blurring_the_edges_55_orphan birdmad It is a wednesday afternoon in mid-October. You wake at 3:30 in the afternoon to the sound of the phone ringing. You stayed at Delia's and stayed there until 9 in the morning because you know the end is near. She's been more out of it than usual since Friday when she drifted in and out while watching the X-Files with you in her room at Delis's. By some strange co-incidence, it is the same episode that they were giving just after the last time she had surgery. You have suspected for the last couple of days that the end could come up any day now It's today. "Hello." "Alex, it's your brother, get to Delia's, the priest is on his way already." You can hear his voice cracking and he's usually the more reserved of the two of you in situations like these. "Oh, God...on my way, bro." You drive, heading north up the I-17 until you get to Thunderbird, just barely avoiding the brunt of the traffic making it's way back up to the further reaches of commuter-suburb hell. Getting off, you are delayed by 27th Avenue by an accident and have to figure out a way around it. When you make it to the house, you rush inside and witness yur mother's last five minutes of breathing life. The little respirator machine chugging away in the corner, reminding you of the one your dad had in his last days. Her comlpexion is sallow and her face seems to have lost much of it's muscle, now just skin hanging over bone and cartilage, making her nose look beaky. Her eyes are open but she is unaware except for one last grasp of your hand as you grasp hers. You can hear the rattling of fluid pooling up in her airway every time she exhales. Tears stream down your face and your nose closes off but you can neither breathe nor sob, fixated on the fading rhythm of her pulse in your hands She exhales one last wheezing breath and you feel the faint pulse of her hand in yours fade away to a stop You want to cry, but the dam still refuses to break. "Bye, mom, i love you." you whisper before placing a kiss on her cooling forehead. With that, you are now parentless. Eight years of sickness and death from the day your father was first diagnosed with the cancer that broke him piece by piece to today, with only a few pauses inbetween for moments of alleged remission and false hopes. The priest, perhaps sensing your specific antipathy toward him as the emissary of a God whose mercy in any of this has been undetectable by your count up until the very moment of death never looks you in the eye. You like to think that if he did, he should burst into flames, but you bury that thought down as deep as it will go. "It's over," you tell the rest of the family, having spent the last minute or so alone with her, "She's gone" You can hear your aunts and your sisters begin to sob quietly and the whispered tremolo of breath being drawn in through the trenbling mouths associated with grief-stricken crying You feel cold and lost but your tears still won't flow past a trickle and you have yet to truly break loose and cry. The rest of the house is now bsest with grief and you, if anything are quite possibly in shock from it as tyou feel this sense of complete displacement as if you are not really here and that none of this is really happening. Because of your seeming composure in this moment, the rest of the family is somehow gravitating toward you, crying on your whoulders and throwing themselves into your empbrace, pouring their grief out into you like a bottomless well and you sit there and take it all in. Delia's husband calls the doctor who comes and calls the time of death and brings someone from the mortuary to come and claim the body. The sight of your mother's draped form being wheeled out of the door on the undertaker's gurney provokes a fresh round of weeping and crying, but you are stone-faced as they wheel her into the van and take her away. You call the plant and tell them that you won't be coming in for awhile. For the next three days, you neither sleep nor eat. Tina's mom heard and called Bryan's dad, who passed the word along to Bryan and his mom. Teri has returned none of the additional three calls you've placed since two days before it happened. Even in the middle of a highway fifty miles outside of town in the middle of the night you have never felt as lonely as you feel right now. Even now, three days later, wehn no one is around, you still cannot manage to cry. Your grief becomes annoyance which you take out on yourself with an exacto knife to your forearm. It stings like a bastard, but you don't even wince. Other thn showering and going to the bathroom and occasionally having a snack, the remaining couple iof days until the funeral are just as blank as tre first three. When you arrive on Sunday night for the rosary, you are still in a blank state, moved only briefly by your grandmother's tears. Like most mothers, she is wrecked by the concept of outliving one of her own children, and one of her youngest at that. Your other aunts and uncles have flown in from Austin and Houston and Galveston and Corpus Christi and everywhere else, between their own bouts of tears and grief they take turns consoling each other and their mother and your brother and sisters. Like everyone else, though, when they come to you, they see this strange blankness and mistake it for strength, so then they come to you and pour their grief into you, which makes you feel infinitely more confused than stoic. Dizzy, you stumble outside, wanting nothing more than a good needle full of the best junk you can score when you see them. Bryan and Tina Bryan is the first to throw his arms around you. "I'm so sorry, Alex, your mom was always so nice to me when i stayed over, god i don't kniow how i'd take it if it was my mom, how are ou doing man?" "You don't wanna know, cause i can't describe how bad it sucks, man, it's like someone pulled a plug somewhere and now i'm just this big walking empty" You turn asround and you are stunned to see Tina. The look of warmth and sympathy in Tina's