My mother took a week off work to make the journey to Port Nix, her mother’s hometown, even though it was only a day-and-a-half away by car.
“I haven’t decided whether we’ll stay a couple of days,” she explained when I asked, not taking her eyes off the expanse of interstate sprawled out ahead of us. “Or if we’ll leave as soon as we’re finished.”
“Okay.” I’d just swapped out one CD for another, and I snapped my Discman’s lid shut, hoping it wouldn’t skip too horribly. “When do you think you’ll know?”
My mom thought this over seriously, mulling the different possibilities, before settling on, “No idea.”
I nodded, as though this made sense coming from my mother. My mother, who lived by to-do lists and carefully crafted itineraries. She and my father once had an unusually heated argument over whether a two hour layover was enough for an international flight. In the end, our first flight had been delayed and we made the connecting flight by the skin of our teeth, ultimately convincing each of my parents they’d been proven correct.
My grandmother was in the backseat, tucked away neatly inside my mother’s tote bag. We hit a bump and a corner of the bag tilted downward, revealing the tiniest peek of her bronze urn. I turned back to the road ahead, wishing it were my father in the passenger seat and me in the back, watching a living Nana grimace as Dad cracked jokes about phallic-sounding town names on exit signs and trying to convince us all to play yet another round of “I Spy”.
Then again, my father in his current state probably wouldn’t be the best road trip companion. We might get away with driving in the carpool lane, but there’d be too much dirt and other matter to clean out of the faux leather seats, to say nothing of the smell.
He’d died just over two years ago, a month after my fifteenth birthday. A heart attack, completely out of the blue. His first, no family history, just a sudden nasty surprise in the parking lot of his office building on an uncharacteristically warm Friday morning in March.
Nana, my mom’s mother, had died just three weeks prior to this trip of a heart attack as well, though hers was just one in a long line of life-threatening ailments, each more dramatic than the last, until the ultimately fatal one felt more like a long-awaited coda than unexpected tragedy. I didn’t know Nana well; we’d met a handful of times at scattered family gatherings and holidays, and she sent me birthday cards absent any messages aside from the preprinted pleasantries and Best wishes, Nana Mary.
“There’s a motel nearby,” my mother said. “At least there was one the last time I was in the area. We’ll stay there tonight and finish the drive to Port Nix tomorrow morning.”
I nodded, having lowered my headphones once again. I didn’t lift them back up, and soon we were pulling into the parking lot of a long, squat two-story structure. My mother parked in the shade of a large sign reading Motel Guests Only: Violators Will Be Towed. We both climbed out of the car together, and as my mother opened the backdoor she stared at her tote bag for several long moments.
“Do you want me to carry it?” I offered, though the idea of Nana bumping against my side, even while buffered by burlap and bronze, wasn’t particularly appealing.
“That’s all right.” My mother brushed my shoulder lightly as she reached for the bag. “But thank you, honey.”
With that, we headed inside. The lobby was devoid of customers and looked like it had last been renovated sometime in the late ‘70s. I was struck with a feeling that a nuclear war could ravage the world around us, but this space might just remain untouched, unaware anything had even happened.
“You have a reservation?” The woman at the front desk looked up from her magazine. When my mother shook her head, she said, “That’s fine. Two, right?”
Three, actually, I thought, and my lips twitched with the effort of not saying it. My mother’s eyes darted sideways, her expression a silent Don’t.
“That’s right, just two.” She pulled the tote bag closer to her side. “Thanks so much.”
“I wasn’t going to say it,” I reassured her as we made our way down a dimly-lit hallway toward our room. “I only thought it.”
“I thought it too,” she admitted, and she wrapped an arm around my shoulder, though her smile didn’t quite reach her eyes.
The room was small, with two twin beds. My mom sat on one and looked around, her hand tightly clutching the handle of her bag. “Do you think there’s a safe? I didn’t think to ask.”
“Do you think someone’s going to steal Nana’s ashes?” My mother’s lips twitched, and I pushed further. “Maybe put her on eBay? She would’ve hated that. Didn’t you say she thought the internet was designed by Satan?”
“You’re very funny,” my mother said, and she tried again to smile, once again only partially succeeding. Closing her eyes, she said, half to herself, “Christ, I’m tired.”
