White Dresses

by Mary Pflum Peterson

  The funeral home the night of the wake was packed with ­mourners, many of whom waited outside in the frigid temperatures for more than thirty minutes to pay their final respects. I stood beside her casket, dressed in a black nylon dress that buttoned at the side, shivering not only because it was so cold outside but also because of the shock of it all. Dean kept his hand planted securely around my waist the whole time. The warmth of both his hand and the mourners brought me comfort throughout the evening. There were teacher friends with whom she’d bonded over IEP reports and a shared desire to help young students—­sometimes against the wishes of frosty school administrators. There were old neighbors who told me they’d miss her car, her spirit, her wit. There were parents of young students who thanked me for her kindness and sobbed as they told me stories of her Herculean efforts to find ways for their speech-­impaired and autistic children to better communicate. There were the friends she’d made when she first moved to Beaver Dam, waitresses who faithfully waited on her at her favorite coffee shop, even local McDonald’s staffers who regaled me with stories about how my mother liked her coffee (hot!) and her pancakes (with extra pats of real butter!).

  “Your mother was so kind” was the most common refrain. “She always made you feel good. Always asked how you were.”

  And then there were her siblings. All five of Al and Aurelia Diener’s surviving children arrived in time for the wake—­from all corners of the nation. Aunt Mimi had come from Rochester, New York. Aunt Kathy and Uncle Mike both flew in from Colorado. Uncle Al drove up from Illinois. And Aunt Patty flew in from her post in Beverly Hills. They huddled together as a unit: Al and Aurelia’s flock, now minus one.

  Patty was perhaps the most stunned by my mother’s passing—­and by the line of ­people waiting to view my mother’s casket.

  “How did she know all of these ­people?” she repeatedly said aloud, more to herself than to anyone else, as she walked around the funeral home. “Where did these ­people come from? Don’t they have places to be? It’s a weeknight.”

  Her hair, once platinum blond, was now dyed red.

  She floated around the funeral home, peering curiously at my mother’s teacher friends, and huddled in tight circles with her siblings and one other curious funeral-­goer: my father.

  Dale Pflum arrived for my mother’s funeral anxious to find a role to play. He had divorced my mother more than twenty-­five years before, so could no longer be considered anything resembling a widower. Still, he seemed to long to carve out for himself at the funeral home a position as an integral member of the family. The night of the wake, he frequently came to stand alongside Dean and me at the casket, greeting mourners as a host might greet dinner party guests. I was one part exasperated and one part amazed. I shifted uncomfortably, watching community members warily look my father up and down, puzzled—­wondering whether to applaud him for coming to his ex-­wife’s side in the wake of her death, or to question his intentions. Many of my mother’s old friends knew my father was gay. Neighbors had long memories and had witnessed some of my father’s outbursts, lobbed squarely at my mother. Still, there stood Dale Pflum, holding court a few feet from her casket.

  “Doesn’t she look nice in that shade of periwinkle blue?” he asked mourners.

  “Did you get a chance to sign the guestbook?” he asked others who had made their way past the casket.

  “Thank you so much for coming,” he said in a folksy drawl that channeled his southern Indiana roots. “It means so much to all of us.”

  My father was oblivious to the silent stares.

  Still, it was clear he loved her. In his own way, he adored her. At times during that funeral week, I was pleasantly surprised by the level of respect and understanding my father had for my mother. It was never more evident than during our second night at the hotel. We were in the throes of funeral planning when he called me in my hotel room. “Mary Elizabeth, I can’t sleep. I have to tell you something. There’s a crucifix your mother had. I’m sure you knew nothing about it. It was a heavy pewter. It was—­ ”

  “From Father Vincent,” I said, finishing his sentence.

  “Your mother told you about it?” he asked, stunned.

  “Yes,” I said. “I didn’t know you knew.” I paused. “How important was he to her?”

