A few people who had known my mom when I was living here came up to me to give their condolences.
The rest were strangers, orbiting the edge of the room, faces pinched in the universal shape of small-town curiosity.
I told myself I wouldn’t look into the casket. But, standing here, I had a hypnotic urge to walk over there and peer at her face. I needed to know she was really dead, and that I couldn’t just drive over to my childhood home and see her standing on the porch with her arms wide open, waiting for me to come home.
I braced myself, ready for the phantom ache, but it didn’t come. Maybe I was too empty to feel anything more. Maybe I’d finally reached the bottom.
The casket was front and center, the cheapest pine, perched on a wheeled altar beneath a spray of fake lilies. I steeled myself before looking, but it still knocked the air out of me: That was her, or at least the body that had once been my mother.
They’d made her up, of course: cheeks rouged and lips a glossy pink she’d never have chosen in life. Her hair was sleek and unmoving, like a helmet. She wore a dress I didn’t recognize. A navy sheath with lace at the collar, prim and tight.
I thought about the dozens of times she’d gotten dressed in front of me, unashamed, and how she always said comfort was the only thing worth dying for.
She would have hated this dress. I wanted to take it off her. I imagined climbing into the casket and unzipping it, swapping itout for her ancient Giants tee and sweatpants, the old cigarette burns still visible on the fabric.
My chest felt packed with wet sand. I wondered if anyone else noticed the bad makeup, the hair, the way her hands were folded like she was praying for someone to come and save her soul.
But nobody was going to come and save her. She wouldn’t ever wake up, and I would never have the chance to give her “sober and well” pep talks.
I didn’t even notice Caiden by my side, or that his hand reached for mine, or that I was clenching it so tightly that my fingers began to hurt.
The tears still did not come.
They did not come when we sat down, and the priest began to speak. They did not come when they played the song Brokedown Palace by The Grateful Dead. They did not come when me and a few others went up to say a few words about my mother.
“I have not seen my mom in seven years. When she was sober, she was a good and loving mom. When she was on a binge, she was a stranger. Today, I am mourning my mother for who she was when she was herself. The one who I yearned for, the one who I needed, the one who I miss, the one who taught me and loved me in her own way, the one who slipped away and was eaten by the monster of addiction.”
I continued my speech with sentimental words, ones that did not take much effort to say. Some people clapped, some cried, others stayed silent and still.
When it was over, the crowd shuffled out into the pale light like a herd of ghosts. Most people avoided eye contact, as if grief might be contagious on a day like this. I must have looked like a zombie.
My legs barely worked. Caiden’s hand stayed on my elbow, steady and insistent, guiding me through the knot of lingerers clogging the foyer.
Outside, the world was too bright. The sky was a washed-out gradient, clouds thin as a hospital sheet.
I blinked into it, letting my vision swim, and tried not to shiver when the wind scraped my bare knees. I didn’t want to go to the graveside service. I wanted to run, to get in the car and drive until I hit water.
But Caiden’s presence held me. He didn’t say anything, didn’t try to comfort me, just walked at my side with his jaw set, eyes fixed on the lines of cars and the slow, awkward procession of people who had nothing better to do on a weekday than watch somebody get planted in the ground.
The drive to the cemetery felt like drifting through a fever dream. I didn’t speak, and neither did Caiden. I watched the scenery jump past the window.
We were in his car following the hearse, and I watched the back of it, knowing that my mother’s body was in the back of it, slipping further away. The tension built higher, yet I swallowed it.
I wanted her to come back. I wanted her to pop out of the coffin and open the door to the hearse.
It wouldn’t happen, though, and that thought was slowly breaking me.
We took the long way around, past the strip mall and the shuttered bowling alley where my mother once tried to bowl a perfect game on her birthday and ended up hurling in the parking lot.
At the cemetery gate, a cluster of crows watched from the fencepost, black and motionless as jury members. I stared at them, daring them to fly off, but they didn’t. They just blinked and let the wind ruffle their feathers.
We gathered at the plot, a small hollow on a hill overlooking the town. The graves were so close together the headstones jostled for space, names and years crowding into each other like gossip.
The priest said something about ashes and dust, afterlife and peace, and then it was time.
Two men in suits lowered my mother into the earth, the ropes squealing against the lacquered handles. I watched the box slip down, further and further until it was too far gone to catch, like a decayed falling star.
There was a moment after the casket landed where everything stopped. The wind flattened, the traffic on the distant highway seemed to stall in place, and even the crows sucked in their laughter.
