My Dead Parents

by Anya Yurchyshyn

  I told her about the books and games her grandchildren received from Santa, and said it would mean a lot to them, and to Alex, if she saw them soon. I reminded her that the eldest’s birthday was in two weeks. “Have Nora help you get a present, okay?”

  She pawed the bed looking for her cigarettes. When she only found empty packs, she asked us to get her some.

  “Okay,” I said. “Do you need anything else? Do you want the paper?”

  “More wine.”

  “You don’t need me to buy you more wine,” I told her. “I’ll get you the other bottle from the fridge.”

  She nodded at the wine on her nightstand. “That is the other bottle.”

  As Marko and I walked to the liquor store, I told myself that it was okay to buy more alcohol. There’d be much, much more. I was just buying one bottle.

  She was already more relaxed when we returned. The drugs had kicked in. I opened the wine and made sure her cigarettes were within reach. I wanted to leave on a positive note, so I began telling her about the classes I’d be teaching during the upcoming semester.

  She interrupted me. “I’m tired. You can go.”

  I looked at my mother and saw a stranger: someone I could hurt for but not love, or even like. I thought, Fuck you, lady. I came over with presents, stories, and all the love I could muster, and you send me on errands and then on my way. I wished her a Merry Christmas and left.

  I spoke to her a few times over the next month because there’d been a sudden development with her health. Though her doctors insisted that “wet brain”—alcohol-induced neurological damage—was responsible for her mobility issues, they’d found excess fluid in her spine and thought draining it might improve her gait. She’d scheduled the procedure, which would require that she spend almost a week in the hospital, possibly in a fair amount of pain. She also had to be sober in the days leading up to it and while she recovered. I’d agreed to take off work so I could be with her before and after. I thought she’d be thrilled that surgery was an option, but when we chatted, she seemed hesitant about going through with it.

  Five days before she was due at the hospital, we spoke on the phone as I was walking through SoHo.

  “I’m canceling the procedure,” she told me. “It’s going to be painful, and I don’t want to spend four days in bed.”

  I stopped walking in the middle of the street. A car honked at me, and I moved over to the sidewalk, where I collided with some tourists. I leaned against a building and glared at the sky. “You spend every day in bed and have for a long time.”

  She didn’t respond.

  “I know it’s going to hurt, and I know that’s scary. But it might help you walk better! Isn’t that what you want? You should be excited! You used to be a dancer!”

  She sucked hard on a cigarette. “I’m not doing it.”

  “This is a real chance to get better!”

  “I’m not doing it,” she said again.

  “Okay, then I guess I don’t have to come to Boston on Friday.”

  “You don’t.”

  I hung up and stifled a scream. Why had I ever thought she might go through with it? I was as mad at myself as I was with her. For the past few years, she’d cited her inability to walk as a justification for her drinking, and I believed that it upset and depressed her, as it would anyone. By refusing surgery, she may have been admitting that although she’d love to be able to walk properly, she didn’t want to change. If the surgery was successful, she’d lose an excuse and face the hope and expectation—her family’s and doctor’s—that she’d drink less, or even stop.

  That Friday, I was home, unsure what I should be doing since I hadn’t planned on being there. Marko was with his parents; his father had late-stage prostate cancer and they were meeting with a new doctor to discuss treatments.

  My phone buzzed, and I saw it was Alex. I answered without thinking.

  She said, “I have something to tell you,” and I knew. I’d predicted this moment and had rehearsed it often. We said it together: “Mom’s dead.”

  Nora had found her in her bed that morning. She called the social worker who coordinated our mom’s care, and the social worker called my sister. They were both at the house. Our mom’s body had just been taken away. I told Alex I’d leave for Boston as soon as I could.

  I studied the winter sun slanting through the window. Everything was the same as it had been a few minutes ago, before my sister’s call. Dolores was sleeping on the couch; I knew that if I tried to pet her, she’d bat my hand away. I turned in circles to see my apartment, then stood still.