  “Father Vincent meant the world to your mother,” my father said flatly. “She’d want to make sure to have his crucifix.” He sighed. “She’d want to be as close to him as possible.”

  Then he hung up.

  But other times during the funeral week, it wasn’t love and respect that my father displayed. Sometimes it seemed he was my mother’s sworn frenemy—­that person who purported to love her while talking about her behind her now-­dead back. One night, seated at a communal table in a hotel conference room we had overtaken for a family dinner, I listened, horrified, as my father regaled Aunt Patty with breathless disclosures about my parents’ sex life and her lack of hygiene.

  “You know, she didn’t like to bathe for days at a time, which posed a problem in the bedroom,” my father said.

  I sat directly across the table from him, sandwiched between two of my confused boys, my mouth agape.

  “How dare you!” I cried, fleeing the room in disgust, overcome by both tears and rage. If I couldn’t protect my mother in life, I was damn well going to do it in death. Only when Aunt Kathy reprimanded my father, the way a teacher might correct a sixth-­grade bully, did he bother to issue a faint apology.

  “I’m sorry, Mary, if you misunderstood our conversation about your mother,” my father later said, never meeting my eyes.

  But more concerning than my father during the funeral week was my brother. For my poor brother, our mother’s passing was one more devastating blow in the course of a soul-­crushing year. In just twelve months, he’d faced divorce, repeated rejections for employment, the loss of a house—­and now the death of our mother, his one constant champion.

  My brother had never been much of a talker, but throughout the funeral week, his reticence took on a life of its own. One family friend described Anthony as ghostlike throughout the proceedings—­present only for glimpses at a time before vanishing. At the wake, he opted not to stand at the casket. Instead, he hovered in the funeral home’s kitchen, wearing a short-­sleeved shirt instead of a suit. He shied away from the attention of family and friends, seeking out only a few for handshakes and hugs. If he clung to anyone that week, it was his children, but even from them, he kept a certain distance. While the rest of the family set up camp at the hotel, my brother sought refuge at my mother’s house. He embraced the place I shunned. The smell, he said, was bothersome, and the mess was a challenge. But he wanted to be home, he said, in our home, our childhood home, away from the prying eyes of family members, whom he felt he only vaguely knew.

  It made sense to me. If my mother’s spirit was present anywhere, I knew it would be in her house. And just as my mother had long sought comfort in its four walls, so too would my brother use the house as a protective armor now. My mother would watch over him in spirit, and the house—­that big, messy house—­would protect him in body.

  As the countdown to the actual funeral continued, the reality of losing my mother hit me in dribs and drabs—­sometimes with the force of a semitrailer that rendered me unable to breathe.

  One night just before the funeral, I woke Dean in our hotel bed, breathless. “I’m thirty-­seven,” I whispered, my head on his chest. I could feel my heart beating rapidly. I struggled to breathe as the panic took over. I looked at the Pack ’n Play cribs scattered throughout the hotel room. One held a snoring Roman. One held a sleeping Creedence. Augie slept in the swing we’d transported from New York in our rental car. I didn’t want to wake any of them. But the fear—­the agonizing terror—­inside was too great to keep within.

  “What if—­?” I began to ask Dean.

  I stopped
midsentence and began to cry.

  “What if what?” Dean whispered, pulling me closer.

  “What if I live to be a hundred?”

  Dean paused, rubbing his eyes. “I don’t understand. What if you live to be a hundred? Wouldn’t that be a good thing?”

  I shook my head and began to sob quietly, struggling to muffle the moans with a pillow so that I wouldn’t wake the kids.

  “If I live to be a hundred,” I said, shaking my head once more, “that would mean I would live more than half my life without her. I don’t think I can do that. I don’t know how I’m going to get through even two weeks without her.”

  Dean stroked my hair then, trying to provide what comfort he could. But there was only so much he could do. Without my mother—­my moral compass—­the world was darker, colder, and unspeakably scary.

