“After you’re dead and buried and floating around whatever place we go to, what’s going to be your best memory of earth? What one moment for you defines what it’s like to be alive on this planet. What’s your takeaway? Fake yuppie experiences that you had to spend money on, like white water rafting or elephant rides in Thailand don’t count. I want to hear some small moment from your life that proves you’re really alive.”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture
I am perpetually fascinated by our ability to reshape our pasts into something better than they were. I spent a good portion of my 20s in the seat of power in our nation’s capitol, working 12-hour days and getting blackout drunk, passing out for a few hours and getting up and doing it again and the hell of all that is I actually miss it, some days. I did really amazing things, I did really fucked up things, I watched history happen, I helped make it and then one day someone I cared a whole hell of a lot about got killed by a plane flying into the Pentagon and suddenly I didn’t want to do any of those things anymore.
I was never happier than to be done with my 20s and yet some days I look around at my life and think, wow, what the hell, you are so far from where you were supposed to be, from what you were supposed to be doing, who is this person and what have you done with your dreams? Consciousness is a pretty messed up thing. Memory’s the greatest liar of them all. I was lonely and miserable and strung out and I don’t want to go back.
I am a week shy of entering the second half of my 30s and I have not done most of the things that I thought I would do when I was 22. And I probably won’t. Not ever. I probably have more failures in my life than victories, even, but at some point you realize that pretty much the only person in your life that’s keeping score is you.
Yesterday I sat in a public market and wrestled with my kids and drank mango juice and talked about how you make gyros with the eldest. We ate cupcakes and looked at Somali wares and argued about Star Wars backpacks and finished each other’s sentences. We read comic books and talked about the weather. Five of us, out in the world. Whole.
Dear 22-year old me: You can have Kilimanjaro, 1600 Penn is all yours. I have love. I am alive.
2/23/13
courage, he said. chin up. soldier on.
The first thing you should know about my oldest son is that he’s really bright. I tell you this because it’s almost always the first thing people tell me. From the moment he was born he had a curiosity, a way of looking at the world that kept me scrambling. Barely three, I teasingly handed my son a book and asked him to read it to me. He did, word for word. Then he wrote his name. In the narrative I constructed for how his life would unfold, this is exactly how everything started. I make smart kids, of course I do. Nobel laureates, maybe, or Pulitzer winners. The stuff of Lake Wobegon.
It’s part of the promises you whisper against their skin when they’re born. You are amazing, you say, you will be amazing. Anything you want in the world, it’s yours. We don’t admit to ourselves that few of those promises are in our power to keep. That we can’t give them happily-ever-afters, no matter how hard we try, because life is made of twists and turns and curveballs, no clues as to how any of it is going to end.
I was so excited when he started 4K, knew he would love school as much as I did. Except he ended up in a class that was massively overcrowded, kids learning their letters while he tried to negotiate Internet time with his bewildered teacher. He seems overwhelmed, she said. He’s acting out, he interrupts, he can’t relate to the other kids in his class. I went home, sobbed in the kitchen against my husband’s chest. It’s not him, became my mantra. It’s not him, it’s them.
He’s got an eidetic memory, have I mentioned that yet? Which basically means that he retains what he sees, what he hears verbatim, whether he understands the context or not. Think about that, about everything we hear and see in a day and all the various things a kid can overhear that you don’t actually want repeated.
Anywhere.
Ever.
There was the time he lectured a totally baffled looking kid in the candy aisle at Target about the Easter display being “a commercial perversion of Pagan fertility rites.” Or Election Day, when I got a call from a weary administrator because he’d been lecturing everyone about politics. “If your parents don’t know who to vote for,” he told his classmates, “you should tell them to ask themselves What Would Joe Biden Do?” “C’mon,” I said to his principal. “It’s a little bit funny.” She didn’t see the charm.
We started therapy, grudgingly, because I was worried that he would get branded a troublemaker at age 5. He started telling me he was stupid. He would curl up with me on the couch at night and tell me how badly he wanted friends to play with. He got so anxious about going to school he made himself physically sick, more than once. I decided it was the school’s fault, and looked into open enrollment elsewhere. The classes were too full. The teachers were subpar. Those were the only logical explanations.
“Your son is such a bright boy!”