  My mom’s death had been on the horizon for more than a decade; sometimes it was close, sometimes far away, but it was never out of sight. I no longer had to wait for it. Finally, it had arrived.

  I was calm as I called Marko, but the moment he answered, I surprised myself by crying. “My mother died.” My words were caught up in my tears.

  “What?” He was thinking about his father’s imminent death, stuck for hours already in the hospital.

  “My mother died,” I said again, and my tears dried up. “My mother died.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I love you. We’re almost done here.”

  “I have to go to Boston,” I said.

  “I know,” he said. “I’ll be home soon.”

  When we arrived at my sister’s five hours later, my brother-in-law, Raj, gave me a huge hug and told me how sorry he was.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Where’s Alex?”

  My sister came out of the living room. We looked at each other, hugged, and looked at each other again.

  “So here we are,” I said.

  “Yup.”

  We all sat on the couch drinking red wine. Alex and I made lists of what we needed to do that night and over the next few days: call family, call more family, call my mom’s friends, find a place to have her cremated, write and publish an obituary, find a church, organize a reception.

  Our first stop the next day was the medical examiner’s. They’d made an exception and seen us on the weekend. A kind and efficient older woman took us into a room with a round table. She slowly opened a manila folder and slid a large black-and-white picture of our mother’s face across the table. Her eyes were closed, her hair was spread out on a gurney, and her skin sagged toward her ears. I thought, “That woman in the picture is my mother, and that picture is a picture of a dead person.”

  The funeral home was next. We chose one not far from where Alex lived. It was a white clapboard house with black shutters, and Irish-owned. O’Someone’s, McSomething’s.

  A large man with hammocked eyes greeted us and brought us upstairs to an office where he described what would happen: They’d receive the body from the medical examiner, cremate it, then release the ashes to us.

  He gave us each a heavy binder of urns to browse and left the room. We saw that our mother’s ashes could be housed in one that looked like a Roman vase, a football, or a horse’s head.

  When he returned, we said we didn’t want an urn. Any urn.

  “Perhaps,” he stuttered, “you’d like go with something simple and elegant so you have a nice place to keep your mother while you decide what you want to do next.”

  “It’s okay,” we said in unison.

  He straightened papers on his desk. “What we do in these instances is put your mother’s remains in a tightly sealed bag and put that bag in a cardboard box.”

  Alex and I looked at each other and nodded. I smiled and said that was perfect.

  We stood and shook hands. “We should be receiving the body from the medical examiner tomorrow, and we should be able to take care of your mother in the afternoon. We’ll call you when she’d ready for pickup.”

  I made a move for the door, but my sister lingered. “In addition to calling us when you’re finished, can you cal
l us before you begin?”

  “I’m sorry?” he said.

  “I’d like you to call us before the cremation, so we can know when it’s happening,” my sister said.

  “Of course,” he said. “We’d be happy to.”

  We decided to hold the funeral at the Unitarian church that our mother liked. I had been to the church with her once for a winter solstice celebration on Christmas Eve, and she’d gone a few times on her own. The minister was a tall, calm woman who resembled Sarah Palin. She asked us about our mother so she could plan the service, and we told her everything. We wanted to be honest about her alcoholism, but we also wanted to celebrate her achievements and love of travel, and address the loss of Yuri and our father. She asked us what our religious beliefs were. Alex and I looked at each other blankly.

  The minister explained that she wanted to use vocabulary that we were comfortable with. She could use the term “God,” for example, but she didn’t have to. She asked my sister what she’d told my nephews about their grandmother’s death, explaining that she thought it was important to reinforce that story or belief in an official capacity.

  “I told them that Noni has gone to live in the stars,” Alex said, and she began to cry. The minister seemed relieved to see one of us get emotional, but by the time she handed my sister a box of tissues, Alex was done. She’d wiped her cheeks with her hands and blinked away whatever tears remained, but politely accepted the box and kept it in her lap.