I understand, I thought, but I didn’t, not really. My mother hadn’t been close to Nana. There’d been multiple stretches of time in which they didn’t speak at all, and when they did it always seemed strained. Not the way it had been between my father and I, who I still occasionally thought I caught glimpses of on the street out of the corner of my eye. No matter how many times it happened, it still stopped me in my tracks every time.
———
“Do you ever think you see Dad?” I asked later that evening, as we sat at a diner down the street. There was foam poking out of the booth’s skirting, and I pulled at it absently as we ate. “Like, in crowds?”
My mother always ordered club sandwiches at diners, but today she’d requested an omelet. She lowered her fork, then shook her head. “Sometimes I think I hear him when I’m at the grocery store, or at the train station. Then I turn my head and realize it sounds nothing like him. Is it like that?”
I nodded. “Once I thought I saw him, but it was an old man.” I fell silent, letting go of the foam and trying not to think about my father never getting to be an old man, how he’d be forever frozen in time by those who knew him as a forty-six-year-old. After a moment, I turned back to my cheeseburger deluxe. “I’m sorry.”
“What for?”
I shrugged. “Bringing up Dad.”
“Why should you be sorry about that?”
I shrugged again, for lack of a better option. “Because this trip isn’t about him.”
“Don’t apologize.” My mom’s hand slid across the table, and she grasped my forearm. “We can always talk about him.”
I nodded, but I didn’t mention him further. I’d spent the past two years talking about him; this was about Mom losing her own mother. It felt vaguely selfish to make this about that other loss, even as a growing part of me suspected every death for the rest of my life would inadvertently end up being a little bit about Dad.
“Perfect.” I imagined him sprawled out in the booth next to ours, grinning at me. “I don’t have any complaints. You know me, always needing to be the center of attention.”
He hadn’t, but it was the sort of thing he’d say, just to make me laugh.
———
My mom and I laughed a lot in the days after my father died. We cried a lot too, but the strange new world we’d been involuntarily thrust into occasionally seemed, for lack of a better term, grotesquely funny. Months after the funeral, my mother admitted she’d been gripped by a firm conviction not to purchase the most affordable coffin offered by the funeral director.
“It wasn’t about the money,” she explained. “It’s just… it was pale blue, with silver clasps. It looked just like our luggage. I couldn’t have him buried in something that looked like our suitcase.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “He might not have minded. He kept saying he wanted us to travel more. Maybe we could have gotten him through airport security.”
That set us both off, not feeling as terrible as we might about laughing because we were doing it together. At least it was just the two of us on that occasion; the wake had been a minefield of absurd moments that took me by surprise and threatened to make me crack.
There’d been the way Dad’s jaw hadn’t been the way he usually set it, the funeral director doing a decent job but having no idea how he’d looked when he was alive. As we gazed into the casket for the first time, my first instinct was that something had gone wrong and my father’s corpse had been swapped for some other poor dead man who looked vaguely like him. I realized my mistake quickly, and as we stared at him, the terrible silence seeming to elongate exponentially with each passing second, I murmured to my mother what I’d first suspected.
She put a hand to her lips, turning to look at me with eyes that seemed to now be permanently puffy, then whispered, “It would be just like him to swap bodies as a joke.”
“That, or maybe he wanted to look different for the viewing. Maybe he owed someone money and hoped they wouldn’t recognize him.”
My mother snorted, then her face immediately fell as she spotted the priest approaching us. Father Donaghue hardly batted an eye, though; I suspect he’d seen any and all reactions to dead loved ones by now.
Please don’t get me wrong; we did laugh a lot in those hazy, abstract days where time didn’t seem to pass as it should, but we wept a lot more, or simply existed in silence, struggling to understand what had just occurred. The laughter came only when those tears or silences became so unbearable there was nothing else to do, no other way to express to the universe our confusion and sorrow that it had taken this man, this husband, this father, from the two of us. There were times I wasn’t certain if I was about to laugh or cry, and even once I had I still wasn’t always sure which I’d settled on. One might lead into the other, or both might happen at once. I knew my father would prefer we laugh, but it was never something I could actively choose.
My mother hadn’t laughed, not truly, since getting the call that Nana died. She hadn’t cried either, beyond a few tears that rolled down her cheeks as she sat at the kitchen table, studying the receiver once the call had ended, ones she hardly seemed to notice or acknowledge.
