I’ve coveted many a porcelain deer, duck, and kitten marked for sale at $2. But I’d never imagined that I would be hocking the home that my mother had inhabited for over a decade. I’m not a particularly organized individual, and my understanding of retail pricing can be boiled down to fifteen minutes spent watching The Price Is Right while on line at the post office. If I hadn’t been referred to a group of professionals I would have sold everything on the premises for $25 and a bag of Oreos.

The three women who arrived at my house resembled the three fairies from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, only with less color coordination and flying. They came across as though they either deal with complete idiots like myself all day, or they have kids of their own who are more interested in staring at computers than hobbies such as tennis or mock trial. They spent two weeks walking through the house, removing items from every cabinet, closet, and corner. They stuck pricetags on everything, if I hadn’t said I wanted to keep my dog she would have been sold with the china. It was pretty unbelievable, if somewhat unlivable, as the shop tables and racks that were erected throughout the house made me feel like I was squatting in an antique shop.

Although the things for sale ranged from coffee tables to cookie jars, the ladies were able to gauge pricing based on books they consulted, and years of experience doing the same thing for other unfortunate widows, widowers, and children of the deceased. Though nothing was guaranteed to sell, everything was on display. They warned me that I might want to get out of the area for the two days, as it can be somewhat traumatic to see hoards of strangers pawing all of your worldly possessions and arguing over their worth. They also cautioned that sometimes people arrive early to get the best deals, and that they might pressure me to let them in to see what’s available before the sale technically starts. Sure enough at 7AM two men were standing on my lawn. Before I could pull a Clint Eastwood and snarl at them to get off of it, they asked if I had stereo or camera equipment. I coyly told them they could wait an hour and packed my dog into the car in order to escape whatever pitchfork-wielding crowd was about to march down my block carrying torches and demanding fondue pots. To be fair, I didn’t have any stereo or camera equipment. But I did have lot of wires, and a really nice set of Bundt pans.

Nearly everybody knows that selling things can make money. I remember pawning everything to my name back when I was drinking, and although that money certainly didn’t go towards useful items such as food or rent, it familiarized me with an immediate, consumer-friendly business model. Here is this pair of earrings/necklace/record, how much are you willing to pay? Easy enough. But with tag sales, there’s a bit of a strategic catch, or at least there was with the liquidators I used. The items that didn’t sell on the first day were marked down by 50% for the second day. Which means that the sport of shopping for tag sale aficionados is a game of patience, luck, and, of course, negotiations. Or just downright stealing. The stories I heard included the tale of one individual who went around to certain pieces of furniture and peeled off the SOLD stickers, hoping to get the women in charge confused and have them resell the item to him. Luckily the ladies were consummate professionals, and the douchebag left empty-handed.

Upon returning to the house, it looked as though a gang of robbers had marched through while freebasing coke, followed by a gang of raccoons. Although the three women had done their best to remove as much of the rubbish and clutter, it still had the look and feel of a crime scene. I was left to ponder what had just happened. In forty-eight hours my mother had been parceled and sold. The sweaters she’d worn to after-school events, the dishes she served cheese on during the holidays, her makeup case that had held countless tubes of black mascara and samples of Chanel perfume, hats that I had teased her about, impossibly high-heels in sizes reserved for Barbie dolls and child beauty pageant winners, armoires that cradled clothes, end tables that I’d stained with glasses of juice and dented with my baby teeth. My memories were now owned by nameless, faceless strangers who had talked the price down to the lowest possible number and walked off carrying something of immeasurable value to two people, one living and one dead.

Of course this macabre goth song of a recounting comes with a silver lining. I could never have carted an additional lifetime’s worth of crap into my new apartment. There would be no room, both physically and metaphorically. But I don’t think anyone can ever prepare themselves for the levels of loss that accompany the death of a loved one. There is the instant devastation that goes along with the burial process and all of its pomp. Then the acknowledgment of the void, the empty space they used to inhabit, how when you tell a joke there’s always one peal of laughter missing, or one hand that isn’t on your shoulder reassuring you when you come home filled with doubt about work, the state of the world, your relationship, grocery shopping, whatever. Losing the remaining accessories of my mother came with an unexpected reopening of the ten-week-old wound of her death. And although it bums me out and makes me listen to even more Joy Division than usual, it is a good thing to get this over with. Otherwise I’d wind up carting around her half-used tube of toothpaste, dirty slippers, nail file, and countless other objects that she’d left her imprint on while still alive. Letting go is a chore for the living. For my mom, she had the easy end of this task, though I know she would have loved to have seen that we sold my collection of spiked collars.

