Awkwardly Social

It’s been two weeks since I got the call, one week since we buried my mom’s ashes, and the busy parts of the day are easy. The not busy times, well, you know, they aren’t.  I have to write this next thing out, just so that it doesn’t fade anymore in my mind, because already that day seems like it was a movie.  Like I wasn’t really there.  Like someone told me a story about my mother dying and I wasn’t listening closely enough.

There was a moment during the burial service that was so, well, let me just tell you the story.

My mother wanted to be cremated, so we did that.  We spent a horrible afternoon at the funeral home picking out an urn and a burial container and a few days later a cemetery plot.  The only urn that we liked did not fit into any of the burial containers that we found remotely attractive.  In fact the only burial container we could use was one that looked like a styrofoam cooler.  You know, the kind you can buy at the grocery store to put your hastily purchased beer in?  With the top that has sort of a stumpy pyramid shape.  That.  We knew my mom would be super pissed if we buried her in a styrofoam cooler, but we also knew that there was only so much decision making we could handle.  So, we picked her pretty urn, and decided that the burial container we would view as just sort of a necessary evil.

So the day of the memorial, we get to the grave site for a private internment, and Tavia and I placed photos and things my nieces made, and a letter from each of us, a box of tic tacs, and her grad school graduation tassel into the cooler along with the urn.  We were all crying and it was raining.

My mom’s oldest brother had been asked before the service if he wanted to place the container into the grave, but the funeral director warned him that it is “quite a deep hole” and that if he didn’t feel comfortable he would do it for him.  My uncle told him that he trusted his judgement and would let him do it in his stead.

So, we get through the service, it’s misting and the ground is wet.  They move the table aside and reveal a tiny little hole.  A cooler sized hole.  A hole that you cannot see the bottom of.  The funeral director knelt down on a piece of plywood next to the hole and slowly, with two hands holding the cooler began to bend over, lowering it into the grave.  He was bending and bending and bending.  And the funeral director, is a large man.  Like tall and wide.  And he’s still bending and then, his body reached a tipping point.

You guys, he fell.  He fell face first, arms in the hole, legs kind of flailing about, and we’re all just sitting there stunned.  After what seemed like hours he was able to get himself out of the hole and when he turned to face me, I was sitting a mere 2 feet away from him, his face… His face was covered in mud.  He looked over at me and said, I am so sorry.

My mom was not a person who loved physical comedy, but I do not know how you could have seen this and not bubbled over with laughter.  I think it was Amelia, my youngest niece, who let out a huge guffaw.  And I quickly slipped away to the car with Seth and sat for about 5 minutes, my body heaving and shaking and crying with laughter.

Seth and I drove to a nearby cafe and I had a glass of wine so I could get ahold of myself.  I was moments away from having to read my mother’s eulogy, and all I could do was laugh.  A man fell into my mother’s grave.  My mother was buried in what looked like a styrofoam cooler, and a man fell into her grave.

After the service, before we left for the reception, the funeral director approached Seth and I, by this point I was again all emotion and no sign of joy left in my body, but he came up to us and said, “I just want you to know I didn’t drop her.”  And Seth, in his signature Seth voice, that those of you who have never heard him won’t really understand, but believe me it’s a specific tone, was like, “Why not, man?” And then the funeral director said, “I know these next months are going to be really hard for all of you, but think of me from time to time.”

And I do.  I don’t know how I could possibly forget it.

I don’t know how to respond to all of your comments, except to say thank you and tell you that I cry pretty much every time I get a new one.  I cry pretty much every time I have to talk about it.

There was an empty file folder in her file cabinet that had, in her neat handwriting, the words, “Advance Directive.”  She thought about it, but just never got to it.  So we were left with the same question ringing in our ears, over and over, “What would Mom want?” My mom, an advocate for seniors and a woman who made sure all of her clients were taken care of in terms of their wills and estates, either didn’t see herself as old enough to really worry about all of that yet, or just couldn’t bring herself to do it.

To say that planning my mom’s funeral, cleaning out her apartment, taking care of her small estate and wondering about all of these unanswered questions is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, seems akin to a person taking a huge gulp of the Pacific Ocean and saying, “It’s kind of salty.”  I’ve never experienced grief of this kind. The kind that sneaks up on you when you remember the things you meant to tell your mom, but just never had the time to pick up the phone.  The kind that keeps you awake at night wondering what her last moments were like.  The kind that makes you worry about your sister because she was the one who got the call, she was the one who had to go there, she found her.  The kind that makes you feel like you shouldn’t be laughing yet and makes you wonder why you don’t find anything funny.

I’ll feel completely fine, and then I feel my shoulders sink and my stomach clench, my mom is gone.

My sister and I read the eulogy at my mother’s service today - here are my words.

Our mother’s life was one of service to her community, loving her family and educating herself and others. She was a force to be reckoned with. From releasing lab rats from the University of Minnesota to raising our ducklings in her bathtub – from protesting the Vietnam war to protesting our dirty rooms – from teaching us to read when we were infants to telling us our Master’s degrees were good but a PhD would be better – from falling in love with the desert of Arizona to moving to the rainforest of Seattle – Everything she did she did with passion. 

