A few days ago there was a comment made about “faux intimacy” regarding people’s emotional response to the death of Madelyn Dunham, Barack Obama’s grandmother. At the time I was reading the post, I agreed with the premise that the internet gives us a false sense of connectedness and I agreed that in retrospect (all of 2 days), the enormous response tiptoed towards strange and stunk of personal inadequacy and emotion, for the sake of emotion. I chastised myself for feeling genuinely sad for Barack Obama (and yes … for crying when his grandmother died.) Looking back again (two more whole days later), I’m considering the fact that I had a “faux reaction” to that post. My sadness upon hearing of the death of Madelyn Dunham, which provoked my tears and led to an ultimate feeling of depression wasn’t “faux intimacy”. It was real. My tears for Barack Obama and his grandmother provided me with the ultimate feeling of intimacy; of shared experience on the deepest emotional level … the universal and profound understanding of loss.
Like President Elect Obama, I lost one of the most important people in my life on the eve of what will always be one of my greatest moments. My mother died on the “due date” of my first child. June 10. I had lived and breathed for 9 months waiting for June 10 to arrive. We counted down the days together … and there was absolutely nothing on this earth my mother wanted more than a grandchild. We counted down as the cancer ate away at her lungs and her brain and her blood. She was a tough, old bird … going from dual treatments straight to the mall to pick up one more blanket or look for a new outfit, just a little cuter than the last one she had gotten. God … I remember being able to barely reach the wheelchair handles because my belly blocked me from getting close enough. We made it though … we made it right up to the day that our girl was to be born. It turned out though, that our countdown ended … not exactly as we had expected.
She died at about 3 am on June 10 quietly and with dignity … just her, my dad, and a nurse. I got much of the same advice that I heard William Bennett give Barack Obama. He described the notion that one could find comfort in knowing that this enormous loss was the end of the “before” part of life and the beginning of the “after” part of life … before-presidency or after-motherhood … an acknowledgment that the collective prize remains though the achievement will now be singular. I know that sadness. You know that sadness. Our humanity gives us the ability to share that sadness, in person and from afar.
For most first-time mothers (or first time Presidents), I think that the loss of their own mother (defined as ‘the person who made you what you are’) during such a critical time, would be too much to handle. I, on the other hand had a different experience. Whether it was God or hormone-induced psychosis ~ I experienced an intervention that saved me from succumbing to the sadness and unfairness of loss. My mother spoke to me (not in words … thank God), but in a way that assured me that everything was going just the way she thought it ought to go. She reassured me in a way no one else could and I survived. I survived because every time I start to miss her (which is often) I smile. I laugh out loud sometimes … sometimes I cry and laugh … but mostly I laugh and the sadness washes away. Only a mother can give you that gift in death.
Here’s the story. I did not want to see my mother’s body after she died. I was against a “Family Night” at the local funeral parlor and I was completely against an open casket. My mother’s siblings, however, were to have no part of that … perhaps it’s a generational thing. I submitted a bit and allowed the casket to be open for one hour. I figured that was enough time for a dozen or so folks to say their goodbyes and do whatever it is people do when looking at a dead body. That was a fine plan and everyone felt satisfied … except my grandmother. My grandmother (God rest her soul) was the first one to see my mother and the first one to realize that hair didn’t look quite right … as it turned out, her wig was on upside down. My mother wore a cute little, dark brown page boy wig … worn correctly, very chic … upside down, surprisingly like Davy Jones of the Monkees. My grandmother only felt that it made sense to come back to our house and insist, in front of dozens of guests, that I … me … I go over to the funeral home and fix the wig. Me. Not her … or the dozen other people there or the employees who had been paid to prepare her for viewing. Me. At that moment I wasn’t sad anymore, I was totally and completely pissed off … at my grandmother, at the funeral home guy (who has since been busted in one of those 48 Hours-To-Catch-A-Predator things) at God … at my Dad … just overwhelmingly angry. Like it was some kind of challenge … I stormed across the small town, into the funeral home, past family and friends, and right into the room where Mother Jones (as we’ve come to call her since then) was … well … housed.
