She

After hearing a song that moved her very much, my mom the original musician said, "I want you to play that song at my funeral."

"Mom," habitual teenage smartass of the family said, "If it makes you feel better we'll promise to play that at your funeral, but probably we're all going to sing 'Ding-Dong the Witch Is Dead' as we back up the dump truck to have you hauled away!"

I said that to my mother, and we laughed like a couple of hyenas. It was 1977 and my mom was never going to die.

Early one October morning in 1988, after she had spent every minute of her last year confronting a word I still don't like to say that starts with 'c', my father called to tell me she was dead. That phone call was not happening. Still trying to remember what movie I heard it in as I hovered somewhere between Mars and Jupiter.

I had video editing clients driving in from out of town, which was why I wasn't at the hospital in response to my dad's call late the previous night. "She's not doing well," he had said. I needed to get a good night's sleep for this long-planned editing session (with out-of-towners!). I would stop by and spend all day with my mom afterward, I said. He was angry. I was angry. How dare he suggest that I needed to be at the hospital because my mom could die? She was going to get better sooner or later.

That morning, with no way to get in touch with my clients, and not being able to use a pen at the moment, I waited 30 minutes after the phone call to meet them at the door. I felt like a schmuck that they had driven all that way only to be turned back. I also knew I had a strange appointment at the hospital.

Nobody told me about the brick wall that had been set up in her hospital room, just at the point where my eyes would first see her lying there. I ran into it and crushed myself – poleaxed by a year of denial meeting an instant of reality. There she was, her head slightly tilted in a way I'd never seen, her mouth still open from trying to breathe. She had had breathing problems as her lungs got destroyed, but the oxygen had been turned off now and the tubes removed. Since I couldn't get past the corner and farther into the room, I just stood there. I could cry though. And singing anything was the last thing on my mind.

Back at the house later that day, it was time for an argument with my father and brother. There were all sorts of issues, and the underlying tone was unspoken. Mom was gone, and in our case so was what we had left as a (strange to even consider the word then) family. I don't know what my father and brother were thinking, but what I was thinking was, "Wow, I never knew until today that I had nothing at all in common with these two people." The glue of our family, which had been viewed as merely one of several supporting beams, had vanished and was not coming back.

My father and brother don't work on cars. I do. Their instinct was to flip through the yellow pages and point a finger to the "we handle nasty problems for you" page. My instinct was to go to the hardware store, buy wood, and get started on building a coffin for this woman who had no peer. I'd pick up 3 shovels too. I would be damned if a mortician got anywhere near her, damned if any of the industrial death equipment be associated with her, damned if, like at my friend's mom's funeral as we carried her casket to the grave, the "funeral director" spoke to us as if to a construction crew lining up a sewer pipe. There were also issues there related to my dad's church and the people who, with his approval, were going to turn the funeral into a circus sideshow. I had seen this before, and wanted no part.

She was my dad's wife, and he had known her the longest. I knew I was going to lose this one. They accused me of arguing about anything "just to argue." I'm used to that accusation, but you don't say that to a man when he's not just arguing about something to argue, but trying to convince two people of something very important as the clock is ticking. As I went downstairs, angrier than I've ever been, my brother, 3½ years older, went into my old room. Walking up to him, I did something I'd never done to anybody in my family. I held my raised middle finger to his face. Looking in his eyes, I said that he was not at my friend's mom's funeral – I was. I told him there was no way in hell I was having anything to do with the death racket – not for mom. Some things must be handled directly.

My brother and I had a bond there I should mention. When our father had decreed a few years before that our mangy dog Yogi, half sheepdog and all personality, was to be killed because he (and therefore the house) smelled bad from his terrible skin infections, the rest of us had assumed he would be buried in our large back yard. No, said the governor, that would create all sorts of problems if we ever sold the house later, and who knows what sort of health department violations would ensue. In an act for which I will always respect my brother, he went to our elderly neighbors and asked for permission to bury our dog in their yard. They, the neighbors we'd always considered cranky when we were kids, agreed without hesitation. We didn't consult my dad, since we knew he'd be backed into a corner with no retreat once it was done; he wasn't very well going to storm the neighbors and insist that he get a dog corpse back.

As I dug that dog's grave with my brother, and we lowered my old buddy into it together (with cans of dog food, an apple, and a poem I'd written about my dog and my father), we had done the only thing death allows you to do. I know my dog was gone and probably didn't have a clue what we were up to, but we had sweated with shovels and tears, and done what we could to know that at least this grouping of molecules so dear to us was mingled with the earth and yard it loved. You can do no more once death has struck.

You can, however, do a lot less. And I was sad beyond tears thinking that what healing might be available through such methods would not take place with my mother and me. My mom loved the mountains. What better way to settle this unfortunate journey than to build a casket from scratch, prepare her body ourselves, drive this woman (to whom we literally owed everything) to the mountains, then spend all day digging her grave, saying our goodbyes, and beginning the unending process of healing with the physical diversion and soul repair of filling back every last shovel's weight of dirt. Why was this not something that would be considered?

There were laws. We had no experience. There wasn't time. Some things you just don't do yourself. I lost. I was the baby of the family, and outnumbered.

Being logical enough to realize that funerals are for the living, I had my own funeral service for my mother. Since there was only one body, I did without. I was the only one there as far as I know.

My daughter was born a year later. If there ever were two people in this world I wish had met, it was she and my mom. They would have loved to go shopping together, play piano together, and laugh at what a messed up person their son and father was. Would have been funny. And I can see my mom's eyes glowing looking at the world's best kid.

One winter weekend when my daughter was 6, we were running errands in a part of town we didn't get to much. We drove by the cemetery where they had buried my mom's body. I said, "T, that's where your grandmother, my mom, is buried."

"Can we go see?"

I had removed myself from that other funeral service, and didn't even really consider that my mom was buried there. But that was my deal, not T's. "Sure. We'll have to find out where her grave is though." Felt strange asking the guy at the office where my mom was buried. He was nice. Gave us the rough directions and we walked there through the grass.

My daughter loves to read and write more than anybody I know. She was fascinated by the gravestones, and liked that my mom's had a nickname on it – a little poetry there for the poet. She started to read my mom's birth date, "February 10 . . .", then stopped and looked at me with a smile. It was February 10, 1996, and we were there on her grandmother's birthday.

I never appreciated my mom enough. She always gave to me and I ran around being a punk most of the time. I felt bad that I hadn't spent nearly enough time with her during what turned out to be her last year. Punk life had just seemed so important. I had a business to run. There was scuba diving to be done.

Months after she died, my brother was going through mom's things, handling that horrible task when we all just wanted to ignore. He flipped through one of the notebooks she'd had in the hospital. Toward the middle, in the shaky writing of a dying woman, were 3 pages with brief goodbye notes written to us – one page apiece. I never got to say goodbye to my mother, but she had said goodbye to me.

What does a mother do when she's borne an independent, stubborn soul? She loves him.

This world and its behavior are not what I would like. My attitude was not what my mother had wanted. She was much more laid back about things. Still, Sylvia Carole Hardman came to terms. It's too easy to see just a parent and ignore the person, and I've things to learn yet from her journey. We have, as my friend Jimmy Cliff the socialist says, many rivers to cross.

August 30, 2003

Charley Hardman (send him mail) was born in Washington DC.

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