eyes breaks your heart and as she throws her arms around you and holds you tightly for a moment, you feel another wash of self-recrimination for thinking "this was the sensation i had always hoped for, if only it hadn't taken something as bad as this for it to happen." You drown the thought as you put your arms around her to prolong the embrace for just a moment longer. It has been nearly three years since the last time you saw or heard from, her for any reason and it was two years between then and the previous encounter with her. To think, the two of you were as close as anyone could be up until the day you told her you loved her. It's almost funny that as you are standing here in the mortuary lobby, you are suddenly reminded that while you have tried to convince yourself that your feelings for her were ancient history and that you had buried them in the dust and debris of the life you have led since the day that Bryan introduced you to Zoe and Michelle, you still fel every last bit of it. The warmth of her arms arouund you and that sudden sensation of contentment that rushed over you when you saw her reminded you of why you try to blur it all out with whatever you could find. "My mom heard about it from someone in your sister's parish who also used to live uin the neighborhood. My mom and my dad have been keeping track of all the cancer cases in the neighborhood." "I'm so sorry, Alex, are you gonna be ok?" "Sooner or later, i guess, i was just telling Bryan that it feels like someone pulled a plug somewhere and now i'm just filled with this weird empty feeling." "We'll sit witrh you," she says. "Yeah," Bryan adds, "it'll be almost like old times, except for how sad this all is....god that was a dumb thing to say, sorry man." "No sweat, i know what you mean and that's cool with me, Bryan" You sit in the back pew with them for the remainder of the evening and between the two of them, the empty feeling abates for at least a little while Both of them promise to call you in a couple of days, but tell you that neigher of them will be able to make it to the burial and you are ok with that. You go home and pack up a few items that you want to send with your mom as memento_mori. The wooden owl you made for her in shop class, in keeping with her fascination with them and her collection of owl figurines, the mother's day placard you made in 6th grade art class with the phrase that used to annoy the hell oult of her until you retired it with the placard itself, underneath the decorative pieces, in plaster relief you printed "HEY MOM!!!... i love you, happy mother's day." That she had laughed when she ha dread the last part was worth the annoyed exclamation of "Ay que cabron!" when she had seen the "Hey mom" part which you had deliberately made large enough to grab her attention. After the final visitation you packed these things in to the casket next to her, kissing your fingertips and touching them to her forehead before the funeral director closed and locked trhe casket for the last time. What was in the casket was now really only the likeness of your mom, her forehead felt as cold and hard as marble and the finality of that sensation chipped away at the involuntary stoicism you had been displaying. (...) 041103 ... birdmad The funeral director puts a hand on your shoulder as you step back away from the casket. You had caught a glimpse of her last night during the rosary and felt another wrenching pang of guilt for feeling attracted to the mystery woman in the purple blouse and black skirt. She looks to be about 25 or 26, and is dressed like a more business-like version of someone you wouldn't be surprised to see at the Atomic Cafe. Today the purple blouse and black skirt have been replaced by an even more businesslike and more appropriately funereal black suit and grey blouse with her hair pulled back into a rather tight ponytail and cat-eye glasses that remind you of that singer, Lisa Loeb. "I can tell you were very close, terribly sorry for your loss." "Thanks." Without looking back and further feeding the two conflicting impulses of lust and guilt, you excuse yourself outside and have a cigarette. Andrew comes around to light one up with you as well and neitehr of you speaks or looks each other in the eyes. Stubbing the butts out in the ashtray next to the door you go back inside as the hearse pulls up and you, Andrew, Delia's husband, Uncles David, Franco and Martin take your places at the side of the casket and move it from the plinth it was resting on in the viewing room and load it onto the scissor-lift cart to wheel it over to the back of the hearse. Even in the heavy box, your mom is fairly light, Obviously lighter than your dad, but that much is a given. This isn't an experience you wanted to have again so soon, but then again, anytime would have reallly been too soon. But then, hey, that's you all over again, Alex - always a pall-bearer, never a corpse. Well okay, you have been a corpse a couple of times, but you didn't stay there long enough to get comfortable with it, so that's old ground and old news. As you watch the procession of relatives and friends of the family lining up behind the hearse, you get in the funeral home's limousine with your siblings and ride first to church for the Mass. You remain focused on the image of the cross, staring at it or past it as the service goes on and goes by with merciful quickness. You come to the conclusion that when you die, you no longer want to be buried but cremated, preferably as soon as the doctor or coroner has made his report so that you never have to settle for being a set decoration at your last public appearance. A recurring though blazes through your mind as you stare a hole though the image of the crucified Christ on the wall behind the altar: "If being daed involves being carted around like a piece of furniture for the last few hours before i'm buried than to hell with that, scatter my ashes or make them into fireworks... now that would be a send off" Though you can find a