I think I physically cringed the first time I heard this from his first grade teacher. We weren’t even a month into school before the first of these conversations happened with her, an educator who is amazing, and wonderful, and who I kind of wanted to reach through the phone and strangle. He won’t do his work, he’s hiding under tables. He won’t work at all if there’s a sub.
I hated how absolutely helpless I felt during these conversations, like there was something I was missing, something I was doing wrong. Why aren’t you doing your work, I would ask him. I don’t know, he’d say with these big, mournful eyes. I stopped asking.
We’d started seeing a psychiatrist before school had even started, a summer’s worth of social awkwardness and anxiety and bullying and I’d looked for someone ostensibly to help work on his self-esteem, but. If I’m being honest with myself, which is sort of the point of this exercise, there’s a reason I looked for a psychiatrist and not a therapist. We’d been seeing her for maybe a month when she mentioned, with heartbreaking casualness, an autism spectrum disorder. I couldn’t breathe. I started researching, irrationally reassured because most of those kids didn’t sound anything like mine. I found all the things he wasn’t in a desperate attempt to ignore all the things he was.
And then.
The day before Christmas break, I stopped at his elementary school and I could hear him, from two hallways away. Shrieking, crying, and I almost tripped over myself running to his classroom door. There he was, between two teachers trying to calm him down. He looked up and saw me and I froze as he started to cry harder. I’m still not sure if his reaction was born from embarrassment or relief.
“Love,” I said, reached for him, dropped my forehead to his like I had when he was a baby, held his hands. “Sweetheart, can you breathe with me? Baby, please, in with me, yeah? Now out, slow and steady.” In and out we breathed together, forehead to forehead until his breathing matched mine and he could steady himself again. I went home and cried, my face pressed into the pillows. I tried to figure out what I had done wrong.
The next phone call from school was about interventions failed, about the need to meet, parents and teachers and the special education team leader.
I am embarrassed about my reaction to that, the rush of shame and disappointment and grief at being forced into a room to acknowledge what everyone else had seen but me; I have a special needs child. He is smart, and he loves politics and comic books and Clint Barton, computers and bugs and Legos and his baby brothers more than just about anything else in the world.
I’m scared. This isn’t something he’s going to grow out of. It’s not going to magically get better and the reality of that is exhausting.
I’m terrified, because I would give anything to make this easy for him and all I can think about is how long this road is going to be, how bumpy, and how there’s so much I can’t do to make this better. Welcome to humanity. Welcome to motherhood, to the dirty secret that no one is actually capable of fixing it all.
I can’t keep kids from picking on him. I can’t sit next to him in class and try to keep him on task. I can’t make friends for him. All I can do is accept the reality of where we are and do everything I can to be patient, to be steady, to help him figure out how to harness that powerful mind and find the balance that enables him to interact with the world around him. I hope I’m up to the challenge. I have to be.
He is my beautiful, bright boy, and maybe I cannot protect him from all the things that hurt, but I can still try. I can be there, forehead to forehead and hand in hand, breathing alongside him, giving him all the courage and strength and tenacity he can take. Because that’s what we do, we mothers. We’re not perfect, and neither are our kids. I don’t know how this story ends. I’m working really hard on accepting that. But moms don’t give up, right?
Our kind of love doesn’t have that kind of vocabulary.
It’s part of the promises you whisper against their skin when they’re born. You are amazing, you say, you will be amazing. Anything you want in the world, it’s yours. We don’t admit to ourselves that few of those promises are in our power to keep. That we can’t give them happily-ever-afters, no matter how hard we try, because life is made of twists and turns and curveballs, no clues as to how any of it is going to end.
I was so excited when he started 4K, knew he would love school as much as I did. Except he ended up in a class that was massively overcrowded, kids learning their letters while he tried to negotiate Internet time with his bewildered teacher. He seems overwhelmed, she said. He’s acting out, he interrupts, he can’t relate to the other kids in his class. I went home, sobbed in the kitchen against my husband’s chest. It’s not him, became my mantra. It’s not him, it’s them.
He’s got an eidetic memory, have I mentioned that yet? Which basically means that he retains what he sees, what he hears verbatim, whether he understands the context or not. Think about that, about everything we hear and see in a day and all the various things a kid can overhear that you don’t actually want repeated.
Anywhere.
Ever.
