Exit Laughing

by Victoria Zackheim

  The gold-bedecked undertaker did not appreciate the levity and left the room to recover from the inappropriate witticisms of a bunch of Irish sons who had no respect for undertakers or for death itself. My brother Alphie, usually the quiet one—thus dubbed chatterbox by the ironic mother—remarked, “There goes a man well experienced in extreme unctuousness,” a pun that sent us into the heights of hilarity, the state that happens only at times of sorrow.

  Angela was cremated without ceremony and her ashes returned to us in what appeared to be the kind of can that is used to contain peas. Whilst bringing her ashes to Ireland, the aeroplane sprung a leak in one of the doors. The high-pitched piercing whistle from that leak was deafening, and to calm the frightened passengers I asked if anyone would like to meet my mother. Some said yes and I produced the can, holding up her ashes and announcing, “Here she is!” For some reason, people on planes that have to return to aeroports because of trouble do not want to meet dead people in flight, so introducing them to my mother was a social failure.

  We did eventually get to Ireland and put Angela’s ashes in her old family graveyard. We had to sneak them in, due to the graveyard being part of a tenth-century abbey, which is now a preserved national monument; no more burials are allowed. As we stood there, this family of McCourts, we did laugh a lot, and we did sing first of all the songs that Angela disliked, as we felt she might pull a phoenix act and arise from the ashes and tell us to shut up, and then we sang the songs she liked, including “Will Ye Go, Lassie, Go,” and she went.

  And that was end of Angela McCourt on this planet.

  THE LAST LAUGH

  —Jacquelyn Mitchard —

  In the middle of spring, in what should have been the middle of his life, my husband died, leaving me and three young sons, as well as a teen daughter from a previous marriage. Nothing about this was good.

  Although all the morphine that hospice could give finally was unable to quell the pain so that Dan could sleep or even talk with his siblings or the children, he did not long for “peace.” The end was preferable only in that there is no fighting colon cancer once it digs in its talons. We lived then in Madison, Wisconsin, and at his memorial, when people told six-year-old Danny that his father was in “a better place,” Danny explained that Dan really preferred Dane County to heaven.

  As memorial services go, it was a good one. Although his sister was enraged that we didn’t opt for a Catholic mass (for Dan hated standard-issue Catholicism with all the passion of a former altar boy), one of the privileges of widowhood (along with no longer having to send Christmas cards) is not giving a big damn what other people think. All Dan’s friends came, and all his enemies came, too. As a crusading political reporter, Dan took the journalistic adjuration about afflicting the comfortable utterly seriously; but even the immensely popular Republican governor paid a visit, later telling me that he and Dan had their differences but that Dan always fought fair, and cherishing family was something on which they agreed. The big Frank Lloyd Wright meetinghouse was filled with the music Dan had loved—and music was his passion—from “God Only Knows” to “Ashokan Farewell.”

  And then, because Dan never did anything according to standard procedure, after the funeral, his best friends—among them Michael and Mad Dog (I didn’t know Mad Dog’s real name until twenty years later)—hosted his wake. There were fireworks. There were lots of fireworks, and staid neighbors who might have been apt to complain came instead to join the fun. I had my first two or six shots of whiskey (and I was nearly forty years old!) and promptly got outrageously sick. I can remember my brother telling me that if anyone could see me, they would be appalled by my throwing up like a dog eating grass. However, not then or now have I had a stomach for liquor. I went home early with my brother, my father, and the boys, who were only four, six, and ten, to put off for one more day facing the Big Question: how I was going to support the kids. All the life insurance Dan had amounted to a 1993 year’s salary for a small-town newspaper editor.

  So I wasn’t there for the gigantic thunderstorm that rolled in late. I didn’t hear the story of what happened to four of Dan’s closest friends until much later. When I heard, I could not stop laughing—and again, I didn’t care who knew it. At first, I felt pretty invulnerable, as fools will.

  The earliest five or six months for a widow (not a widower) are pretty great. Families offer to make room at picnics and fishing excursions for your kids. And then, although men raising kids as an only parent continue to receive the sweetest strokes and comeliest casseroles, an odd-woman-out becomes something of a burden and even something of a threat. Friends drifted away, some with no explanation, some just confessing that they didn’t know what to do for me.

  One Friday night, when I called my friend Laurie to ask if she and her three kids could get together with us, she gave me what obviously had been the piece of her mind she’d been holding back. “We have husbands and families, Jackie,” she said. “We can’t drop everything and do something with you anymore.” I was heartbroken, and my relationship with Laurie never was the same, but I got it. The circus of Dan’s early, fast, and horrific death had moved on. My friendships now would be fewer, much fewer, because not only the couple friends but the single friends would fade away, one sort of afraid of the contagion, one a little miffed that my posse had to go wherever I went.

  But this recognition was far in the future, and I still believed that people loved me not only for myself but for my sufferings.

