White Dresses

by Mary Pflum Peterson

  My hands shaking, I reached over Piper, sprawled out on the changing table, and pulled the white linen gown off the hanger that I’d hung in the window the night before. The garment was just as breathtaking as I’d remembered. It was long—­extending more than three feet. It had the loveliest touches of lace down the front, at the hem, and on either wrist of the long, billowy sleeves. And it had the fairy dust of love and Ireland sprinkled throughout it. For more than seven years, the dress had hung in the closet, waiting for her. At last its time had come.

  Undoing the last of the little buttons lining the back of the dress, I gathered the inches and inches of material together into two hands and slipped it over Piper’s little head. Next came the hard part: turning her over onto her tummy so that I could close the same buttons I’d just unbuttoned. The buttons were so little, so delicate, so like my new daughter.

  Unlike the boys, Piper didn’t mind spending time on her tummy. She seemed to embrace the chance to look at the world from a new perspective.

  Then, turning her back over, it was time for the finale: the little bonnet trimmed in ribbon and lace that matched the rest of the dress.

  I couldn’t believe my luck. After three boys, I’d given birth to a baby girl. And every day when I awoke and turned from our bed to her, sleeping in her little bassinette beside me, I marveled at her beauty. She had the softest wisps of dirty-­blond peach fuzz on her head, yummy little toes, big brown eyes that reminded me of—­well, that reminded me so much of her.

  As I finished tying the ribbon on the bonnet, the tears fell down my cheeks.

  The snow-­white dress fit Piper to a T, making her look like something out of one of the JC Penney Christmas wish books I used to covet as a child—­like a perfect little baby doll, with porcelain skin and a little nub of a nose. There was only one problem with the moment.

  “What’s wrong?” asked my father. He’d flown in from Florida two nights before and, hearing me sniffling, had entered the living room, his white dress shirt untucked over his khakis and two mismatched little socks clutched in his hands. He’d been trying to dress the boys and had apparently stopped at their feet.

  “Does the dress not fit?” Dale Pflum asked.

  I shook my head, trying to will the tears to stop. But I failed miserably, and the tears fell harder.

  “Then what’s wrong, sweetheart?” he asked again, his voice growing concerned.

  I shook my head once more. “I miss Mom.”

  I’ve had many “love at first sight” moments when it comes to white dresses. But only one happened outside of the U.S. In November 2006 in County Cork, I fell in love with the white christening gown my daughter, Piper, would eventually wear for her baptism.

  At the time of the dress sighting, I was six months pregnant with my oldest son, Roman. I had been sent to Ireland to cover a story for Good Morning America and had managed to convince my obstetrician that, pregnant though I was, it was an assignment I couldn’t turn down. County Cork was where my grandmother’s ancestors had come from. Her grandfather—­my great-­great-­grandfather—­had farmed its soil before setting sail for New York in the late nineteenth century. With a baby growing inside of me, I wanted more than ever to become one with my roots. In the end, my doctor agreed, signing the note to Delta indicating it was safe for me to fly.

  It was a wonderful journey, full of traipses through lush green fields, boat tours that boasted stunning views of picturesque towns, and that fateful meeting with The White Dress. I spied it on the second-­to-­last day of my journey, situated behind a store window not far from where the crew and I were scarfing down a hurried lunch. The ensemble was elegant and timeless—­something that my great-­great-­grandmother might have worn a century before, and something that my great-­great-­granddaughter could easily wear a century from now. I was in love.

  As was the case with all of my pregnancies, I had elected not to find out whether I was carrying a boy or a girl, so I was in the “gender dark” on that day in 2006. If the baby I was carrying turned out to be a boy, I knew I would likely dress him in something more masculine on the day of his christening. But if the baby I was carrying was a girl or if I eventually birthed a girl, well then, this was the dress.

  The family gown I’d been baptized in as a newborn—­the one my father had worn before me, and his mother before him, and my great-­grandmother before her—­had been retired in the late 1990s after one of my cousins had elected to mount and frame it as part of a 4-­H project that won her a blue ribbon at the county fair in my father’s Indiana hometown. It was time for me to start a new tradition, and this dress was it.