There was the time he lectured a totally baffled looking kid in the candy aisle at Target about the Easter display being “a commercial perversion of Pagan fertility rites.” Or Election Day, when I got a call from a weary administrator because he’d been lecturing everyone about politics. “If your parents don’t know who to vote for,” he told his classmates, “you should tell them to ask themselves What Would Joe Biden Do?” “C’mon,” I said to his principal. “It’s a little bit funny.” She didn’t see the charm.
We started therapy, grudgingly, because I was worried that he would get branded a troublemaker at age 5. He started telling me he was stupid. He would curl up with me on the couch at night and tell me how badly he wanted friends to play with. He got so anxious about going to school he made himself physically sick, more than once. I decided it was the school’s fault, and looked into open enrollment elsewhere. The classes were too full. The teachers were subpar. Those were the only logical explanations.
“Your son is such a bright boy!”
I think I physically cringed the first time I heard this from his first grade teacher. We weren’t even a month into school before the first of these conversations happened with her, an educator who is amazing, and wonderful, and who I kind of wanted to reach through the phone and strangle. He won’t do his work, he’s hiding under tables. He won’t work at all if there’s a sub.
I hated how absolutely helpless I felt during these conversations, like there was something I was missing, something I was doing wrong. Why aren’t you doing your work, I would ask him. I don’t know, he’d say with these big, mournful eyes. I stopped asking.
We’d started seeing a psychiatrist before school had even started, a summer’s worth of social awkwardness and anxiety and bullying and I’d looked for someone ostensibly to help work on his self-esteem, but. If I’m being honest with myself, which is sort of the point of this exercise, there’s a reason I looked for a psychiatrist and not a therapist. We’d been seeing her for maybe a month when she mentioned, with heartbreaking casualness, an autism spectrum disorder. I couldn’t breathe. I started researching, irrationally reassured because most of those kids didn’t sound anything like mine. I found all the things he wasn’t in a desperate attempt to ignore all the things he was.
And then.
The day before Christmas break, I stopped at his elementary school and I could hear him, from two hallways away. Shrieking, crying, and I almost tripped over myself running to his classroom door. There he was, between two teachers trying to calm him down. He looked up and saw me and I froze as he started to cry harder. I’m still not sure if his reaction was born from embarrassment or relief.
“Love,” I said, reached for him, dropped my forehead to his like I had when he was a baby, held his hands. “Sweetheart, can you breathe with me? Baby, please, in with me, yeah? Now out, slow and steady.” In and out we breathed together, forehead to forehead until his breathing matched mine and he could steady himself again. I went home and cried, my face pressed into the pillows. I tried to figure out what I had done wrong.
The next phone call from school was about interventions failed, about the need to meet, parents and teachers and the special education team leader.
I am embarrassed about my reaction to that, the rush of shame and disappointment and grief at being forced into a room to acknowledge what everyone else had seen but me; I have a special needs child. He is smart, and he loves politics and comic books and Clint Barton, computers and bugs and Legos and his baby brothers more than just about anything else in the world.
I’m scared. This isn’t something he’s going to grow out of. It’s not going to magically get better and the reality of that is exhausting.
I’m terrified, because I would give anything to make this easy for him and all I can think about is how long this road is going to be, how bumpy, and how there’s so much I can’t do to make this better. Welcome to humanity. Welcome to motherhood, to the dirty secret that no one is actually capable of fixing it all.
I can’t keep kids from picking on him. I can’t sit next to him in class and try to keep him on task. I can’t make friends for him. All I can do is accept the reality of where we are and do everything I can to be patient, to be steady, to help him figure out how to harness that powerful mind and find the balance that enables him to interact with the world around him. I hope I’m up to the challenge. I have to be.
He is my beautiful, bright boy, and maybe I cannot protect him from all the things that hurt, but I can still try. I can be there, forehead to forehead and hand in hand, breathing alongside him, giving him all the courage and strength and tenacity he can take. Because that’s what we do, we mothers. We’re not perfect, and neither are our kids. I don’t know how this story ends. I’m working really hard on accepting that. But moms don’t give up, right?
Our kind of love doesn’t have that kind of vocabulary.
2/18/13
my heart's outstanding bills
My mom is 65 today.