  After Dan’s wake, the house party was rained indoors, but three of Dan’s closest friends from town, along with another from out of town, decided to go up to the roof of the Mendota Mental Health Institute—the place in the State of Wisconsin where the severely mentally ill live, sometimes all their lives. Ed Gein, whose affection for his mother inspired Robert Bloch’s novel Psycho, had died not long before at Mendota. Ed’s favorite part of his week were the Thursday night mixers, because Ed, murderer of at least two women besides his mother, did like the ladies. Dan’s good friend, Ken, was a psychiatrist and the administrator of Mendota.

  There was a covered area on the roof, and Ken led three other friends up there to watch the lightning over one of Madison’s three city lakes. They talked about old times and how much Dan would have loved the thunderstorm. As news channels screamed for families to take cover in tornadoes, he was always outside with his old camera, hoping to capture a real twister on film. That night, the storm was more sound than real fury, and after an hour or so, the friends made their way down. Dan’s best friend, Rob, had to go back to New York the following morning, and the others had pressing business as well.

  When they strolled up to the gate, flanked by ten-foot fences with electrified razor wire on top, the night watchman asked pleasantly, “And where are you gentlemen headed?”

  Later, Ken would wonder if the storm had interrupted the electrical current, but the man’s manner was polite and calm. Similarly politely and calmly, Ken reached into his jeans pocket for his ID. But he’d left it in the car. Reasonably, Ken explained that he’d just been to a great friend’s funeral and now he needed to go home. He added that he was the medical director of Mendota. Why the man on duty at midnight should have believed this was anyone’s guess, but Ken was still surprised when the gatekeeper said, “You are, huh?”

  “He is!” spoke up Dan’s closest friend from work. “And I’m the editor of the newspaper!”

  Rick added, “I’m the Dane County executive!”

  And not to be outdone, Rob said, “I’m a columnist for the New York Times!”

  “You are, huh?” repeated the watchman, who had by then summoned several others.

  No one could stop laughing—they realized how absurd they sounded—until the guard offered to escort them back inside, nice and friendly-like. Ken protested, spluttering. But spluttering is what a delusional person does best, and it was a good two hours before Ken could give his keys to someone who fetched his wallet with its ID, and until all the others�
�� IDs were verified, and double-verified, with calls to the police, the executive editor of the local paper, and the New York Times, where the guy on the desk at first had no idea who Rob was.

  When they finally left, in the wee hours of a cold spring morning, Rob, the most fanciful and sentimental of the group said, “Dan gave us all a lot of laughs. That was his last laugh on us.”

  They all agreed. It was just the kind of story Dan would have loved to hear.

  They hoped he had.

  UP HERE

  — Amy Ferris —

  She must have a window seat. This, she promises, is her last phone call for the night, reminding me one more time, “It must be a window seat.” I tell her, “I will do my best. The plane seems awfully full, and since it’s a last-minute booking, it might be hard.”

  “If I tell you I want a window seat, get me a window seat.”

  Click.

  This phone exchange was not long after she had been diagnosed with moderate-stage dementia. She had some scary moments—unsettling, jarring, completely-out-of-left-field confusing moments. While visiting for a long weekend, my husband, Ken, and I found her curled up in a ball, naked on the floor in her bedroom in Florida. She had absolutely no recollection of how she landed there. When I shook her from her sound sleep, she smiled and told me I looked a lot taller than she remembered. “Ma, you’re on the floor.”

  “Oh. It feels comfy though; you sure it’s the floor?”

  There were the middle-of-the-night phone calls when she thought it was the middle of the day; there were the panicked phone calls about her bank account. She had stopped balancing her checkbook, and believed she was being “robbed.” And then there were the phone calls wondering why my dad hadn’t returned from the bagel place when, in fact, my father had died a few years earlier.

  She was becoming much more agitated, much more impatient, and much less vain. Bathing became a chore for her. Losing her keys became second nature. Burning toast was a daily routine.

  A bat mitzvah in Scarsdale, New York, galvanized her into major travel frenzy. She wanted desperately to go. A spur-of-the-minute decision, literally.

  “I have to go. I have to see Gertie. I have to go.”

  Gertie was her older sister. Theirs was a relationship not dissimilar to Palestine and Israel.

  “I have to go. Don’t tell me I’m not going.” The thing about my mom was she was as stubborn as the day was long. God’s honest truth, sometimes it was really hard to tell if it was the dementia or my mother just being herself.

  “Ma, I don’t think it’s a good idea, you traveling by yourself.”

  “Oh, really? Fine. I’ll drive to Gert’s,” she proposed after she had rammed her car into a fire hydrant—a glaring sign that she should never be behind the wheel, ever again—a few weeks earlier. “It came out of nowhere,” she said. “One minute I was sitting there, minding my own business, and the next minute, there it was, crossing the street.”

  What do you say? Really? “Ma, it can’t walk. A fire hydrant doesn’t walk.”

  Unfortunately, having her car keys taken away from her required more than just a sit-down—removing them from her grip required the jaws-of-life. It is, I learned, the last bit of true freedom and independence, and it is never given up without a fight.