  As it turns out, the dress would go unworn for six years. When Roman turned out to be a boy, I dressed him on the morning of his baptism—­and later his younger brothers, Creedence and ­Augie—­in a little white linen suit and matching hat that made him look like a Pillsbury Doughboy. The dress—­the dress—­would wait. It would wait for Piper Anne Peterson, who made her debut on February 10, 2012.

  My mother’s passing had happened some eighteen months before the christening. And in that time, the gaping, gushing wound that her death created had, bit by bit, begun to heal. But when I saw Piper in that dress for the first time, the fragile scab fell away—­and the sore called Grief bled anew. For a moment, it was as if my mother had died all over again.

  After the call came from the hospital announcing my mother’s death, I sat with Dean at the kitchen table, wondering what to do. I had never planned a funeral before. But most ­people haven’t until death comes knocking.

  My first shell-­shocked call that night was to my brother. I tried once, twice, three times. He didn’t answer. I tried to call my former sister-­in-­law, who had divorced him just a few months prior. She said she’d keep trying him at the budget motel he’d moved into. Then I called my mother’s sister Kathy and my uncle Al. Both seemed a strange combination of stunned, yet not entirely surprised, before telling me they’d call their other siblings. Finally came the call to my father. When he answered, I heard the familiar music in the background, loud with a techno beat. He was at a bar. I’d heard similar music when, in my single days, I’d accompanied him on his outings with his friends. I heard the voices around him. They were laughing.

  “It’s Mom,” I said.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “She died,” I said.

  “She what?” he asked, straining to make his voice heard over the music.

  “She’s DEAD!” I yelled, the tears spilling down my cheeks.

  “Hang on,” he told me. “I’m going to have to call you back.”

  In the moments after his abrupt hang-­up, I imagined my father sharing the news with those around him—­his friends, many of whom, like him, had married women before coming out of the closet. Many had left their wives—­and any children and remnants of their straight lives—­forever. My father was among just a handful in his group of newfound BFFs who maintained any ties with former wives and children. Would they be empathetic? Or think that my mother’s death should be viewed as a source of relief for him?

  My father would eventually call me back, but later admitted he remembered little of the night or of our conversations, including his offer to help me and Dean with the funeral arrangements. When it came to that, we were very much on our own.

  All deaths are hard. But sudden deaths are especially so. And sudden avoidable deaths are perhaps the worst of all.

  It turns out that my mother had been admitted to the hospital on the day of her death because, upon arriving at work that morning, she hadn’t felt well. She’d had some shortness of breath and dizziness. And my mother being my mother, she didn’t want to worry anyone. So rather than ask anyone from her school to call an ambulance, or to come with her, and rather than call me or Al or any friends from church, she’d driven herself the seventy minutes back to Beaver Dam to see a local doc
tor filling in for her regular physician, who eventually suggested she go to the hospital for what he described as “routine tests.”

  “Why would I want to worry you?” I would later imagine her asking, had she lived to phone me. “You had work and you had the kids to look after. I can take care of myself.”

  At Beaver Dam Community Hospital, the only hospital in town, she’d been left unattended in her room after the tests—­even though she’d told the nurse that she was dizzy and even though she had a history of falls owing to her bad knees. The rooms had recently been redone with shiny new faux wooden floorboards that were slippery when dry. They were part of some grand hospital redesign, I would later be told, that a new hospital administrator had worked tirelessly for the better part of two years to complete.

  My mother didn’t like hardwood floors. Any hard floors bothered her. She preferred carpeting—­owing, I suppose, to all those hard floors at the convent that she’d spent hours shining and waxing and kneeling upon.

  “Carpeting,” she murmured with a roll of the eyes when she saw the hardwood floors in our Manhattan apartment, “is underrated. Give me a thick rug over the most expensive hardwood floors any day.”

