“Do you want to stay in a room with your Grandmother?”
What the hell?
I look at my mom like she has five heads. Is this a sick joke? Why would I want to stay in a room with my recently deceased Granmom’s body?
“What?” I reply, confused.
Did she seriously just ask me to stay in a room overnight for several days with the corpse of my now passed Granmother? I’m old enough now to know that we’re not rich, but I always assumed that when someone died we’d have enough money to pay for separate rooms. You know: one for the deceased, another for the living.
I look closely at my mom.
Her red, puffy eyes tell me no, this wasn’t a joke. What am I even supposed to say something to that? I don’t know, so instead I play with the worn blue quilt that was pulled across her bed. There are tangles of thread and string here and there. I grab hold of a string and begin to pull it gently as my mom glances over at me from her inherited, white jewelry box.
“Your Grandmother is coming upstate with us for the funeral. Are you okay with sharing a room with her?”
Oh. That made more sense. But, wait, “Why is Grandmom coming?”
My mom turns to look at me. I know I’m being difficult: it’s just who I am. She should be used to it by now anyway; she’s known me for over sixteen years now. “She wants to pay her respects to my mother,” my mom grumbled. I know Mom dislikes Grandmom more than I did. My own mother is definitely a better person than I will ever be if she is willing to bring this woman along. The woman was a sore topic for most of those in my family and I didn’t want to stay in a room with her either…
“No, I don’t want to share a room with her,” I’d rather have the dead one, I add silently. I don’t have to tell my mom that, though, she already knows.
Turning her body toward me, I’m given the look. “I know you don’t like her, but we have to get a hotel because not everyone will fit in the house upstate. Your brothers are sharing one room, your Grandmother and you have the other.”
I stare back at her, wordlessly.
Seriously, could I have the other grandmother? It would be better company. At least I know that she listened to and loved me. “Is that okay?” my mom asks again.
Didn’t we establish that it wasn’t okay?
“Where are you and Dad gonna stay?” I ask, biding my time.
“In the middle bedroom at the house; Aunt Kaye and Uncle Frank are taking the front room and his kids are taking what they can of the back bedroom and living room.” I nod with understanding. There’s not even enough beds for my cousins and their significant others within the remaining areas. I don’t bother arguing because I know it’s a lost cause.
Share a hotel room or sleep in the cold Toyota. I briefly contemplate how cold the Camry could get on a January night in the mountains.
Well below freezing, I guessed.
I look at my Mom for another moment before speaking, still contemplating. “I thought you meant your mother at first.”
“What?” My mom moves across the room now to her closet, and is gathering articles of clothing to wear for the week. She’s going up before us to help make the arrangements with her only sibling, my uncle. I begged to come along at first, but was told I needed to try to attend school as best I could before leaving for the rest of the week. I don’t bother to mention that I’m in no shape to go to school, let alone try to learn.
“When you asked if I wanted to share a room,” I clarify to my mom now as she stops to watch me closely, “I thought you meant Granmom…”
This takes a minute to register in my mother’s grief altered state: what I’d meant. “Oh! Oh, no! I meant the living one -”
“Yeah, I got that. I just wasn’t thinking about her. I was thinking about the one who just died, you know.” I could see her eyes begin to water again. Oh no, I thought to myself, please don’t cry. If you start, I’ll start.
Luckily, she hears my silent plea and laughs quietly. “Sorry,” she says.
“You should be.” I pause for a minute before adding, “Are you sure I can’t share a room with the other one instead? I still like her better.”
I recall only a few months ago on the way to a choir dress rehearsal, my mom and brother were in the front seat of the car, while I was riding in the back, discussing Granmom. Mere days before the frail woman moved in with us again; her health worsened by the day; her time left clearly numbered. Not that her health was great to begin with; it’d been going downhill since her husband died six years before; maybe even longer. As a child, I wouldn’t have noticed; too young and innocent to understand. I’m not entirely sure how we got on the topic, as our conversations were always rather strange during car rides… But, on this evening, my mom had stated that if Granmom died while she was staying with us, she was going to set the woman’s body in the backseat of one of our cars with a blanket over her so as to make her seem like she was just napping, and drive her back up to Wilkes-Barre herself.
In a later conversation, my mom admitted that she’d only said this because she wasn’t sure if Keith, the family undertaker, would make the trip down to Philadelphia to retrieve the body. I told her that there was a difference between being frugal and being cheap. This idea: it was just plain cheap.
Regardless of the reason, my brother and I were amused, and slightly horrified, at her idea. John, my older brother, made comments about “What would an officer say if she got pulled over on the turnpike and there was a corpse in the backseat with a blanket over it?” I chimed in that she could just cover her head with the blanket. No one would even know, especially if it was dark out!
My mother, scandalized by this idea, turned to look at me in the backseat to reply, “I would never do that! That’d kill her!” John and I stared back at her, and began laughing.
Luckily for my Granmom, she passed away while at my Uncle’s house, not mine. He was kind enough to call the family undertaker to deal with all the travel arrangements.
Sitting on my mom’s familiar bed, I’m reminded briefly of my Granpop’s funeral when I was nine; one I’ll never forget. The man (a curmudgeon who I barely knew long enough to be able to mimic his grumpy-about-the-world-traits, but still managed to continue his anti-social tradition as an adult myself; as if his attitude was a gene he was able to pass onto me) didn’t want anyone to attend; it was his dying wish. It snowed a foot on the day he was buried. Only our immediate family went to the gravesite. Our limo barely made it up the forty degree angled hill in the ironically named Plains, Pa, saved only by the determination of our driver. The poor priest, who after nearly sliding butt-first down the long, steep hill to the gravesite, struggled to not only obtain the trowel from the dirt-fill bucket at his feet, but then was unable to scatter the frozen dirt from the trowel and onto the casket before us. He nearly had a heart attack of his own as a large piece of dirt, finally left the trowel and pelted off of the casket before rolling to settle at the feet of the widow: my Granmom. We all held our breath, concerned for her reaction. Needlessly, it turned out, as the woman was laughing so hard at the absurdity of our situation that she could barely control herself. To this day, I’m still not sure why there were burly men in the basement of the funeral home during his wake who looked as if they belonged to the Ukrainian mob, gathered to play poker and smoke.
I was nine then; I didn’t ask questions.
My mom laughs, ignoring my question entirely. For a moment, I feel like a bad person. That thought crept up again: I wish it’d been the other one. I push it out of my head as fast as I can. My mom sits next to me on her bed. “Do I have to share a room with her?”
“Yes, it’ll save us a lot of hassle.”
I only say yes to make her happy.
I’d much rather slept on nothing in the house than in my own bed in the Holiday Inn any day of the week.
The back seat of the Camry looks awfully warm and cozy as I grab my bags out of the trunk and drag them through the lobby to our room a week later.
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