  I worked it out so a car service (a very kind man who lived a few doors down from her) would come and pick her up, drop her off at the JetBlue terminal, and make sure there were no seen or unforeseen problems. I paid the guy to wait an extra half hour. I called the airline and spoke with a reservation agent, who had just the right combination of humor and sympathy and could not have been any more cordial or kind. She promised that they would do whatever they could to accommodate my mom, but she needed to remind me that the plane was, in fact, full, and hopefully someone would be able to move, since there was not a window seat available. I asked her if there was a “companion” person—a representative—who could help my mom get settled, help her with her boarding pass, and handle the other unexpected frustrations that might arise.

  “Yes,” she said, “someone will help your mom.” I hoped and prayed for my mother to come face-to-face with kindness. I thought of all the times I gave up a window seat for an elderly person, or a pregnant woman, or a wife who wanted to sit next to her husband. I was hopeful.

  Standing outside her condo with a massive suitcase and an overnight bag, having packed enough clothing for an entire month or lifetime, whichever came first, she was picked up at the designated time. “Maybe I’ll stay for a few extra weeks,” she had told me the night before, when she listed all the clothing she was bringing. I heard in her voice something I had never heard before: loneliness.

  She got to the JetBlue terminal and checked her suitcase outside with baggage claim, and (the neighbor/car service driver told me) handed a crisp ten-dollar bill to the bag handler, telling him he was a lovely, lovely kind man. He deeply appreciated her gesture. Little did he know that the remaining ten or so crisp ten- and twenty-dollar bills that she had tucked ever so neatly into her wallet would make their way to others who smiled, offered a hand, let her get ahead in line, and helped her with her carry-on.

  She made her way up to the counter, where a ticket should be waiting for her. Yes, the agent told her, there was a ticket, but she must go to the gate in order to get a window seat.

  She went through the whole security scene, and I am told by the neighbor/car service guy about the taking off of her shoes, the removing of her belt, the telling of a joke or two about her hip replacement after she in fact set off the security alarm and how the sound once reminded her of the old days in Las Vegas when someone won at the slots, and it was a sound filled with “good wishes.”

  “No more,” she said loudly, as if telling it to every single person on the security line. “It’s a phony sound. It has no heart. Gimme back my shoes.”

  The neighbor/car service guy could not go any farther with my mom. The rules. The companion person from JetBlue now met her, thankfully.

  There was no window seat available. She had an aisle seat. No one wanted to give up a seat.

  This is where I get to relive the whole crazy scenario as it was repeated to me, beat by beat, blow by excruciating blow. My mother threw a shit storm of a nut-dance, flung a racial slur at the African American flight attendant, and then, if that weren’t enough, caused another passenger who was somewhat overweight to break down and cry. “You know how fat you are? You have your own zip code.”

  She was escorted off the plane, and somehow managed to get back to her condo by renting a car, even though she had an expired license. I would just love to meet the Avis rental person who gave my mom a red Mustang to tool around in.

  She called me in absolute hyper-hysterics. She wanted me to fire every single one of those nasty, bitchy flight attendants, and pilots, and the copilot—he was as much to blame. And where was her luggage, her fucking luggage? “I bet they stole it. They stole it and you should fire them, the whole lot of them. Now. I want you to fire them now.”

  “Okay, Ma. I’m gonna fire them now.”

  I found out from another very cordial and patient JetBlue rep that her luggage was on its way to New York. I was in Los Angeles on business; my brother was at a birthday celebration on Long Island. Neither one of us had expected this hailstorm. I tried to deal with the airport bureaucracy and arranged for my mom’s luggage to make its way to Fort Lauderdale within forty-eight hours, barring no glitches.

  The administrator on the phone told me it was like an unstoppable chaotic ruckus, a tornado, a whirlwind. “Your mother is old and frail and disruptive.”

  Holy shit.

  I felt sad. I felt horribly sad and, dare I say, embarrassed, wholly, deeply, immensely embarrassed, because this old frail woman is, in fact, my mom.

  “While we really appreciate your business, we must inform you that your mother, Beatrice, will no longer be able to fly with us.”

  This did not surprise me. I told t
he JetBlue representative that my mom has the beginning stages of dementia. It comes and goes, but mostly it’s coming these days. I gave her all the broad strokes—my dad died, she’s living alone, we know, we know, it’s time to get her settled, she’s stubborn, she’s independent, and there’s the whole question of what to do now. Move her, or does she stay? And she’s always been much more strident and righteous and defiant. Not going gently into the good night.

  For the record, every single JetBlue employee I spoke to knew exactly what happened on that plane. They not only knew all about my mother’s tantrum but, just like the game telephone, each and every time I spoke with someone new there seemed to be an added bit of shocking information. I was waiting for someone to tell me she stormed the cockpit, demanding to fly the plane to New York. I can only imagine the watercooler conversation about the crazy woman and the window seat.

  My mother refused to speak to anyone. She felt duped and lied to and thought that the fat girl should have gotten up. “My God, she took up two goddamn seats.” And then she said, “I always, always have to sit at the window.” “Why,” I asked her, “why?”

  “Fuck you,” she hung up on me.

  Trying to calm my mother down was near impossible. And just like the JetBlue employees, my mother’s version of the story became more and more exaggerated and embellished each and every time she told it—repeated it, shared it. By the time I spoke with my cousin Carol, my mother was claiming she was strip-searched and held prisoner in a room, naked … without a television.