  But my mother’s anti-­hardwood opinion mattered little to the Beaver Dam Community Hospital staff, particularly on the evening of December 15. It was shift change when the nurse finally brought her back to her room after her tests, and the countdown to Christmas was on. The nurse who was supposed to be minding my mother, I was later told, left. And a new nurse was slated to come on duty. But until she did, my mother was alone. Consequently, no nurse was there to catch her fall—­or to even hear the fall. Records indicate that twenty minutes—­maybe more—­elapsed between the time my mother was left alone and when she was discovered in the room unconscious and bleeding on the floor—­her glasses broken and her face badly bruised from the force of her head hitting the unforgiving floorboards.

  By the time the mousy-­voiced nurse called me two hours later, my mother was dead, and staffers were telling me she’d died from “unknown” complications. They’d failed to transfer her to the ICU until it was too late. They’d failed to call me when she did finally reach the unit. They’d failed to track down her emergency contact numbers. And when they eventually did call, after she’d already died, they failed to tell me she’d suffered a fall that had left her unconscious and bleeding. They told me only that she’d “expired,” describing her passing the same way the DMV described my old driver’s license—­something in need of renewing.

  Small-­town hospitals forget that small-­town funeral homes often have relationships with bereaved family members. So when Todd Michael, the young funeral director with whom I used to ride the school bus home, called to talk to me about my mother a few hours after her death, he gently pushed me to learn more about the nature of her death.

  “What did she die from? Did they tell you, Mary?” His tone was kind, tentative, concerned.

  “I—­I don’t know. They were vague.”

  Todd paused.

  “Did they tell you about the cut? The broken glasses?”

  “The what?”

  I held Augie in my arms. It was early in the morning—­four or five o’clock. It was dark. He was nursing while I cupped the phone to my ear. Dean and I had tried to get some sleep after making our round of calls to family members but had managed to doze for little more than an hour.

  “Your mother was so nice. She always used to stop in to see me when I was doing yard work in front of the funeral home,” Todd said. “She deserved better than this. Mary, I’m so sorry. Did they bother to tell you why your mother died with a black eye? With your permission, we need to call the medical examiner. You need a full autopsy.”

  And so—­while I juggled the tasks of penning an obituary, calling her friends, sorting through that horrible suffocating grief—­we began the task of launching an investigation into my mother’s cause of death.

  Dean held my hand through all of it. It’s often said that ­couples grow stronger—­or discover their fissures and flaws—­in the wake of death. I was fortunate in that we grew immeasurably tighter, operating in the aftermath of my mother’s death more as a single, unified unit than we ever had before.

  Together, we searched for the priests I knew my mother would want to give her a final send-­off. In the years since my parents’ divorce, my mother’s relationship with the church had grown increasingly complicated. She continued to love the sacraments and the idea of the church. She attended Mass on a near-­daily basis. But more and more, she questioned and frowned upon—­even openly disliked—­the words and attitudes of priests. The old fire-­and-­brimstone variety rankled her. And those who were too young and judgmental—­too absolute in their beliefs, who didn’t recognize the gray in the world—­bothered her as well.

  She preferred priests who were kind and wise and aware that most of the world isn’t painted in shades of black and white.

  Among her favorite priests during her later years was a pair of brothers, sons of her longtime friend Mary Bergin from Beaver Dam. Unlike other Beaver Dam natives, Mary Bergin never turned her back on my mother in the wake of her very public divorce. Her sons, Father Jim and Father John, were, like their mother, intelligent and kind. And when I tracked them down in Iowa and Boston, respectively, I was relieved that they would say the funeral Mass together.

  Putting on my producer hat in planning my mother’s funeral helped me immeasurably as I dealt with the pain and shock that is grief. The tears came frequently but fell at a more controlled rate when I was able to view the funeral as a production—­and my mother and her memory the star of the show I was helming. At every turn, I asked, What would Anne want? What would make Anne happy? The happiness that had eluded her in so many facets of her life had been beyond my control. But her final send-­off? That was within my control.

