Articles

A gift rose after winter frost

Marcia Z. Nelson

This is the first Mother’s Day I will spend visiting a cemetery.

I won’t be able to give my mother the gift I had for a change selected well in advance: a rose bush, maybe two. Two days before she died, she told me that most of the roses in her and my father’s prized garden had fallen victim to last November’s early frost. They weren’t planning to replace the bushes, she said. I was aghast. There have always been roses in their garden, in ever increasing numbers as time went on. Some of the bushes were 10 years old. Varieties of crimson, pink, yellow tipped with blush, they bloomed in waves throughout the summer.

We covered the casket with red roses at the wake, and the flowers went with her to the cemetery.

Call your mother, goes the phone ad. She used to call me when she figured it was time for me to call and I hadn’t. Were you calling? she would ask. We were outside, or, we were in the living room, she would say. After I got married, I called her a lot less. Time enough, I expected. Among the umpteen things I forgot to tell her was that my husband and I had decided to start our family next year. I forgot to tell her I would need her when faced with my own unstoppably howling infant for the first time.

A mother’s death is nothing like the angry imaginings of your adolescence that come faintly, guiltily back to you once the reality is beyond your control. The realization, and the tears, come in raggedy fits and starts, sometimes blessedly receding, sometimes precipitated in a rush by some ordinary detail.

All her everyday activities have been braked abruptly, permanently. A bookmark holds her place in a book left by the side of her customary chair. Her washed hose hang neatly in the bathroom. In the refrigerator that my hands remember opening, the condiments are in the same places they have occupied for 15 years, in ranks on shelves on the door, and the Sunday roast beef awaits cooking.

She was planning dinner, not death.

I was younger when my grandparents died, and the rites of death held comparatively little meaning for me then. Today I remain sure that heaven is not a place, but I am also certain that my mother is somewhere, certainly in my memories and my spirit, right in the spot that aches. What had once seemed to me the unnatural presence of a dead person among the living at a wake, and the unnatural sound of laughter in the solemnity of a funeral parlor, now strike me as welcome and necessary. Of course Mom should be with us. It’s a family gathering. The first missings – where is her voice, her laugh – are attenuated somehow.

At the wake, the family gathering is enlarged by the memory of dozens of previous comings-together, for weddings, anniversaries, holidays. Many people have come to keep us company on this occasion too, to wait with her one final time. From dozens of Polish weddings, here are the people I have been introduced to dozens of times, older by a dozen years, some older than my mother.

The news of her death spread through the neighborhood, telegraphed via the grocery store and the Sunday night church bingo. The owner of the local mom-and-pop shop, whom I barely know but whose five kids went to the same grammar school I did, asks me about my house, remarks on the wedding cake that my mother described to her 18 months ago. All news travels the same way in a neighborhood.

I generally avoid thinking about eternal life; it seems an impossible subject for thought. The timeworn metaphors the priest used in the homily began to make it accessible, though, and I reached urgently for their meaning. Their truth, however hard to accept, yielded a grain of comfort.

She was just a traveler passing through here on her way to a larger purpose. Unless a seed fall in the ground and die, it cannot bear fruit. All flesh is as the grass, as the grass that will grow over her grave, as the rose bushes that succumb to time and wear.

We bloom, we bear, we die.

Call your mother.