Bereavement

It was a nice funeral. Everyone said so. Mother would have been pleased with the nice things said about her. Different from my brother’s funeral twenty-six years previously where no one knew what to say. Intentional death carries its own taboo.

The living room feels strange without the noise and glare of the television. A sorrowful little dog with its head on its paws lies next to the fireplace. On the mantel are framed photos of my parents together, a wedding photo with her dressed in black, her only good dress, an anniversary photo sixty-two years later. My sister sits on the crocheted afghan on the sofa, her stubby arms folded across her enormous breasts. Her tennis shoes hide beneath large angry ankles. Her belly strains against the black cotton dress she bought at Goodwill for the funeral.

Next to the ticking grandfather clock is my brother, still dressed in his Sunday suit, arms folded tightly across his chest, fingers clutching his armpits. We-love-you-grandma pictures sketched by great grandchildren are taped to the frig. Inexpensive artwork on the wall above the mantel reflects my mother’s love of the ocean near her childhood home. A rented hospital bed, its mattress encased in plastic, sits folded in the bedroom, waiting to be returned. The kitchen calendar marked with birthday parties she won’t be attending hangs above the phone. A younger brother stands outside with my father, inspecting the pine trees that need to be trimmed.

“Remember that dog we had in Wisconsin? What was his name?” I ask.

“Frosty,” the acknowledged animal lover, my sister, answers. She could easily name every dog, cat, chicken, guinea pig, hamster, fish, toad, parakeet, rat, and snake we ever owned.

“There was a dog we had in Germany. I was too young to remember it,” I say.

“Harry,” my brother Jim says, still staring at the floor. Medicated into monosyllabism, he rarely speaks. Though his long-term memory is better than the rest of ours, he rarely displays it. Conversation holds no interest for him. That’s just the way schizophrenics are, we were told.

“Whatever happened to Harry?” my sister Janet looks at Jim. Teased at school and scolded at home for failing grades, she always found solace in her many pets.

“Run over by a car.” His eyes have a faraway look. We all sit comfortably silent as we dedicate a moment of silence for Harry, the dog I can’t remember.

“Remember the summer that dad built us that tall swing set? We had a lot of fun on it, didn’t we?” I asked. Jim nodded. Janet smiled. “I was so surprised when I came home from kindergarten one day to find two dead deer hanging from it.”

“I remember that,” Janet said flatly. Jim says nothing. Another silence as we remember the deer, heads hanging down, blood dripping into rusty buckets.

Mother had brought us together but she was not here to help me after thirty-five years of avoiding contact, just as she had not been there to protect me from them during our childhood.

“I liked to swim in the lake.” Janet looked at Jim. “Remember how we ran and jumped off the end of the pier?” He nods. I wince, remembering the interminable half-mile walk to the lake with the sun-softened tar burning my tiny bare feet as I tried to catch up.

“We sure swam a lot, didn’t we?” I look at my siblings. I’ve tried to remember something that my adult mind cann’t quite grasp as real. Maybe I made it up. “Do you remember a dead body floating in the lake?” I ask tentatively. I can still see the bloated stomach, fish-belly white, rising high above the water, the partially submerged face bobbing in and out of the water, unseeing eyes wide open.

“Yes,” my brother said. “I remember it,” his eyes meeting mine.

“Yes,” my sister said. “I remember it, too.”

“We never told anyone,” Janet says. The briefest of smiles passes between us. Mother would have been pleased.

by Kathie