Mom, having grown up in a small town herself, wanted to make sure that Tavia and I weren’t small town girls.  She encouraged us to look beyond the borders of our community and reach out for bigger and better things. We were coddled only when absolutely necessary, but we were loved every moment.  Even those teenage moments when we ourselves hard to love.  Mom didn’t want her daughters to be push-overs, but I’m sure there came I time when she regretted teaching us that if you believe in your cause you better prove your side and never give up until you’ve won.  (Whether it be can we have YET ANOTHER cat, or can’t we just stay out until midnight like every other person).

The motto “Shoot for the stars and you’ll get the moon,” was altered a little bit while raising us it was more like, “Shoot for the edge of the Universe and you’ll get the Milky Way galaxy.”  We were expected to be perfect, but mom was happy that we became the flawed and slightly deranged people we are.  I never got to take her to the Oscars with me, like I one day hoped to do, and she never got to see my name on the big screen like I know she would have wanted, but she watched the terrible shows I work on and she told me “Well, I’m glad you’re working, at least.”

My mom could be a tough cookie with us, sure she cried at every Kleenex commercial and personal interest story on the news, but she trusted that we were going to be ok.  One of the last conversations I had with her, after a run of particularly bad luck for me and my husband, she cried on the phone with me and told me that she just wanted things to be easier for me, that she wanted things to go my way and that she would do anything she could just to make me feel like things were going to be OK.  We didn’t say a lot of I love yous, my mom and I, but she told me she loved me, I and said I love you too.  And I do, I love you mom and I miss you and I hope you know that I’m going to be OK.

Carol, mother to Tavia and Tamara, mother-in-law to Andre and Seth, sister to David and Harry, grandmother to Fiona and Amelia, born December 26, 1945, died July 14, 2011. We love her and miss her and will not be the same without her.

Our toaster no longer pops when the toast is done.  Also the crumb catcher is no longer attached to it.  Seth will not allow me to buy a new toaster.  He won’t let me buy a new toaster because he has this amazingly expensive toaster that doesn’t work that he’ll one day get fixed.  He’ll get that thing fixed just as soon as he can find a small appliance repair shop in the great and vast city of Los Angeles.

I’ve mentioned the small appliance repair shop two blocks from my work three times.  He asked me three times where it was.  I told him three times. It has been broken for as long as I’ve known Seth, by the way.  Three years, this thing hasn’t performed the one function it was designed for.  TOAST THINGS.

We still have two broken toasters. If there isn’t any change in toasterville, I’m buying a new one.  I don’t give a care what my husband says.

Sigh.

So the network passed on our pitch on Friday and I got my period a few hours ago.  It was an infertile month.

Our show will go out to a couple of other networks as a “soft pitch.” They’ll watch the reel and read our written materials, but we won’t necessarily have to go and sit in a room with them.

I would have been shocked if we had sold a pilot or even a presentation on our first outing, but I also wouldn’t have been shocked if it happened.  Does that make sense?  It wouldn’t have surprised me, but it would have been surprising.

As for the infertility front, well, that continues.  I spent all week feeling weird twinges and cramping, wondering if I was getting feelings of implantation or an impending period.  It’s a mind fuck and I was immediately sad when I got my period, but I’ve tried to rally.  No one enjoys a sad sack.

We’ve got another couple of cycles before our doctor decides if we need to try something more drastic, so we wait.  And try, try again.

There’s something about the summertime after the 4th of July that seems kind of endless and when I was a kid riding my bike around in lightening storms, that always seemed like a good thing, but now?  It seems like a high air conditioning bill and too many work hours getting in the way of enjoying hot summer nights on the front stoop.

Seth and his son assembled the ping pong table yesterday.  The ping pong table I gave him for his birthday.  In February.  I love that we have a ping pong table.  I love that we have a living room large enough for a ping pong table.  But I do not love that the ping pong table is now the centerpiece of my living room.  This is weird, because I spend zero time in my living room.  So, now with a giant ping pong table in it, I actually spent more time in there in one evening than I did in the 6 months leading up to this moment.  Thank god it folds up.  Because, even though I bought the most attractive option, it is still a hideous eye sore in the middle of my living room.

This morning I woke up after a terrible dream that involved me murdering three people so that we could properly execute the reality television outline we were given.  Then, when I was watching the cut of the show (still in the dream) I realized that people were going to find out that I REALLY killed those people.  And they were going to send me to jail.  And Seth refused to help me by changing the cut so that it would be ambiguous if they died, because he thought it was better to know that they got poisoned, shot, hacked up and strangled (the poisoned person didn’t die, because another producer did that segment and didn’t really kill the reality tv cast member… STILL A DREAM).  I woke up really freaked out that I was going to have to go to jail and really mad at Seth for not doing my notes.  Issues, I have a few!