Aftermath

Here at Funeral Central the emails have been rocketing back and forth at the speed of thought. The Sisters have gone home for a few days to preserve their jobs, silly girls, and I've been distracting them all day with all we have to do -- plan a funeral, write an obit, figure out the catering, sort the pictures.

It's the pictures that get to me. In almost every one, Mom seems more beautiful and happier than I ever saw her as a child. It's quite something. It's like the joke told by David Foster Wallace in a commencement speech: The big fish says to the little fish, "The water sure is nice today," and the little fish says, "What's water?" I was in perfect water and didn't even know it.

For three days now I have felt like an amputee with phantom limb syndrome. The obligation, or habit, or even, let's say, urge to visit her, to carry out my duties of care, arises several times a day, completely unconnected to the fact that she is gone.

In the months, weeks, days and even just hours before her death, I thought I would feel nothing when it was over. Much of her was gone already, it seemed. But sitting beside her bed after she died, I sobbed. At the loss of my mother, of course, but also at the improbable miracle of life -- that it happens at all, and that it ends.