My mental circus, inside and out.

The reason Alvie had told the story of his murderous mother, as I found out later, was that Maud had been the first person to whom he had ever revealed this traumatic event.   He now cathartically shared the memory with some 200 people at my mother's funeral without clarifying why, so that my brothers and sisters shuffled uncomfortably, thinking, "Where is this going? Why is this man telling us this?"

Then there was Paula, my mother's successor.  She kept repeating,  "Ruth Larabee.  Teacher, Colleague, Mentor," in between long, agency-specific details of my mother's working life.

Finally, my mother's partner Ed, sad and frail, leaning into the podium, unable to feel his lower legs because of nerve damage.  Without any seeming personal knowledge of my mother, lost in their strangely distant 20-year relationship, he had simply lifted a eulogy for Robert Kennedy, changing a few words that were obviously inapplicable.  The speech had thunderous words about inspiring a lost generation which seemed to make my mother into a marble statue of Columbia with a flag in her lap.  Later, Ed asked me how I liked his speech.  This made me intensely uncomfortable, for what could you say to the man, so forlorn and desperate looking.  "Nice, but you stole it"?  Or, "It would have been great if my mother had been named Robert F. Kennedy"? But no, I simply said, "It would have been nice to hear some personal stories about your relationship with my mother."  He seemed surprised by this.

 

Posted by: EmmaPele at December 21, 2005 22:35 | link | comments

The first person to speak in the atrium was the state treasurer, considered a Very Important Person among a slew of Very Important Local Persons who attended my mother's funeral.  She said that God had met my mother at heaven's doors and said, "I've been waiting for you."  After leaving the Church, my mother kept any spiritual beliefs private, so I don't know whether she would have appreciated the sentiment.

Then, a small, elderly, ruddy-faced man, one of the county commissioners, approached the podium, and began with what appeared to be a job performance review of my mother.  After losing his place among his papers, he suddenly began to talk abstractly about mental illness, finding his way into a frightening, intensely personal story about himself, how his mother had been crazy, and how, as a young boy,  he had come home to find her trying to drown his brother in the bathtub, and had fought with her to save him. 

Posted by: EmmaPele at December 21, 2005 18:57 | link | comments (1)

the funeral

Maud's funeral was an odd affair.  It took place in the atrium of the county courthouse across the street from her house, a big Victorian, 1/5 of which now belongs to me.  I slept there the night before. Or I should say I tried to sleep, but felt too haunted to sink into REM.  My sisters and I sat up for a while, at the old dining room table, talking about my mother, what she had left us, excited about the death benefit.   Jane had on a man's blue jacket with an embroidered patch: a flag with the slogan:  Free Country.  She kept bringing up her husband, Ray, the crazy fundamentalist who makes up his religion as he goes.  Always, he is her last word in anything, the font of all truth, no matter how madly constructed.  He was already deeply immersed in figuring out how to protect the death benefit  (all of $1500) from taxes, shooting off letters to the retirement system.  My other sister, Jackie, now occupying the house, was struggling to avoid living my mother's life, realizing that she had taken up the role, putting up the plastic christmas tree with the pink and white lace bows, my mother's style. 

The next day, we put on our dress clothes.  We are not the types who like dress clothes, the pantyhose and ties, and change into jeans as soon as we can.  My mother was an elegant woman who despaired of us because of this, and she imagined us rather as the von Trapp family singers, well dressed even in dire circumstances, in clothes made out of the mansion curtains.  One of her cousins told me that he thought my mother, when young, looked just like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music.  She would have loved that. "How do you solve a problem like Mariiiiiiiiaaaaaaaaaaaaa. How do you catch a cloud and pin it down . . . How can you hold a moonbeam in your hands."  Writing the eulogy, which I had been putting off for weeks, felt rather like that.

A small family gathering  went out to the snowy cemetary on the edge of the local campus,  where Maud has a pink stone with a rose carved on it, and only her birthday, as if she never died.  She was now ashes in what looked like a bakery box sitting on plastic turf.  It was freezing. We said a few words. 

More tomorrow. . 

 

Posted by: EmmaPele at December 20, 2005 21:00 | link | comments