  The day of the funeral was a long, sad blur. I entered the back of St. Peter’s, where I’d received my First Communion in that white dress all those years ago, half expecting to see my mother looking at her watch, telling me we needed to find a pew before Mass started—­or else.

  There were two eulogies given that day—­one by the superintendent of my mother’s school and one by me.

  I told mourners of the Wonder Woman who was my mother: the one who angelically swaddled and rocked my infant son to sleep when I was overwhelmed by new motherhood, the one who courageously and selflessly raised my brother and me alone after a humiliating and debilitating divorce.

  The words of my mother, the former nun who once coached both speech and debate, rang in my ears the entire time I stood at the lectern: Keep your chin up. Keep your hair—­that hair that needs to be cut!—­out of your face. Keep your shoulders back. Above all, keep that voice low—­and your pace slow.

  I faltered only once. My breakdown, thankfully, came at the end of the eulogy as I read:

  “I miss you, Mom. And I still need you. So much. You went too soon and there won’t be a day that goes by now that I won’t think of you and miss you and long to pick up the phone to call and tell you something. But I thank you for being such a wonderful soul—­an angel on earth. And I count myself the luckiest woman alive to have called you my mom.”

  After the funeral dinner—­after the word games and sugar cream pies and presentation of videos honoring Anne—­my mother’s brothers and sisters wanted to gather at my mother’s house. “Do you want to come?” they asked.

  I silently shook my head. Perhaps they wanted to gather so they could grieve as a group. But they could have achieved that at the hotel or at a local restaurant. No, if they were headed to the house, it seemed they wanted to take in the scene of the crime as a collective unit. They wanted to see the hoarding. Why else would they go to a drafty, smelly house overrun with junk? My stomach turned at the idea of all of them struggling to step over the piles of stuff, straining to breathe the putrid air.

  “Why didn’t they all want to come to the house when she was alive?” I asked Dean, crying, as we took our places inside our frozen rental car. “I know they love her, but why didn’t they come and visit when I was growing up? I would have killed for their company then. Killed for their help. If they care so much about the house now when she’s dead, why didn’t they care to see the house when she was alive?”

  Dean shook his head.

  “I don’t know. Morbid curiosity, I guess. Even ­people closest to her have it.”

  I buried my head in the shoulder of his navy-­blue peacoat, the same one he’d worn on our first date. Dean held me while I cried. My mother was gone. But she’d seen me find the love of my life, the man she’d never managed to find.

  While my mother’s siblings toured the house, Dean took the kids and me on a drive around Beaver Dam. The motion was precisely what the children needed to fall asleep after a long day of funeral proceedings. And the drive was what I needed to momentarily clear my head. Dean drove us out into the countryside surrounding Beaver Dam. We drove past Trenton, the elementary school that I’d attended. Situated deep in the country, it had sheltered me from my parents’ personal problems and had been the place in which I’d fallen madly and passionately in love with reading and writing.

  Snow covered the entire countryside. It had fallen early and hard that year—­giving Mother Nature a clean white dress for my mother’s funeral. And a white dress would cover my mother’s casket when we buried her later in the week.

  Figuring out where to bury my mother was no easy task. She’d lived in Beaver Dam for three and a half decades, yet her heart had never made the trek from Indiana. She’d never felt at home in Wisconsin. She liked many of the ­people—­especially her teacher friends. But she’d never felt as if she belonged. I couldn’t bury her there. Besides, I didn’t want her to be alone, buried next to no one she knew and with none of her family members close by to bring flowers to her grave.

  My father briefly tossed out the idea of burying her in Connersville, where he grew up. But Connersville was my father’s home, not hers.

  No, she needed to go home to Dunkirk. Fortunately, a plot was available in the cemetery where my mother’s beloved parents, Al and Aurelia, were buried. Better yet, the available plot was situated beside my mother’s father. In death, at last, she would have her daddy’s undivided attention.