To me, chassis, piston, and crankshaft are stripper names. If you asked me to venture a guess about what each of them did, I’d probably say some snarky comment about you needing to go back to your mom’s basement and watch Bladerunner again, you Cheetoh-eating, D&D-playing geek. Of course, to the well-informed, responsible car owner, they are parts of your automobile. But this idiot couldn’t tell you the first thing about cars. When I hear “horsepower” mentioned in a commercial, I still imagine Honda’s newest model being led to some straightaway where it was raced against the Belmont’s finest.

A car I do not want or need was an item left behind the wake of my mother’s death, pun intended. Back in ’99, after my parents’ divorce settlement was finalized, my mother decided to do something extravagant for herself to celebrate. This resulted in a purchase of a Mercedes-Benz SL500 convertible in a color referred to as “champagne,” with an interior that Simon calls “peanut butter.” Model year? 2000. Number of miles on it when my mom went to the Masarati lot in the sky? 40K. Personally, my dream car is a new paint job for my bicycle, but I will swoon into a puddle when confronted with a mint-condition hot rod, preferably if there’s a tattooed man involved in its maintenance. But, seriously, hand me a skateboard and I’m happy. My mom’s ‘cedes-spending spree was ridiculous in my eyes, but it made her happy and feel like a new woman, so I couldn’t scoff too much.

Now that she’s gone, I’m the asshole with the Mercedes. Please buy my Mercedes. Please.

So far, my attempts to sell it have included a Craigslist posting and a doe-eyed sales pitch to any person over the age of forty who looks like they have a steady job. Of course, the main problem here is that I am wholly ignorant when it comes to sales, cars, and selling cars. Not to mention the fact that I’m impatient as all get-out and distrusting of people.

I own a used Volkswagen Jetta, model year 2000. This gray, beat up, lovable vehicle replaced the first car I ever had, a 1998 VW Golf that was totaled by a speeding 90 year old in a Cadillac, resulting in a mild shoulder injury and phobia of the elderly. If you asked me to tell you about my car, I’d say it goes fast and has a good sound system. I’d tell you that its prime features include a passenger seat that’s easy for the driver to make out in, and a fun console that glows blue at night. I don’t know how many miles are on it, how many miles it gets per tank of gas, or why the radiator decided to blow out in the center lane of traffic on a highway last week. Also a mystery, why Goodyear originally tried to charge me $1,300 for the repairs, but knocked it down to $822 when I turned on the waterworks. Apparently cars require fewer repairs when their owners are pathetic.

I knew I was in over my head when the first response to the Craigslist post was the question, “Can I have the VIN#?” Vin number. I was about to research what vin was the prefix for in Latin when my dad emailed me back. “Vehicle Identification Number. Should be in car someplace.” I didn’t point out that calling it “vehicle identification number” and putting a hash mark after its abbreviation makes it read “vehicle identification number number,” but I did take note of it. If I wanted to seem with it, I’d better just call it a vin.

Once I located the VIN, which took three trips to the car, a YouTube video, and some words that included a hash mark or two of my own among other symbolic punctuation, I was able to respond to the email. Several more were exchanged, and a date to view the car was set. On Monday at five-thirty I met Gene, a forty-something Polish gentleman with a close-cropped beard and sandals. He arrived ready to go, and set about circling the car like a lion circles a fallen gazelle. I assumed that this was a sign that Gene knew about cars, had possibly driven one just like it, and wouldn’t turn to me – the staring half-wit dressed like an extra for a 1998 Hole video – for any information that would make or break his decision to settle and speed the thing out of my life.

“How do you open the trunk?” he asked.

I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice to say that I would have had more luck trying to rip open a hole in the fabric of the universe. If scientists had recorded it, it would have been a screaming example of how humans are similar to monkeys when confronted with the unknown. The answer to Gene’s question was you press a button. But it took fifteen minutes of random knocking, twisting, and head-scratching to get there.

