Somebody had kicked off her shoes, leaving a small clump of dried dirt on the carpet. Not my shoes, not my house, not my dirt, but I panicked, momentarily. Ann would have died, but she had already done that. Even so, I did my best to clean it up.
When a friend's mother passes away, it stirs up all sorts of unexpected emotions -- like an irrepressible urge to clean a microscopic section of carpet. An empathic fear of losing the person who knew you before you were knowable, who taught you when you didn't realize you were being taught, who continued to shape you even when you thought -- insisted, really -- you could do just fine shaping yourself. The person who could, with a glance, make you feel safe, sure that you could do anything. The same person who could, with a glance, make you quiver with fear, certain you could never do anything right.
As friends, we see each others mothers through different lenses. Yes, we are far more familiar with the tales of well-intentioned emotional abuse than we are with the mundane daily touch, or the thousands of times she peeked into our room while we were sleeping, adjusted covers that didn't need adjusting, or the hours of silent worry because she wanted our lives to be free of all that is not perfect. But from the outside, we are often more able to see the unseeable good stuff, see the humor in their oft repeated incomparable wisdom. My personal favorite from my own mom: The best exercise is pushing yourself away from the table. I didn't always find it as funny as my friends do, but I've certainly retained it far longer than anything I learned in school.
My friend's mother died last weekend, long after the doctors thought she would after her diagnosis. I had gotten to the point of believing she was truly superhuman, that she would never go. When I saw her recently, she was as smart and funny and deliciously sarcastic as she had always been. And meticulously turned out, though she had become painfully thin. She had made her daughters promise to not let the hairs on her chin go un-plucked, even at the end.
At the cemetery, I half expected her to start barking out instructions to the guys who were taking too long to get her settled. I'm sure she was hoping we'd all take our shoes off once we got back to her house; the ground was so muddy. To my friend, Ann, mom, has always been larger than life, a force to be reckoned with. I get it.
Back at Ann's house, I was struck by her ordinariness. The unfinished crossword puzzle on her toilet tank. The lotions and potions she had not put away before she left, thinking she'd be back. The piles of papers on her nightstand, the assorted items in her cabinets that had long expired. I zeroed in on one of the cookbooks on her shelf full of cookbooks. The Pillsbury baking cookbook. Even from across the room, there was something about it that took me back, way back -- even though my own mom never baked. I pulled it out, flipped through the yellowed pages, looked at the copyright date -- 1959. The year I was born, right around the time my friend's mother became a mother. I am claiming that book as my own, an ordinary reminder of the extraordinary Ann.
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