  Our rental car pulled into Dunkirk on the morning of the twenty-­fourth of December, Christmas Eve. I had not been back since my grandmother’s memorial ser­vice a decade before. Not much had changed since. Now, as then, the town remained small. Tired.

  The community that had bustled when my mother was a girl and when her father had helped run the glass factory had slowed to a crawl in the eighties and nineties. Portions of the downtown were now boarded up, and many homes featured the telltale signs of a depressed economy: cars parked on front lawns, siding falling off houses. Faring better was St. Mary’s, where my mother had made her First Communion. It remained a sweet little church, neat and warm and cozy. And then there was the Pine Patch. It still looked lovely, under the care of its new owners and their young children. Many of the trees had been trimmed—­some had been removed. But it remained beautiful.

  Father Bates, the priest who had married my parents all those years ago, was on hand to greet me at the cemetery, located just outside of the town, as we pulled in.

  “Mary, so good to see you,” he said, wrapping his gloved hands around my winter coat. It was a frigid day.

  I’d reluctantly asked Father Bates to say the final blessing for my mother before she was lowered into the frozen ground. It was my father’s idea. And since I didn’t know any other priests in the area—­and the Bergin boys couldn’t make the trek to Indiana—­I agreed. Now old and frail, Father Bates walked with a cane. He had retired not long ago. Would my mother have smiled at the idea of his presence at her burial? Or would she have cringed—­noting that it was he who had introduced and married my parents and ushered her into another painful chapter in her life? I prayed that she would have smiled good-­naturedly, arguing “the more the merrier” for her final send-­off.

  Noticeably absent from the cemetery when Dean and I arrived with the boys was my brother. No one had heard from him that morning, and no one knew where he was. Was he still in Wisconsin? Had he stopped in a hotel the night before?

  Reaching into my purse, I fumbled with the cell phone and made the call. He didn’t answer the first time. Or the second time. But the third time I hit the send button to call, he said, “Hello.”

  His voice was hollow. “I’m lost,” he said. And I knew he meant it in more ways than one.

  I guided him to the cemetery entrance with verbal directions as best I could. But when he arrived, driving his old minivan that used to take his kids to soccer practice, he looked no more found than when he was driving around Dunkirk. The reality of my mother’s passing appeared to be hitting him—­and on Christmas Eve, no less.

&nbs
p; The burial was relatively quick. Fighting back tears, I recited the lyrics to my mother’s favorite song, “Back Home Again in Indiana.” They were more than appropriate for the occasion, as it was a long-­awaited homecoming for her and a reunion with the place she’d been happiest, particularly when her parents were still alive.

  Back home again in Indiana,

  And it seems that I can see

  The gleaming candlelight, still shining bright,

  Through the sycamores for me.

  We played the John Denver tune—­“Annie’s Song”—­which she had so adored and which had last been played for her at our wedding.

  And then came the time to say goodbye. I shook with disbelief as I stroked my mother’s coffin with a mittened hand. Snow covered the cemetery. A bouquet of pine branches and pinecones covered the casket. It would have been beautiful if it hadn’t been so sad.

  Dean wrapped his arm around me as I said my final prayers.

  But my brother had no one to wrap his arms around. His children had gone home with his now ex-­wife to Texas to spend the holidays with her new boyfriend. And while he had told me repeatedly that he was doing all right in the wake of our mother’s death, I could see by the slope of his shoulders as he pitched his head over his knees, studying the snow-­covered ground, that he was not faring as well as he’d said.

  I reached for my brother’s shoulder at the same time that my father’s first cousin David, a lifelong farmer who had made the drive from Milton, Indiana, did so.

  “It’s going to be okay,” David said to Anthony, his tone a sweet mixture of matter-­of-­factness and compassion. David had always been my mother’s favorite member of the extended Pflum family. While some other family members shifted uncomfortably in my mother’s presence in the wake of my parents’ divorce, David had done the opposite, making it a point to talk to my mother at family gatherings, to offer her an arm to help her in and out of cars or up and down stairs, even to ask her to dance.