Relationships are complicated things. I’m lucky, though, that for all the twists and turns in my life she’s become part of my bedrock, one of my best friends.
She’s a pretty amazing woman. When A was born, she was the one who held my hand in the delivery room, she was the one who cut the cord. When she had a kidney removed to rid herself of cancer, it was I that curled up in the chair next to her in the hospital that first night, counted breaths and watched machines.
I wouldn’t be the person I am - the parent I am - without having been able to watch how she continued to push forward even when life did its best to drag her under, and I am so grateful for that. We haven’t always understood each other, we haven’t always agreed with each other but always, always there is love.
When I was little, I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world, and many, many moons later, that’s still true. Every gray hair, every line on her face and her hands a testament, a battle scar, a story.
This picture was taken on my wedding day. A walked her down the aisle.
Happy birthday, Mom.
Relationships are complicated things. I’m lucky, though, that for all the twists and turns in my life she’s become part of my bedrock, one of my best friends.
She’s a pretty amazing woman. When A was born, she was the one who held my hand in the delivery room, she was the one who cut the cord. When she had a kidney removed to rid herself of cancer, it was I that curled up in the chair next to her in the hospital that first night, counted breaths and watched machines.
I wouldn’t be the person I am - the parent I am - without having been able to watch how she continued to push forward even when life did its best to drag her under, and I am so grateful for that. We haven’t always understood each other, we haven’t always agreed with each other but always, always there is love.
When I was little, I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world, and many, many moons later, that’s still true. Every gray hair, every line on her face and her hands a testament, a battle scar, a story.
This picture was taken on my wedding day. A walked her down the aisle.
Happy birthday, Mom.
2/16/13
“believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.” - Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet.
I’m super behind on the OneWord posts, which is disappointing but not surprising. If my math is correct, which is questionable on a good day, then this week’s word is faith. Mmm. Baggage.
When I was in sixth grade, I think, I read Stephen King’s “It.” Besides reinforcing a life-long and occasionally paralyzing fear of clowns, it also provided me with the best, most logical description of Creator I’ve come across. I’m sort of amused in thinking about how Stephen King might react to that. In the universe he creates, there is the Turtle, the creator of all that is, who does his work and then pulls inside his shell, wanders off into some vast corner of the cosmos and lets what will happen, happen.
There’s a lot of life that’s happened between then and now. I’ve rubbed shoulders with Jesuits and sung in gospel choirs with Baptists and thrown shade at Unitarians and knelt with Episcopalians, spent years away from organized religion and years inside it. I’ve read everything I can put my hands on and some of it feels more organic than others.
I don’t have answers, but that’s the whole point, right?
I look at my kids, I look at this world, I look up at the stars and even when I feel like I can’t believe in anything else I still see the Turtle out there somewhere, beyond our reach, that thing that set all of this in motion, all the things that even the most brilliant of our science minds can’t entirely explain. I look at my kids and I think about the way my capacity to love grew and shifted and metastasized in one horrible, awful painful push and think yes, okay. I have faith in creation. I have faith in love. I believe. I have faith that no matter what happens when I am not here the love that we are born into and that we bend and shape during the time we live it continues to wrap its arms around this world and every other, even after we’re gone.
And like bits and pieces of our DNA, a genetic code that tells the stories of who our people were and who our people will be, it stretches onward through time, eternal. And if when we sleep, we dream, well. That’ll be some adventure, too.
I’m super behind on the OneWord posts, which is disappointing but not surprising. If my math is correct, which is questionable on a good day, then this week’s word is faith. Mmm. Baggage.
When I was in sixth grade, I think, I read Stephen King’s “It.” Besides reinforcing a life-long and occasionally paralyzing fear of clowns, it also provided me with the best, most logical description of Creator I’ve come across. I’m sort of amused in thinking about how Stephen King might react to that. In the universe he creates, there is the Turtle, the creator of all that is, who does his work and then pulls inside his shell, wanders off into some vast corner of the cosmos and lets what will happen, happen.
There’s a lot of life that’s happened between then and now. I’ve rubbed shoulders with Jesuits and sung in gospel choirs with Baptists and thrown shade at Unitarians and knelt with Episcopalians, spent years away from organized religion and years inside it. I’ve read everything I can put my hands on and some of it feels more organic than others.
I don’t have answers, but that’s the whole point, right?