  Mom loved word games. So we prepared a crossword puzzle honoring her life for her funeral dinner. Among the queries: Seven across: Name Anne’s favorite singer-­songwriter (Answer: John Denver); Nine down: Name Anne’s childhood home (Answer: the Pine Patch).

  Anne worshiped Indiana cooking and pies. To satisfy those loves, we arranged to serve at the funeral dinner a dozen Wick’s Sugar Cream Pies—­a staple of Indiana potluck dinners.

  And she’d long talked about her desire to be buried with Kermit the Frog—­the embodiment, she’d always said, of a kind soul who forever tried his best even when the deck of life was stacked against him and even though he didn’t always succeed. I made certain that the first of the items that the superintendent of my mother’s school district collected from my mother’s classroom to bring to the funeral home for us was her beloved Kermit the Frog stuffed animal, which she’d loved sharing with her young students. The smiling green creature was ultimately placed on the pillow of her casket, beside her head.

  But there were things that proved more difficult to find than a beloved stuffed animal. Perhaps the hardest task I faced came when Todd Michael asked what we wanted my mother to wear for her burial. I looked at Dean as Todd asked the question and dissolved into a heap of tears.

  “We’ll figure it out,” Dean told me, hugging me to him.

  “But her clothes—­her clothes—­”

  I cried harder, unable to finish my sentence. My mother had purchased some nice dresses in her final years—­notably the dress she wore to my wedding. The dress complemented her figure. And more importantly, it made her feel good about herself.

  But the dress had been left to corrode in that monstrosity of a house.

  I shuddered to think of the kind of damage a few years’ worth of mold and dust and moths and mouse droppings had done to the fabric. If my mother was to look nice in that open casket she’d always wanted, I needed to find something new for her to wear.

  There are many reasons I will always love my best friend from childhood,
Kim. But I will never love her more for any one thing than for taking me to find a new dress for my mother to be buried in. It was no easy task. My mother at the end of her life took comfort in few things other than food—­and so had ballooned to a size 20 in the wake of mushrooming depression. The size posed a challenge. Beaver Dam had no stores that offered dressy clothing in plus sizes. And even nearby Madison—­a forty-­mile drive—­offered spotty selections. Our best bet, Kim told me, was to journey to Baraboo, Wisconsin, home to what was considered the best plus-­sized dress shop in all of southeastern Wisconsin. It’s where my mother had found the dress for my wedding. And it’s where we hoped we would find her final dress.

  For more than ninety minutes, Kim gamely drove us through dark, winding roadways and a freezing rainstorm to find the store, with Baby Augie tucked into his car seat in the back. Upon reaching the store, the three of us—­Kim and I standing and Baby Augie in his stroller—­found It, sandwiched in the middle of a rack crammed full of hundreds of dresses: a lovely periwinkle-­blue dress that hung in elegant folds and had a simple sophistication to it.

  “That’s the one,” Kim and I said, nodding in unison. My mother, we knew, would have approved. She would have clapped her hands and then patted each of us on the back.

  The preliminary findings of the medical examiner suggested that Beaver Dam Community Hospital made a number of errors in the hours leading up to my mother’s death, not the least of which was leaving a woman with a history of bad falls unattended. But the official cause of her death issued by the county was pulmonary embolism. I hated that hospital and I hated the nurses who had abandoned my mother in her time of need.

  And just as I hated that hospital, I hated my mother’s house. It had swallowed her whole in her final years of life, sucking from her most of the energy she had left. I wanted to take a sledgehammer to it—­raze it to the ground. My way of dealing with the house was to steer clear of it entirely the week of the funeral. I avoided it like the plague, pretending it didn’t exist. We set up temporary residence at the AmericInn Hotel, where we had stayed during our last visit to Beaver Dam. When we weren’t there, we were at the funeral home. Or at the church. Or at the florist’s. Anywhere but the house. I couldn’t bring myself to go near the dwelling that, in my eyes, was draped in my mother’s blood. I needed to focus on the funeral.