The Eulogy My Mother Already Wrote

So for four years, I drove to my mother’s house every morning before my own shift at the clinic, and I set out her pills in the Tuesday-to-Sunday box, seven little doors, and I made her oatmeal the way she liked it, with the brown sugar stirred in before the milk and not after, because she said after made it gritty. I washed her hair over the kitchen sink on Wednesdays and Saturdays with a plastic cup, the way the home health nurse taught me, tilting her head back gentle so the water ran away from her face. I drove her to physical therapy on Mondays and to church on Sundays and to Dr. Instenes twice a year for the checkups that told us, each time, a little more of what we already knew.

Greg called on her birthday, most years. He came up for Christmas, most years, for one night, and left the morning after with his girls still in their pajamas in the back seat. He sent flowers twice when she was in the hospital with pneumonia, nice ones, real roses, and I will not pretend that did not matter to her. It did. She kept the card from the second bouquet in her Bible for a long time.

I am not telling you my brother did nothing. I am telling you what he did, and I am telling you what I did, so that when I tell you what happened at that funeral, you will understand why it landed the way it landed, and why I did not have to raise my voice to make it land.

My own two grandchildren, Mason, who is eight, and Addison, who just turned six, used to come with me to Mama’s house most Saturdays while their mother worked the early shift at the hospital in Wausau. Mama could not get down on the floor with them anymore, but she would sit in her recliner with a lap tray and teach Mason to play gin rummy, cheating outrageously and denying it with a straight face, and she would let Addison brush her hair with a soft-bristle brush for as long as the child wanted, which was sometimes twenty minutes at a stretch, Mama sitting perfectly still and humming. Those two children were not an afterthought to her. They were half the reason she fought as hard as she did to stay in her own kitchen instead of a facility. So when Greg told Mr. Lahti I should sit with the grandkids, as if that were a lesser job, a consolation prize, I thought about how many Saturday afternoons I had watched her hum while a six-year-old worked a brush through her thin white hair, and I thought, you have no idea what you just called small.

The notes started the second year.