  I’d seen her cry only a few times. Alex thought feelings were an indulgence. She’d once gone to therapy, and when I’d asked about her session, she told me she didn’t see the point. “I cried the whole hour,” she told me. “It was such a waste.” When I suggested that expressing her pain and frustration could be a good thing, especially since the burden of our mother fell so heavily on her, she’d rolled her eyes. I tried again. “If you cried, maybe you’re more upset than you know. You’re juggling so much between the kids, work, and Mom. Speaking to someone an hour a week sounds good for you.”

  “I’m too busy,” she’d said. “And, anyway, I’m great at compartmentalizing.”

  Alex’s phone rang as she drove us back to her house, and she handed it to me. “I think it’s the funeral home.”

  When I answered, the man we’d met with said the cremation was done, and we could pick up our mother anytime. “Okay,” I said. “Thanks so much.” I hung up and relayed the news.

  Alex’s face turned red and her eyes filled. “He was supposed to call us before so we knew it was happening, not after! Why didn’t you scream at him?”

  “I don’t know.” My mind went blank, as it always did when someone was mad at me. “Do you want me to call him back?”

  “No,” she sighed.

  “Why did you want to know when it was happening?”

  “So we could have prayed, or meditated, or I don’t know, done something.”

  I apologized and squirmed in my seat. Alex had cried twice in one day. We were experiencing our mother’s death together, but her feelings weren’t what I’d expected. I figured she’d feel unburdened, maybe even happy. I didn’t know how to respond to her, didn’t know if she wanted comfort or quiet.

  Meditating or praying while our mother’s body was turned to dust seemed too spiritual and reverent for my sister; that was the kind of thing I tended to want to do. But I hadn’t thought of it in the first place and had forgotten about it altogether. I didn’t know if Alex’s desire came from wanting to acknowledge and respect that moment or from needing a specific time to say goodbye.

  I asked again if I could call him back. “I’ll yell at him,” I said.

  “Don’t bother.”

  “Do you want to pull over and meditate?” I said anxiously. “We can do whatever you want.”

  Raj and Marko seemed uncertain how they should approach us when we returned. I took Marko up to the guest room and flopped on the bed.

  “How’s it going?” he asked as he stroked my arm. “Are you okay? Are you sad? You can be sad, you know.”

  I traced invisible shapes on the green-and-white bedspread. I was hyperaware of my body and movements, aware that I was empty. “If I’m sad,” I said, “I’m sad for my mother.”

  That became my line. Whenever people asked how I was doing, I said that I wasn’t sad for myself but was so, so sad for my mom and for what her life became. How could I be sad that my mother, the person she’d turned into, was gone? Wanting her to live longer, when she obviously didn’t want to be alive, would have been cruel, even selfish. I was sixteen years older, but I felt the way I had when my father died—relieved.

  The night before the funeral, Marko and I went into the drugstore where I’d worked throughout high school. The owner, his son, and everyone who worked there had been deeply kind to my family and me. They’d looked after me when I was little, and, when I was older, talked me through treatment options for my mother. They’d wait with me if I told them an ambulance was coming to take her to detox and let my mother’s account go unpaid for months. I figured they knew about the funeral from the neighborhood, or from the obituary we’d published, but I wanted to invite them personally.

  A young guy was working, and I asked to see Danny, the owner’s son. Danny’s smile evaporated when he saw me. He said he and his dad would be at the funeral; all of the staff who could be spared would be there. He asked if I needed anything, and I burst into tears. The young kid disappeared. I was so confused to be crying, and embarrassed by my gasps and wet face. When I tried to apologize, I couldn’t get the words out. I waved my hands in the “I can’t/I’m sorry” gesture, tried to make the “you get it” face, and backed out of the store.

  “I can’t believe that just happened,” I hiccupped to Marko as we walked toward the restaurant. “That was crazy.”

  “It was.” Marko laughed, then realized he wasn’t supposed to be laughing. He put his arm around me and squeezed.