That night in our motel room, as I crept back from the bathroom, I saw my mother was still awake. I paused, and she turned to look at me. Nothing was said, and after a moment I climbed into her twin bed. It was a tight fit, even as my mother shifted to the side, but neither of us seemed to mind. My mother pulled me close to her, letting out a soft noise as she did.
“Are you okay?” I felt stupid the moment the words came out of my mouth.
She made the quiet grunting noise again. “Yes. No. I don’t want to burden you with this.”
“You’re not burdening me with anything.” I shifted in place slightly, wrapping my arm around her, a new sense of protectiveness washing over me toward someone who’d always been the one who protected me. “I’m seventeen. I can handle this sort of thing. Besides, I know what it’s like.” I paused, then admitted, “I mean, I know it’s different in your case. Everything about you and Nana is different from me and Dad.”
My mother shook her head, giving me that steady look she directed toward me more and more these days, one that started when Dad died and only increased with time. It was one I’d come to understand was her regarding me as an adult, or something close to it.
“It’s different, but in the end it’s all the same,” she said. “Losing a parent– I hate that you had to experience that before I did.”
“We both lost Dad,” I reminded her, and she nodded, but her gaze was still far-off.
“I know you’ve been trying to cheer me up, and I appreciate it.” Her voice was hardly above a whisper. “I really do, Anna. And I wish I could laugh the way we did when it was your dad and everything was hell, but…” She trailed off.
I thought this over, then asked, “What was she like? I never really knew her.”
“She was…” My mother reached up, running a hand through her hair. “Scared, I think. The world frightened her, and her way of handling that was to get angry. We didn’t really see eye-to-eye.”
I nodded. “Was she mean to you?”
My mother exhaled. “I don’t think she meant to be– she wanted what was best for me. It came from a place of love. But, yes, she was mean to me, and I could be mean back.”
“Did Grandpa take sides?”
“No. He was always working, and when he was home he was very determined to pretend that everything was fine. He meant well too, but he lived in his own world.”
We both fell silent at that, and I thought of Grandpa now, still living in his own world, one that even he had no control over. We’d visited him in the nursing home shortly after Nana’s memorial service. He didn’t know who we were, didn’t even understand that his wife of fifty years was gone. A barbed blessing; at least he wouldn’t have to mourn her death.
“She hated your father,” Mom whispered. “Thought he wasn’t serious enough. She tried to talk me out of marrying him.”
“How did you react to that?”
She hesitated, then admitted, “I told her to go fuck herself.”
I stared at her, then burst out laughing. My mother smiled too, though it was mixed with unmistakable guilt. “I stand by it, completely, but I still wish I hadn’t said it. Or I wish things had been different. That she’d been different. That I’d been different. That…” She trailed off again. “I thought when she died I wouldn’t be angry at her anymore. I love her so much, and I know she loved me, but I’m still angry at her.”
I didn’t know how to respond to this, and I doubted there was any one right answer, so I instead burrowed my head into the crook between my mother’s shoulder and her neck.
“When we laughed about your dad, I know that’s what he would have wanted,” she went on. “We were honoring him. There are so many times I’ve wanted to laugh about the same sort of things since she died, but she wasn’t like that. She would have called it disrespectful.”
“I think I get that,” I said. “But do you think she would’ve wanted you to just wallow?”
“Honestly?” She hesitated. “Yeah, a bit. I think that’s really what she would have wanted.”
We didn’t say anything for a long while, instead lying side-by-side as I resolved to be there for my mother, even if I didn’t know how.
———
I woke up before my mother the next morning. I let her sleep as I showered and got dressed. It felt strange, the vibe of starting the day in a motel room evoking memories of vacations as opposed to the task ahead of spreading what was left of Nana in Port Nix.
The urn sat on the dresser opposite our beds, beside a television that looked like it had been manufactured before I was born. I stepped toward it, and before I could stop myself, I had unscrewed the lid. I don’t know what I was expecting– the mysteries behind my mom and Nana’s relationship, perhaps– but I just found a pile of what looked like lumpy gray sand.