Gene started the engine. Gene twisted the steering wheel. Gene figured out (without consulting me) how to pop the hood and look at the robot inside of my mother’s car. “Is that the gallbladder?” I joked, pointing to some knot of metal and wires. Gene looked at me earnestly and answered. “No.”

There was some inspection of some things I couldn’t explain or tell you. I gave up trying to exude any aura of confidence or intellect following the trunk fiasco, so I basically just stood back and observed a man acquainting himself with a car.

“We go for test drive now, okay, yes?” Gene asked and commanded. Okay. Yes. I hopped in, realizing that I’d left my cellphone, wallet, identification, and oblivious boyfriend in the house. No matter. I was in a German convertible belonging to my dead mother with a stranger who was either interested in purchasing the vehicle, or interested in abducting a tattooed, androgynous moron. Unless the ransom was going to be a box of Raisinets and a bundle of RSS feeds, I seriously doubted I’d ever see Simon again.

“Where can we go to test engine? Open it up. Nothing crazy,” Gene said.”

I am the kind of driver who is more afraid of the police than a fourteen-year-old suburban kid who smokes pot for the first time. I do not know where to speed anywhere, because I try to obey the speed limit everywhere. Due to my inherent aversion to math, I respect numbers of any kind.

“Uh. Left?” I said.

The car suddenly began to imitate a personal massager. It trembled. It shook. Separate from requiring two double-A batteries, it vibrated. I might know nothing about cars, but I do know that they are not designed to induce orgasms.

“What is this?” Gene asked.

“Uh. I don’t know?” I said.

We drove for twenty minutes or so, the vibrations becoming intermittent, at times less severe, other times I felt my teeth rattle in my jaw. Gene stopped at every traffic light, revved the engine once or twice, brought the car up to sixty-five and dropped it back down to the school-zone-friendly thirty-five, and finally made the U-turn to lead us back to my house.

The word mechanic was used. My mother’s car could be hiding a deep, dark secret beneath its gilded exterior: the need for a brand new transmission. I don’t know what that means, and I don’t care. It can’t be that bad. After all, Transmission is one of my favorite songs by Joy Division.

Drop me a line, AinsleyDrew at the gmail one.

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There were the prayer cards to select out of a book. I tried to compare the sets of wallet-sized laminated pictures of saints, each looking skyward as though rolling their eyes at my indecision. I couldn’t choose between the Holy Family Edition and the baroque Old Masters Series, so LeighAnn suggested fifty of each. Next were the prayers to go on the back, like the Bible equivalent of fortune cookie fortunes. I debated whether or not my mom would have been pissed to have the Fireman’s Prayer on the back of her mass card. Instead I chose some passage about death not being so bad, ’cause God was going to flip the resurrection switch eventually, yadda yadda. A smattering of accolades about life everlasting, with a dash of fire and brimstone thrown in. Amen.

Caskets come in metal or wood, and you’d think wood would be cheaper, but no. Good ol’ alloy saves you some coin. Fifteen-hundred dollars for a metal box to put a body in, and my mother insisted on having a closed casket wake. At least that meant that the lining wouldn’t be a determining factor. I selected a coffin the color of Pepto Bismol, possibly because I hoped it would settle the unease that was tossing itself across my stomach each time LeighAnn used her unnaturally smooth fingers to turn the display pages.

Throughout the wake and funeral process I was reminded of a nightmare I used to have as a kid. In it I showed up to a dance recital that I hadn’t been aware of. I didn’t know any of the steps or the songs, and wound up standing center-stage, trying to distract the audience from the fact that I didn’t know what I was doing. In reality, walking in the door with my mother’s name, with the pink coffin and the photographs I’d provided surrounding it, I waited for someone to give me a clue. Do I kneel? Bow? What do I say to her boss? Is there some sort of secret sorrow handshake? Some sort of special recitation I was supposed to be giving? In the middle of the ordeal I left the crowd of cooing, sniffling adults to crouch by my mother and whispered into the explosion of roses on top of her. “Mom, you didn’t tell me it was going to be this big of a deal. You’re so lucky you don’t have to be standing through all of this. You sure got out of this one.”

Drop me a line, AinsleyDrew at gmail dot com
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