I look at my kids, I look at this world, I look up at the stars and even when I feel like I can’t believe in anything else I still see the Turtle out there somewhere, beyond our reach, that thing that set all of this in motion, all the things that even the most brilliant of our science minds can’t entirely explain. I look at my kids and I think about the way my capacity to love grew and shifted and metastasized in one horrible, awful painful push and think yes, okay. I have faith in creation. I have faith in love. I believe. I have faith that no matter what happens when I am not here the love that we are born into and that we bend and shape during the time we live it continues to wrap its arms around this world and every other, even after we’re gone.
And like bits and pieces of our DNA, a genetic code that tells the stories of who our people were and who our people will be, it stretches onward through time, eternal. And if when we sleep, we dream, well. That’ll be some adventure, too.
2/3/13
the essay that wasn't
I finished a draft a few days ago for Listen to Your Mother, sent it off to a few people to pick apart. One of the topics I considered was trying to tackle how working in funeral service had changed how I parent.
It’s two in the morning, and I’m not sure this is that, but I couldn’t sleep so I wrote. I’ll throw it behind a cut because there is talk about dying, and kids, and talking to kids about death, and loss in all its iterations and there are a lot of people for whom that is all ridiculously uncomfortable and I respect that.
It’s the middle of the night or early morning, whichever. I can’t sleep. So there’s this.
If you’ve ever watched Six Feet Under, you’re familiar with their conceit - each episode opens with a death. I often think about how those writers must have scrambled, especially later into the series, to come up with something different for each one.
There is an episode, fairly early on, season one or two, I think, that opens in a nursery. The picture is blurry, the perspective is from the inside of a crib. You see a mother and a father, peeking in, then leaving. There is a mobile hanging above. The screen goes black, then opens to the mobile again. Black, mobile, a repeated sequence until there is just black, and then a name, and you realize what you’ve just watched.
The first time I saw it I was a single twenty-something. Wow, I thought to myself. They went there.
The second time I saw it I had a baby, several months old, and I put the meat of my palm between my teeth to stifle any noise I might make as I ugly cried my way through it.
*
I was five months pregnant when I started working for funeral directors. Six weeks on the job and the highlight of our national convention, for me, was getting to work with some producers doing a project that would be included in the bonus material for the final season of SFU - a documentary on how the American view of death had changed over the course of the series.
They interviewed several funeral directors for the piece. One of them, a past president, is a tremendous man and funeral director based out of Connecticut, and I may be biased but he’s one of the best in the country. In one of the more moving segments, he talked about the funeral of a child. Young, very young, and he described putting the child in his mother’s arms, letting her rock him one last time, giving her that time to say goodbye and I thought, Jesus, what the hell have I gotten myself into?
*
Back maybe two weeks from maternity leave, I travelled with some colleagues to tour a funeral home in a different part of the state. We walked into the casket showroom and there, in the corner, was an infant display (please to note: this is not something you ordinarily see in a showroom - fact of life or not it’s not something most funeral directors call attention to). I turned around and walked right out of the room, trying to catch my breath.
*
You probably don’t know it, because they never talk about it but many funeral directors will donate their professional services for the funeral of a young child, asking only for payment that covers things like the casket, the vault, etc. Someone rolled their eyes at me once, said something along the lines of “of course they should, those funerals shouldn’t happen to begin with ” to which I responded, “so basically pediatric hospice should only bill for medicines delivered, then? Doctors should comp billing on cases where kids don’t make it?” I’m saying. These are good people.
*
Another funeral director told me about a service he’d done, a family friend whose teenage son had killed himself, shot himself in the head at a range and with ammunition that did a pretty horrific amount of damage. He worked, nonstop, pulling out every trick he knew, everything he’d been taught to reconstruct the boy’s face so his parents wouldn’t have a closed casket as their only choice. So his mother could touch his cheek one last time and say goodbye.
*
There is an organization of volunteer photographers called Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep. They go in and provide remembrance photography for parents that have lost a baby. If there are angels on earth, these people have wings. Ours is a society that cannot process the notion of infant loss and so we don’t talk about it. At a time of unspeakable grief they help families and give them something tangible to hold onto, after.
