Speechless.
Mom's going under. Dad's helping her as much as he can, and she's as comfortable as drugs can make her, but it's still not a pretty sight. She hasn't eaten in days, and hasn't been able to swallow much more than a few sips of water since Monday. It won't be long, now, not long at all, which is both the blessing and the curse of it.
She'll go soon, and sometime next week there'll be a service where whatever remains of her spirit after her body has been consigned to the cleansing fire will be commended into whatever comes after this part of our existence.
I told Dad today that I don't want some God-babbling churchfuck who doesn't know the pole in his ass from a stick in the mud speaking at her service. Nanny's memorial was horrible. The guy hadn't known her, and it sounded like it. Dad agreed. Nevertheless, we'll need someone to speak, since we can't count on any of us being strong enough to do it without losing our shit completely. Not that I'm scared of public speaking; after dancing in a bra and belt set in front of 200 drunken rednecks, you lose your fear of stuttering, but I rather imagine I'll be too busy crying to rest-in-peace the family.
It was his thought, and my sister's, that maybe I should write something for the minister to read. No formal request has been made, but he said we should all think about it.
The prospect is . . . tremendous. It's an honor, a great one, but it's not one I would've asked for. I'll do it, of course, since I can't stomach the thought of paying someone else just to get it wrong. It's just that I have no idea what to say.
I didn't know her all that well. She was my mother, not my friend, and I'm not about to make the mistake of assuming that "Mom" is all there is to a woman, or is even the most important or interesting part of a woman's life. She could be friendly and fun, but ultimately she was hard to get close to, and she could be more vicious than anyone I have ever met. Believe me when I say that she made some bad decisions that nearly tore the family to pieces.
She was a deeply flawed woman, and she hurt me and my sister badly. When I learned that the wicked stepmother in the fairy stories I loved had originally been the wicked mother, I felt a shock of recognition. They still tell stories about my family, it's just that the names have been changed to protect the guilty and the no-longer-innocent.
And at the sticky, ugly root of it, she and I were the same kind of creature. She'd been whipped, though, until she felt guilty about what she was. I gave up on that once I saw what it did to her. So I understand her in a way that maybe the others don't, and never will. I understood her darkness, and I knew so very little of her light. The good side that everyone wants to hear about in a eulogy, that always seemed to me like a facade, a cloth covering a deep, dark pit. And everything that she was, everything that she truly was lived at the bottom of that pit and crawled out of there at some time or other. Sometimes it was a wild but good thing that wanted to play or laugh or do something just a little wicked, and sometimes it was an eldritch, nasty thing that only wanted to take a bite out of us.
She wasn't a bad woman. She just had too much guilt and fear, I think, to ever develop the comfort and wildness that you really need to control your inner monsters.
And that's what she taught me. That there's nothing wrong with being a wolf, unless you're the kind that tries to wear Grandmother's skin, or powders its fur and sweetens its voice with a lump of chalk to convince the cowering kids that it's really Mama Goat. Wolves are only dangerous when they're pretending to be something else entirely.
This isn't a lesson I think the rest of the family will care to hear. Embrace your inner slut, free your inner bitch, be a raving madwoman when the time is right, because the whole world can tell when you're faking it. Molasses ain't white sugar, and if you cook like it was, everything sure tastes bitter.
So I feel hardly equal to the task of memorializing in a short speech the qualities she had that were unrelentingly positive. But of all of us, I'm the closest to her who has a facility with words, so it falls to me. And perhaps it's appropriate that it does. But it's a large thing to be asked to do, to speak for a family you were never sure approved of you about a woman who abandoned and betrayed you when you were too young to understand what was happening. It's a kind of validation, but not the kind you ever really want to get.
How do I avoid the platitudes? Gone but not forgotten. Touched so many lives. Devoted daughter, proud wife, loving mother. Death is a release from sorrow. All we have is each other. It's hard, finding words that aren't worn smooth already.
I love her. I don't know what else I can possibly say.
Oh, yeah, no doubt I'll find the words. It's what I do. But the idea of it makes me wince. It's a huge thing to be asked, really; to draw some meaning out of death and grief, to say the words that formally recall the deceased and also release her, to start friends and family on the long, dusty road of mourning with a few breadcrumbs of hope to follow. It's like being asked to understand, so that you can explain what happened. And there's no understanding, no understanding it at all.
I can't explain why this has to happen. I can't explain death, or why we have to have an awareness of it, a fear of it. I can't explain why our human grief is so much messier than the clean grief of the animals we sometimes leave behind when we go. I can offer no assurances of what comes after, for her or for us.