  Marko and I were staying at my mom’s house since my sister’s place was full of guests. When we got in, he asked if I wanted a drink. “I’m good,” I said. “I have to work on the eulogy. I haven’t even started.”

  He laughed. “You know the funeral is tomorrow, right?” He gave me a long hug. I wriggled out of it, anxious to get to work, and sent him to bed.

  I’d done what I typically did—put off a big task with the hope that the eventual pressure would produce genius I wouldn’t otherwise be able to access. I took out a notebook and started writing, but the only things that came out were canned sentiments I’d heard elsewhere. I couldn’t think of anything personal or remotely brilliant to say. After an hour, I gave up and went to look for inspiration.

  The door to my mother’s bedroom was closed. I peeked in and saw that it was almost exactly as I’d last seen it. Her dressers were littered with cigarettes packs and lighters, tissues and pill bottles, but her bed had been stripped, her stained mattress naked. The bottles, dirty plates, and glasses had been cleared.

  I poked around her study, the room that would soon demand so much of my time, until I came across boxes of photographs, ones I’d seen many times as well as ones my parents had never shown me—photos from their wedding; of them in bathing suits and Santa hats atop camels; my mother in Boston, Beirut, alone, with us. I realized her life had inspired many of my dreams and goals; all of her travels, working internationally. I’d never been able to admit it because from childhood I’d positioned myself as separate from her. Later, I was only able to see her as a prisoner of her own weaknesses, a bedridden victim who had no dreams at all. I grabbed a bunch of letters and pictures, and returned to the living room and my notebook. What came out was a surprise.

  I didn’t cry at the funeral. Not when I walked in with my family, or when I saw how crowded it was and that so many of my friends had made the trip from New York. But I knew that I had to show some emotion. As I walked
up to the podium to give the eulogy, I scanned the page and found a place where I could pause and perform at least a bit of grief.

  On behalf of my family, I want to thank everyone for coming. It means so much to us to have you here to honor my mother’s life.

  As her daughter, and probably as anyone who knew her well, it’s hard to know what person and life to honor. In a lot of ways, I think my mother led two distinct lives. The first part, which thankfully was the largest, was filled with passion, adventure, and achievement. She was a very sensitive person, and she put love into everything. She traveled the world, dedicated years of her life to environmental protection. She was a devoted teacher and, of course, a mother. One of the nicest, and most difficult, things for me to hear over the past few weeks is how much she adored my sister and me. How, though she had a million interests, we were really her life. She gave us a lot of love, and she also raised us to be strong and independent. On top of all this, she was also a lot of fun. She loved laughing and telling jokes, she could talk (and talk) to anyone, and she was a great hostess.

  But my mother’s life was also filled with tragedy. She lost her son, Yuri David, and then she lost her husband, my father, George. And I just think it was too much for her. These two people left her life, and they left enormous holes in her heart. I don’t think she believed it was possible to fill them. She was so sad, and she turned to alcohol to deal with her feelings.

  And we all know the rest. For so long we, her friends and family, rallied behind her, but she didn’t believe in herself like we believed in her. I felt so helpless as I watched her sink further and further into her anger and grief. I also felt incredibly sad, angry, and confused. For so long I thought things might change, but eventually I accepted that they weren’t going to. She continued to decline, and toward the end of her life, I know many of us felt that she just wasn’t the person we knew and loved. I know it’s going to take me a while to make sense of what happened to her, as much as you can make sense of anything.

  People have told me that of the most difficult things to do after someone dies is to go through their belongings, but last night, I found some things that were actually very comforting, though I did feel a bit like a kid who was being really naughty by going through Mommy’s stuff, and that she might show up at any time and scream at me. Now that she’s gone, I can finally get to the good stuff, the stuff in the boxes on the top shelf that I need a chair to reach. This excavating is weird and it is sad, but I’m seeing and learning so many interesting things about who my mother was when she was not my mother, that I can’t help but be a little bit happy and even charmed.