*
When Newtown happened, my first thought was of my kids, my second for those parents, those families. Then it was the funeral directors, because those are my people, even still. The Connecticut funeral director who was a friend and mentor. He has all boys, just like me, all grown up. All his grandbabies are all girls, and some of them, no doubt, the same age range as those kids. I have a pretty good idea what those kinds of rounds do to a body that size. I know all too well the lengths to which those men and women - whose calling is all too often dismissed as “creepy” - served those families, how they worked untold hours amidst that horror to make sure those families could say goodbye whatever way they needed to.
*
If there are angels on earth, there are innumerable funeral directors walking around with wings of their own.
*
They became part of my family, these men and women, and they taught me about how we care for our dead. They changed my vocabulary and they changed how I think about mortality. Whether you believe there is something more than what we know while our hearts are beating or not, we have this time, now, and this time is finite. There are no promises about how long we get, about who gets to go first. I have been to funerals for babies and for grade schoolers and for teenagers, for parents and grandparents and crazy old uncles.
I look at my boys and every day I am thankful for more time with them because I know there are no guarantees.
*
It was always something of a running joke among some of us on the staff, about how much funeral directors love to hug. Six years working for funeral directors, gone from that work almost two years now and I’ll be damned if I’ve not become one, too. Hug while you can.
*
I make no promises to my kids. Our pets don’t go to sleep, they die. Death is a part of life, and everything dies. I will die, they will die. The concept is mostly abstract to them now. They’ve been lucky enough that except for a pet they haven’t had to deal with the loss of anyone close to them. It is never a comfortable conversation to have but it’s an important one and I think I would have avoided the hell out of it were it not for my funeral directors, for funeral service.
Lately, the almost-4-year old has asked about it. I don’t want to die, he says and I tuck him up and tell him that I know. No one wants to, but it simply is part of our human experience. It’s okay to be afraid, but there is no need to linger on it. No matter what, no matter when, we will always love each other and that’s what gets you through.
*
Love. It’s not true that funeral service taught me to love, but I don’t think I fully appreciated what a gift it is until I spent my time around people whose life work is to care for the dead. You can’t do that and not have love. You can’t do that and not understand that what we are will one day be stripped away, ‘til that’s really all that’s left.
*
I learned that I can’t control when I go, when the people I love do. But I can love them, and I can tell them, and so the last thing they hear before they go to sleep, the first thing they hear in the morning is “I love you.” We can yell at each other and go to bed angry but no one leaves the house without those words to carry them on their way. Because you never know.
*
Whether we go first, or we go last, at some point what we love here, in this life, is lost. Six years in the trenches with the caretakers of the dead, and I’m a hugger, and I say “I love you” more than I ever did before. There is nothing dark or creepy about that.
It’s two in the morning, and I’m not sure this is that, but I couldn’t sleep so I wrote. I’ll throw it behind a cut because there is talk about dying, and kids, and talking to kids about death, and loss in all its iterations and there are a lot of people for whom that is all ridiculously uncomfortable and I respect that.
It’s the middle of the night or early morning, whichever. I can’t sleep. So there’s this.
If you’ve ever watched Six Feet Under, you’re familiar with their conceit - each episode opens with a death. I often think about how those writers must have scrambled, especially later into the series, to come up with something different for each one.
There is an episode, fairly early on, season one or two, I think, that opens in a nursery. The picture is blurry, the perspective is from the inside of a crib. You see a mother and a father, peeking in, then leaving. There is a mobile hanging above. The screen goes black, then opens to the mobile again. Black, mobile, a repeated sequence until there is just black, and then a name, and you realize what you’ve just watched.
The first time I saw it I was a single twenty-something. Wow, I thought to myself. They went there.
The second time I saw it I had a baby, several months old, and I put the meat of my palm between my teeth to stifle any noise I might make as I ugly cried my way through it.
*
I was five months pregnant when I started working for funeral directors. Six weeks on the job and the highlight of our national convention, for me, was getting to work with some producers doing a project that would be included in the bonus material for the final season of SFU - a documentary on how the American view of death had changed over the course of the series.
They interviewed several funeral directors for the piece. One of them, a past president, is a tremendous man and funeral director based out of Connecticut, and I may be biased but he’s one of the best in the country. In one of the more moving segments, he talked about the funeral of a child. Young, very young, and he described putting the child in his mother’s arms, letting her rock him one last time, giving her that time to say goodbye and I thought, Jesus, what the hell have I gotten myself into?