And I don't know, I really don't, what that leaves me to say.
She'll go soon, and sometime next week there'll be a service where whatever remains of her spirit after her body has been consigned to the cleansing fire will be commended into whatever comes after this part of our existence.
I told Dad today that I don't want some God-babbling churchfuck who doesn't know the pole in his ass from a stick in the mud speaking at her service. Nanny's memorial was horrible. The guy hadn't known her, and it sounded like it. Dad agreed. Nevertheless, we'll need someone to speak, since we can't count on any of us being strong enough to do it without losing our shit completely. Not that I'm scared of public speaking; after dancing in a bra and belt set in front of 200 drunken rednecks, you lose your fear of stuttering, but I rather imagine I'll be too busy crying to rest-in-peace the family.
It was his thought, and my sister's, that maybe I should write something for the minister to read. No formal request has been made, but he said we should all think about it.
The prospect is . . . tremendous. It's an honor, a great one, but it's not one I would've asked for. I'll do it, of course, since I can't stomach the thought of paying someone else just to get it wrong. It's just that I have no idea what to say.
I didn't know her all that well. She was my mother, not my friend, and I'm not about to make the mistake of assuming that "Mom" is all there is to a woman, or is even the most important or interesting part of a woman's life. She could be friendly and fun, but ultimately she was hard to get close to, and she could be more vicious than anyone I have ever met. Believe me when I say that she made some bad decisions that nearly tore the family to pieces.
She was a deeply flawed woman, and she hurt me and my sister badly. When I learned that the wicked stepmother in the fairy stories I loved had originally been the wicked mother, I felt a shock of recognition. They still tell stories about my family, it's just that the names have been changed to protect the guilty and the no-longer-innocent.
And at the sticky, ugly root of it, she and I were the same kind of creature. She'd been whipped, though, until she felt guilty about what she was. I gave up on that once I saw what it did to her. So I understand her in a way that maybe the others don't, and never will. I understood her darkness, and I knew so very little of her light. The good side that everyone wants to hear about in a eulogy, that always seemed to me like a facade, a cloth covering a deep, dark pit. And everything that she was, everything that she truly was lived at the bottom of that pit and crawled out of there at some time or other. Sometimes it was a wild but good thing that wanted to play or laugh or do something just a little wicked, and sometimes it was an eldritch, nasty thing that only wanted to take a bite out of us.
She wasn't a bad woman. She just had too much guilt and fear, I think, to ever develop the comfort and wildness that you really need to control your inner monsters.
And that's what she taught me. That there's nothing wrong with being a wolf, unless you're the kind that tries to wear Grandmother's skin, or powders its fur and sweetens its voice with a lump of chalk to convince the cowering kids that it's really Mama Goat. Wolves are only dangerous when they're pretending to be something else entirely.
This isn't a lesson I think the rest of the family will care to hear. Embrace your inner slut, free your inner bitch, be a raving madwoman when the time is right, because the whole world can tell when you're faking it. Molasses ain't white sugar, and if you cook like it was, everything sure tastes bitter.
So I feel hardly equal to the task of memorializing in a short speech the qualities she had that were unrelentingly positive. But of all of us, I'm the closest to her who has a facility with words, so it falls to me. And perhaps it's appropriate that it does. But it's a large thing to be asked to do, to speak for a family you were never sure approved of you about a woman who abandoned and betrayed you when you were too young to understand what was happening. It's a kind of validation, but not the kind you ever really want to get.
How do I avoid the platitudes? Gone but not forgotten. Touched so many lives. Devoted daughter, proud wife, loving mother. Death is a release from sorrow. All we have is each other. It's hard, finding words that aren't worn smooth already.
I love her. I don't know what else I can possibly say.
Oh, yeah, no doubt I'll find the words. It's what I do. But the idea of it makes me wince. It's a huge thing to be asked, really; to draw some meaning out of death and grief, to say the words that formally recall the deceased and also release her, to start friends and family on the long, dusty road of mourning with a few breadcrumbs of hope to follow. It's like being asked to understand, so that you can explain what happened. And there's no understanding, no understanding it at all.
I can't explain why this has to happen. I can't explain death, or why we have to have an awareness of it, a fear of it. I can't explain why our human grief is so much messier than the clean grief of the animals we sometimes leave behind when we go. I can offer no assurances of what comes after, for her or for us.
And I don't know, I really don't, what that leaves me to say.