small kernel of humor in the sentiment, you are in no mood to laugh. When the mass is finally over, you and your brother and the rest of the family members appointed to the task of pall-bearer wheel the scissor-cart back to the hearse and place her carefully in the back of the white hearse for one last trip. Your brother has cried a few times, quietly, softly and your sisters have done so as well, and they co so on and off throughout the ride to the cemetery where she'll join your dad. Looking out of the back window of the limousine, you notice that the line of cars has gotten longer since you left the church parking lot. By the time the procession stops, the cemetery lane is full of cars and relatives you either know well or are only peripherally aware of and the Pecan trees that line the lane sewam appropriately leaf-bare both for the time of year and for the occasion. It was hot last week, but today it is cold, the blast of wintery air that closes out the last of summer's heat by either coming along as a couple days of rain and clouds or as a week of dry, crisp gusts of wind has come as the wind this year. Carrying your mother to the rig that will lower her into the waiting ground weighs down on you as if you were carrying her weight by yourself and that of the whole world along with her. That feeling that has been lurking behind some dam of its own creation is rising to the surface now, but this time yo willingly bite it back because it is not simply grief, it is the blind rage of having watched the events that led here and never having had any power to stop it. It's the self-recrimination of both feeling like and knowing that you have not always been the best child to your parents. It's the pain of all of the arguments that needed to be had but will now go unspoken and now never truly resolved. You bite it back because you don't just want to cry. You want to scream, you want to snap the juniper trees tht line the inner parcels of the cemetery and worse, you want to toss the priest in the grave if you thought it would provoke God into coming down and answering one question: "Why?" He didn't asnwer you last time you asked, Alex. He's not gonna answer you now. There are thousands , if not millions of people on earth who more deserve to endure slow, painful, rotting deaths, but most of them will reap the blessings of long lives with few conseqeunces, and there are thousands, if not millions of people who have never done anything so significantly wrong to merit the kinds of suffering that the world will conspire to mete out to them. If everything happens for a reason, you are damned, you think, if you can figure out the reason for any of it. Now it's not just little trinkets in that casket with your mother now. Your faith is in there too, waiting to be buried. The priest says the final words over the casket, your family is not one or eulogies and never really has been. Overhead, a few fluffy wight cumulus clouds drift lazily along, floating high in an almost impossibly blue sky. The attendants flip the lever on the rig of chrome bars and green canvas straps and many of those both sincere and not-so-sincere begin to cry againa. You take one of the lillies from the arangement in one hand and a handful of loose dirt from the cannister in the other. You throw the lily in first and then with a wave of your other hand, ou let the particles of earth drift down over the silver-grey metal casket. Standing back and slightly away from the rest of the family as the procession moves on, you fight back the tears a little longer, not sure you will be able to stop now if they start and aware of how much more ridiculous than normal such a large and creepy beast as you wouild look in the throes of a crying jag. Just a little while longer, just a few minutes more. Walking toward the limo as the crowd begins to disperse, the dam breaks and you cannot even stand up. Dropping to your knees, after having presented the illusion of stoic calm and strength for the last five days, you cry out as you fall, punching the ground and sobbing uncontrollably, tears and snot flowing faster than the nearest kleenex can catch When your brother and your uncles pick you up off your knees and put their arms around you, more than a couple of people pause to notice the depth of the pock-mark your fist left in the fairly hard soil. One of your knuckles is bleeding and one of the others is beginning to swell, but you don't feel any of it. You haven't felt this lost since the time a crowd of old ladies cut across your path and accidentally separated you from your mom at the mall when you were little and you ran for the center aisle and cried until she heard you and came running. It takes an hour before you are cried out to the point of violent sobs and by then you are back at Delia's house. Another three days goes by before you are able to eat again and you are able to forgo grocery shopping based on the sheer volume of food that the neighbors have brought by while you have holed up in the house. For the remainder of that week, when you are not in tears, you sit in the living room, never turning on the TV or the radio (...) 041104 ... birdmad Teri still does not return yuor call, but from the office where she works, Tina has gotten Bryan on another line and has you on conference call. "Hey, alex, i know this is going to sound weird after what you've been through lately, but i figure it'd be just the thing to maybe cheer you up a little." Brian chimes in "Me and Tina thought that maybe it might be cool to hit the State Fair this weekend." "Actually," you tell them, "that does sound like a good idea, i haven't been able to drag myself outside in days and if i sit here like this any longer i think i'm gonna flip out." "It's a plan, then?" Tina asks. "Yeah,what time?" A moment of indistinct chatter between Tina and Bryan and then almost in unison "six o'clock saturday night?" "Yeah, works for me." Well, alex, this should be interesting. 041105 what's it to you? who go blather from