Life Will Be the Death of Me Read online

  She was gracious and dignified, two qualities I am in short supply of. My grace is grit, and my dignity is outrage. She would cover her mouth when she laughed, and she hated being photographed—she was from that era. I always wanted my mom to smile big. I wanted that for her. She probably didn’t care about it, but I wanted her to be freer. I wanted her to throw caution to the wind, not be so ladylike, to be a little bit bawdy and crass—I wanted her to be more like me.

  She was nothing like me. My mother would have probably hated me, had I not been her daughter. She was warm and fuzzy and chunky with lots of side pockets of meat to grab onto, which always made me feel like I was home. It’s why I love meaty pets and meaty babies and meaty people. My mom wanted the best for her kids, but she and I both knew that she was probably not the person who would be providing it. She never wanted you to be sad—or to cry. She had a ton of compassion. And empathy in spades. She always wanted everyone to be happy, to feel better. She was soft with her touch, and always had her arms open for anyone who needed comfort.

  She worried about Shana and Roy. She always told me she never worried about me. She never held any of my past behavior against me; she never passed judgment—she was always ready with new unconditional love. She was my mother—the person who would love me more perfectly than anyone else ever would and never asked for much in return. When my dad and I went through our rough years, she did whatever she could to make the situation better for me. She knew my father was an asshole. She knew I was one too, and with two assholes in such close proximity, I’m sure she wondered what it was about her personality that drew those types of people to her.

  * * *

  • • •

  “It takes an asshole to make an asshole. You got it from your father,” she told me after I told her I was pregnant at sixteen and planning to move to Niagara Falls, where I could raise my baby in peace. When my mom yelled at you it was hard to take her seriously—it was almost like she had peanut butter in her mouth. Hearing my mother curse always put a smile on my face, even when things were bad. She didn’t do it often, but when she did it, you looked up.

  “You’re not having a baby. You’ll ruin your life. I’ll let you do almost anything else, but I will not let you bring a child into this world—not while you’re still acting like one. You have no idea what that responsibility is like.”

  “Well, it doesn’t seem that hard,” I told her. “You can just sleep all the time and never show up to anything.”

  I was terrible as a teenager. I always had a knee-jerk reaction to things I didn’t like hearing. I put my mother through hell, but she never gave up on me, and she never stopped loving me. She always told me she knew I would turn out okay, and that I just needed my independence, and that once I was an adult, I would shake myself out. Maybe that was another thing she made true, simply by saying it.

  When my father and I used to go to war, he would yell at me and throw his hands up and say, “She’s not right! Something is wrong with her!”

  My mom would tell him not to talk about me like that—that I was in pain and I needed to get it out of my system. I overheard her say that to him once while they were arguing about me. I thought then about how out of focus that seemed. It has nothing to do with pain—I just want a different family. I know now that it had everything to do with pain, and that what I wanted was my family back in one piece. If I took control of making my family dysfunctional, then I would never have to mourn anyone again.

  * * *

  • • •

  My best friend from high school told me many years later that my mom was the first person to tell her she loved her. I couldn’t believe that. I could believe my mom did something like that, but I also couldn’t believe her own parents had never told her they loved her. Another broad reminder that your experience isn’t like everyone else’s. I never felt unloved. I felt disappointed, and abandoned, but I never felt like I wasn’t loved.

  “No one had ever told me that before,” my friend said. “Your mom told me she loved me and that I was lovable. She just somehow knew I needed to hear that.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The day of the funeral, I headed upstairs to my mom’s medicine cabinet. Roy was already standing there looking through the options. “What do we got?” I asked.

  “Valium, Norco?” he said.

  “That’s like Vicodin.”

  “Codeine?”

  “That’s good.”

  “Percocet?”

  “That’s pretty strong. Give me the Percocet and you take the rest. By the way, all of these things make you constipated,” I told him.

  Roy pursed his lips to indicate he had bigger problems at the moment, but I knew, as a pharmacological intuit, I had the duty to inform him of all pertinent side effects. I had been prescribing drugs to people for years, and I knew the ethical guidelines that go with said profession. I can tell by someone’s weight, body type, personality, and mood what the right dosage for them will be. I’d known my brother my whole life. He needed a Vicodin.

  My dad walked out of the closet he shared with my mom wearing a pair of suspenders strapped to a pair of khakis and a shirt that he couldn’t button all the way. He looked like a giant baby.

  “I don’t think so, buddy,” I told him.

  “Nothing fits,” he declared.

  “Neither does what you’re wearing.”

  “What are you two doing in there?” he asked, cocking his head to one side, playfully. “Careful with that stuff. It’s strong.”

  Roy elbowed me, like we were twelve. Once I was an adult, I knew I always had the upper hand with my father, simply by virtue of telling the truth.

  “It’s Percocet,” I told him. “Do you want one?”

  “No, I don’t touch the stuff. But you should take two. I don’t want you to have another one of your hysterical hospital episodes at the funeral.”

  I wondered if my father was relieved that my mother was dead. I remember looking at him in those suspenders with his giant belly protruding, thinking, Why on earth did I bother fighting so hard to keep you alive, when my mother was the one worth fighting for? Then I thought about my mother watching us from where she believed she was going, and thought, She’s already laughing at us, and then I was laughing, and then my father, and then Roy.

  My father’s plan for my mother’s funeral was exactly the kind of hijinks we’d all learned to expect from him. The funeral was a long afternoon of avoiding eye contact with anyone Mormon. This was the epitome of our family. We couldn’t even get death right.

  After my mom died, my dad acted like my sisters and I were just going to pick up where she left off, as if there had been some indication that we had any of her talent or gift for homemaking. He simply presumed that because we were related to my mother, we could all make a casserole out of matzoh. My sisters would complain about him showing up at their houses demanding a fresh-cooked meal. Nothing is more annoying than someone who can’t cook pretending they can, and none of us can cook, but somehow during that time, my father must have convinced Simone that she had the gift. She got on this recipe kick for a while—because my father was tricking her into making food for him—and she’d talk about cooking as if she had just somehow magically inherited my mother’s culinary skills. She acted like she was the first person who ever roasted a chicken with peaches. Hopefully, the last.

  * * *

  • • •

  I grew up with people always telling me that I looked like my mother. When I was a teenager, my mother was old and chubby in my eyes—I loved her, but I didn’t want to look like her. Now that she’s gone, I always look for myself in pictures of her. I want to resemble her now. Probably the same way parents look for themselves in their children. I guess it’s all about whoever is on the other side of the looking glass. Now I want to look like my mother, and—guess what—now that I’m older, I