The Pearls At My Mothers Visitation
No offense. As if offense were a coat you could hand a person and expect her to put it on polite.
I stood there a second with my mother’s funeral program still folded in my hand, feeling the paper go soft and damp at the edges where my fingers gripped it too hard, and I became aware, in a distant sort of way, of every small sound in that room. The rustle of someone’s good dress behind me in line. A baby fussing two rows back, being hushed. The particular creak the funeral home’s old hardwood floor made under careful church shoes. I noticed all of it because I needed somewhere else to put my attention besides the pearls still catching the light at Stephanie’s throat, bright and small and entirely wrong against everything else in that room.
I want to tell you I had a clever answer ready. I did not. I had forty years of being raised by Dorothy Whitfield ready, and what that raising did was lock my jaw and put my hand out to the next person in line, who happened to be Carol Dietz from the church, who hugged me and said my mother had been the best casserole cook in three counties, and I said thank you, and the line kept moving, and the moment Stephanie had handed me sat in my chest like a swallowed stone.
I did not reach for the pearls. I did not say one word about them in that room. I want to explain why, because I know some of you reading this would have had those pearls off her neck before she finished her sentence, and I understand that feeling, I felt it too. But my mother was lying in a casket forty feet from where we stood, with half the county filing past to pay respects, and the last thing I was going to give her funeral was a public fight over jewelry. Mama spent eighty years teaching me that some battles are not worth winning in front of an audience. I decided, standing right there with my hand still half extended toward Carol Dietz, that I would wait until the family was all in one room, away from strangers, away from flowers and a guest book and a preacher watching the clock. I did not know yet how that room would come together, or who would be the one to open the door I could not open myself. I only knew I was not doing this today, over my mother’s body, in front of people who had known her longer than Stephanie had been alive.