*
Back maybe two weeks from maternity leave, I travelled with some colleagues to tour a funeral home in a different part of the state. We walked into the casket showroom and there, in the corner, was an infant display (please to note: this is not something you ordinarily see in a showroom - fact of life or not it’s not something most funeral directors call attention to). I turned around and walked right out of the room, trying to catch my breath.
*
You probably don’t know it, because they never talk about it but many funeral directors will donate their professional services for the funeral of a young child, asking only for payment that covers things like the casket, the vault, etc. Someone rolled their eyes at me once, said something along the lines of “of course they should, those funerals shouldn’t happen to begin with ” to which I responded, “so basically pediatric hospice should only bill for medicines delivered, then? Doctors should comp billing on cases where kids don’t make it?” I’m saying. These are good people.
*
Another funeral director told me about a service he’d done, a family friend whose teenage son had killed himself, shot himself in the head at a range and with ammunition that did a pretty horrific amount of damage. He worked, nonstop, pulling out every trick he knew, everything he’d been taught to reconstruct the boy’s face so his parents wouldn’t have a closed casket as their only choice. So his mother could touch his cheek one last time and say goodbye.
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There is an organization of volunteer photographers called Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep. They go in and provide remembrance photography for parents that have lost a baby. If there are angels on earth, these people have wings. Ours is a society that cannot process the notion of infant loss and so we don’t talk about it. At a time of unspeakable grief they help families and give them something tangible to hold onto, after.
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When Newtown happened, my first thought was of my kids, my second for those parents, those families. Then it was the funeral directors, because those are my people, even still. The Connecticut funeral director who was a friend and mentor. He has all boys, just like me, all grown up. All his grandbabies are all girls, and some of them, no doubt, the same age range as those kids. I have a pretty good idea what those kinds of rounds do to a body that size. I know all too well the lengths to which those men and women - whose calling is all too often dismissed as “creepy” - served those families, how they worked untold hours amidst that horror to make sure those families could say goodbye whatever way they needed to.
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If there are angels on earth, there are innumerable funeral directors walking around with wings of their own.
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They became part of my family, these men and women, and they taught me about how we care for our dead. They changed my vocabulary and they changed how I think about mortality. Whether you believe there is something more than what we know while our hearts are beating or not, we have this time, now, and this time is finite. There are no promises about how long we get, about who gets to go first. I have been to funerals for babies and for grade schoolers and for teenagers, for parents and grandparents and crazy old uncles.
I look at my boys and every day I am thankful for more time with them because I know there are no guarantees.
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It was always something of a running joke among some of us on the staff, about how much funeral directors love to hug. Six years working for funeral directors, gone from that work almost two years now and I’ll be damned if I’ve not become one, too. Hug while you can.
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I make no promises to my kids. Our pets don’t go to sleep, they die. Death is a part of life, and everything dies. I will die, they will die. The concept is mostly abstract to them now. They’ve been lucky enough that except for a pet they haven’t had to deal with the loss of anyone close to them. It is never a comfortable conversation to have but it’s an important one and I think I would have avoided the hell out of it were it not for my funeral directors, for funeral service.
Lately, the almost-4-year old has asked about it. I don’t want to die, he says and I tuck him up and tell him that I know. No one wants to, but it simply is part of our human experience. It’s okay to be afraid, but there is no need to linger on it. No matter what, no matter when, we will always love each other and that’s what gets you through.
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Love. It’s not true that funeral service taught me to love, but I don’t think I fully appreciated what a gift it is until I spent my time around people whose life work is to care for the dead. You can’t do that and not have love. You can’t do that and not understand that what we are will one day be stripped away, ‘til that’s really all that’s left.
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I learned that I can’t control when I go, when the people I love do. But I can love them, and I can tell them, and so the last thing they hear before they go to sleep, the first thing they hear in the morning is “I love you.” We can yell at each other and go to bed angry but no one leaves the house without those words to carry them on their way. Because you never know.
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Whether we go first, or we go last, at some point what we love here, in this life, is lost. Six years in the trenches with the caretakers of the dead, and I’m a hugger, and I say “I love you” more than I ever did before. There is nothing dark or creepy about that.
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