I was acutely aware my dad would know the perfect thing to say, and as I looked down at what remained of Nana I found myself feeling as though, one by one, the people who’d come before me were being pulled away, a pair of scissors emerging periodically to snip away another string tethering me to them. There’d come a time, I knew, when there’d be no strings left to cut, but I forced that thought away, half-believing despite all we’d been through that my mother and I would live forever.
She stirred, and I quickly replaced the urn’s lid, spinning it to the right and hurrying back to my own bed. She stared at me groggily, as though she wasn’t quite sure where she was, then she managed a small smile.
“Sleep well?”
I nodded. “You?”
“Well enough.” She reached across the space between the two beds and brushed my hand. “Thank you for last night.”
———
A different woman checked us out than had checked us in the day before. While my mother paid, I leaned against the wall nearest the door, vaguely aware of a repetitive beeping outside.
“Ah, jeez,” the woman at the desk said, glancing up. “Someone must’ve parked in the lot overnight again.”
“Hm?” my mother asked, only half-listening as she signed the credit card receipt.
“It’s a real problem. Folks who aren’t guests use the lot as their own garage. We’ve started cracking down on it, but they don’t seem to learn.”
“How do you know which cars belong to guests and which ones don’t?” I asked.
“The pass in the window,” the receptionist explained. She paused. “You got a pass to put in the window when you checked in yesterday, right? A blue one?”
My mother raised her head as I turned toward the window and saw which car was being lifted into the air by the tow truck. “Mom.”
I didn’t have to say anything more; she was already out the door, her tote bag banging wildly at her side.
“Shit,” the receptionist muttered, hurrying after her.
I’d reached the parking lot myself when my mother’s foot caught against the low cement barrier at the far end of one of the parking spots. She jerked forward, and I thought she was going to fall, but she caught her balance in time. Her bag wasn’t so lucky; it flew open and I knew what was going to happen just before it actually did.
Several pens, a notepad, a map, her wallet, and Nana’s urn flew through the air. Nana’s urn hit the asphalt once, twice, three times, and then it rolled merrily on its way as Nana herself tumbled across the ground, the lump of her stretching into a crooked line.
“Oh, shit,” the receptionist said, more loudly this time, her eyes wide. “Shit, shit.”
She rushed toward the tow truck, waving her arms, while my mother stood in place, seemingly rooted to the ground. I hurried toward her, but she didn’t look up, instead just staring open-mouthed at what was left of her own mother.
“Mom, I’m so sorry,” I blurted out upon reaching her. She hardly reacted, but I kept speaking. “I opened the urn this morning– I didn’t put the lid back on tightly enough.”
She looked up at me, expression completely unreadable beyond a sense of shock. I bent down, trying as best I could to sweep Nana back into her urn, and my mother fell to her knees beside me. I looked up, bracing myself for whatever it was that would come, and, once again, I realized what was going to happen seconds before it did.
She let out a noise, a horrible, guttural noise that I don’t think I’ll ever fully erase from my mind. Then my mother began to laugh, great gasping laughs that mingled with sobs as she tugged my hands away from Nana’s ashes and instead pulled me close to her. She squeezed me tightly, her body wracked all the while with laughter. When she released me, she gazed upward, as though expecting to see Nana there, then down at the ashes. She looked up again, and as she did, she seemed to shrug, her face a million different expressions at once, a private reckoning of sorts. She wiped her eyes, but her smile remained.
We didn’t talk much in the years that followed about that trip, but whenever it came up a small, sad smile would play at the corners of my mother’s mouth, and she didn’t have to say a thing. I knew she was thinking about that, just as I was, more than I remembered us leaving in the successfully rescued car, our motel room fully comped, and us finally reaching the sleepy harbor town of Port Nix and scattering what we could successfully salvage of Nana in the bay near her childhood home.
Just as I had with Dad’s funeral, it was that absurd, aching laughter I thought of before anything, that message to the universe of You want to fuck with me that badly? Fine, I’ll fuck with you. Then, of course, the memory of the pain followed; the pain that never truly went away but simply went quiet, became manageable, became one of the many parts of who we were. It was impossible to separate the two, but that moment in the parking lot was a sign I hadn’t realized I’d been waiting for, one that the world in all its horror and beauty was still out there, just waiting for us to rediscover it.
Pressing my head against my mother’s shoulder and returning her embrace, I felt a love toward both her and those who were gone that I knew I’d never be able to put into words.