The Plain Pine Box Mama Asked For
“I will talk how I like. I’m eighty-six. Plain pine, and spend the rest on somebody hungry.”
She said it again at Easter, and again in front of Pastor Marv Engstrom when he brought her communion. The last week of her life, with an oxygen line under her nose and her hands gone thin as paper, she said it one more time, and she made me look her in the eye.
“You’ll do it?”
“I’ll do it.”
“Not Noreen. Noreen will want to do it fancy.”
“Mama.”
“She loves me, that’s why,” Mama said. “She’s got a lot of love and not enough places to put it. Be patient with her when it comes.”
I thought I understood what she meant. I did not.
Mama died on a Sunday morning at twenty minutes to six, in the first week of October, with the harvest moon still hanging over Bernie’s garden and the first combines already running on the Dressler place across the road.
She went easily. I want to say that for anyone who has sat in that room. Bernie was asleep in the recliner by the door. I was on the edge of her bed holding her hand, and I felt the breathing change, long gaps and then a small sigh, and then a very long gap.
At the last, she opened her eyes. They were as clear as a girl’s. She looked past me at the window, and she said one word.
“Noreen.”
Then she was gone.
I sat there a long time. Then I woke Bernie, and I called the hospice nurse, and then I called my sister.
She did not pick up.
I called again at six, at ten after, and at twenty after. I called eleven times in all. I left messages that got shorter each time, until the last one was only, “Noreen, please call me.”
It was past nine when she finally called back. She had been in a school gym in Omaha, in the stands at her granddaughter Paige’s volleyball tournament, where Gary had made her leave her phone in the car. She walked out between games and saw eleven missed calls from me.
I will not describe the sound she made when I told her. I have heard it once since, and I never want to hear it again.
She drove the ninety miles in an hour and ten minutes and does not remember any of it. She came through our kitchen door with her coat open and her face wrecked and ran to the back bedroom, and I let her go in alone. When she came out, she held on to me a long time.
I thought that moment had mended everything. I truly did.
By Sunday night she had stopped crying. By Monday morning she had started arranging, and I did not understand then that the arranging was the crying. I did not understand that a woman can pour her whole grief into a spreadsheet and a guest list and a casket she can point to, because the other thing she is holding is too heavy to pick up.
We did not speak in the parking lot of the funeral home, or in the car. Bernie drove, and I sat with my hands in my lap, watching the stubble fields go by, thinking that I had been right and that I felt terrible.
That afternoon, at my kitchen table, I asked myself an ugly question. Was I doing this for Mama, or was I doing it at Noreen?