I slammed the double doors and stood there, afraid to turn around. It felt as though there was no oxygen in my body … like I might float up off the floor if I let go of the knobs. I stood there for what seemed like an hour and then I finally turned around. From across the room, I couldn’t really tell that anything was wrong with the wig and I almost decided to leave. Something else took over though and I knew I had to check on the wig. The stupid, damn wig. The stupid, damn wig that it took forever to pick out. The stupid, damn wig that she hated to wear … because it itched. That stupid, damn wig was going to force me to go face-to-face with my mother … who was dead … something I knew in my soul I could not do, could not handle, and from which I would not recover. That wig.
I walked a little closer. And then closer. As I neared the side of the casket, I almost didn’t recognize her. My mother suffered incredible edema as a side effect of her treatments. The woman I was looking at looked like someone I had known years ago, not the woman I had just seen days before. As the lump of emotion and the sensation of vomiting entered my throat, my eyes turned from her face to her head … the wig. The wig was definitely on upside down. She would have made a good “Paul” in a Beatles reunion band. As I stood there, with tears running down my face, I started to smile a little. That little smile turned to a bit of a giggle and as “She loves you, yeah, yeah,yeah … she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah” started to play in my head, I fell into a full, belly laugh. I laughed and laughed and laughed some more. I laughed until my father started beating on the door because everyone standing outside thought my hysterical laughter was hysterical crying. I assured him I was all right and went about the business of fixing the wig.
In case you don’t know … a dead human head weighs like 30 pounds. I swear to God it is so heavy. I tried to reach in from the side of the casket, but my big belly kept me from getting very close. I thought I would be able to spin the wig … but I couldn’t. (I’m not saying this as a fact … but I’m pretty sure that the wig was stapled on or something) That wig would not budge. At this point I was just on a mission. If I knew anything at that point, it was that my mom would have come back to life just to kill me had I let anyone see her with that hairstyle. I moved around to the end of the casket, behind her head … this gave me a better angle and more leverage, however, the wig would not move (maybe sewn on?). I took a deep breath, grabbed the wig, and twisted with all my strength … bad idea … not only did I jerk the wig all the way off … my elbow rammed into the casket lid so hard that it knocked it off the wall hook and it lid slammed down. Now, I’m standing there, wig in hand. My dad is outside banging on the door. I lift the lid of the casket to find my mother, totally bald and in disarray among little trinkets and pictures, and a rose that had been resting on the little shelf made in the top when the door was open. I quickly grabbed all the stuff and threw it back up on the little ledge and went to work trying to get the wig on. It was one of those moments when you forget you’re an adult and the sensation of “being in trouble” takes over your entire psyche.
I got that wig back on … the right way … and before anyone was able to make it into the room. As my father and the pervert funeral home guy opened the doors, I looked down one last time, to check the wig. This time, instead, my eyes traveled down to her face. Whether it was a result of my belly banging the casket or the door slamming down … or on the chance that it was real … she was smiling at me. She was giving me a smirk that only mothers give … and it said that she had orchestrated the whole thing … the ultimate mother-manipulation … for one last chance to spend time with me. She was saying to me that it was ok … that she wanted me to move forward … and it seemed that the thing standing between us at that moment … the thing that had made it practically impossible for me to “fix” things and had provided that beautiful moment … was my belly and that precious little baby girl … who in that second received every beautiful gift my mother had to give her.
Death divides people, but death’s legacy of feelings and raw emotion also unites us as human beings. I don’t know if everyone has as strange a story as I do, but I bet a lot of people have one. If we cannot be connected and intimate in our most human moments, then when can we … with friends, family, strangers … we all have the capacity to be one in an experience … be that an election, a team victory, or something more mandatory … in the loss of a loved one.
I’m glad I cried when Madelyn Dunham died. I know exactly how that feels in the deepest part of my soul. In real time, I am connected to Barack Obama and millions of other humans who are and have experienced the same essential thing ~ that thing that’s indicative of our human nature … there’s nothing “faux” about that and I can’t think of a better definition of intimacy.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment