For as long as I can remember, my mother has instructed me on how to plan her funeral. She wants me to read a eulogy. She wants my brother to play the cello. She shows me where to find her password document, the spot she keeps the keys to the filing cabinet.
She wants to be buried with the stuffed duck her parents bought her when she was about to undergo surgery as a child. It’s deep brown and still soft, with an evergreen head and beady eyes. And she wants to be buried with her parents, in the same memorial lawn with grass wet and crisp enough to make my legs itch and short iron fences separating the different gravestones, different lives.
My mother is in her 50s, still the loudest voice at every dinner party as she tells stories about my brother and me that make us roll our eyes, still swimming an hour each day before arriving home for dinner soggy, hair dripping, wearing old leggings and a sagging swimsuit she keeps because she refuses to spend money on a new one. She sleeps too little and wakes up with more energy than anyone else in our family. She eats vegetables like she enjoys them. On family hikes, she’s always the one urging us to go just around the bend up there, just across the river. Just a little farther.
Never enough cheap airline tickets
When I went off to college, my mother began sending me texts each day: about the airline sale she bought tickets from in case I want to come home for the weekend, about how I would love the bakery that just opened up back home, about the hike she went on with my father that morning, about the airline ticket sale again.
In January, she texts me to say that she still rewatches my commencement speech, replaying my movements as I look into the crowd and say, “I never wanted to be an adult. I never wanted to have to navigate the world alone.”
“How did you grow so quickly? Feels like yesterday that you and Katie were walking Molarchy around the pet and hobby show. I blinked, and now you’re gone,” she texts.
She never wanted me to grow up either, she says. To her, I’m still in second grade rolling my pink Zuca backpack, the one with butterflies on the fabric, to class. I don’t tell her that, to me, she’s still driving me to school in our old Volvo and the sneakers she would wear before changing into her work heels. She’s still in her black leggings, her sagging swimsuit.
Sleeping at Cedar Sinai
My mother lost her parents too early. When her father died, she told my father that she felt like an orphan. I spent two years watching her work late and then drive immediately down to Cedar Sinai hospital to sleep on the couch in the patient room, drive back early, and work again. I think everyone who has loved and lost someone lost them too early. I don’t think we are ever ready to let people go.
Since childhood, she has been fostering a keen awareness of her own mortality within me. I think, maybe, she considers it her last duty as a parent: to raise my brother and I to be truly self-sufficient, to let us know that she, too, will die someday.
Over spring break, she tells me she thinks she’s almost done. My brother will be applying to college in the fall. And then, she can die content, she says. “I did such a good job of raising you, you don’t even need me anymore,” she says. She makes me promise to care for him.
She has taught us that we are all frail and fleeting. As though maybe if she emailed us a funeral guest list and showed us where the keys to the filing cabinet were, we might be ready. Maybe if she forced us to picture it – my brother’s cello symphony, my eulogy, her memorial plot – it might hurt a little less.
And still, I remember turning 19 and sitting by the dry lake outside my dorm watching the sun set to dark orange and wondering how I had gone so far. And still, I wake up and check my phone for texts about discounted airline tickets. And still, I am not ready to let her go.
What does a longer lifespan mean to you? Talented local columnists tag-team every Friday to tackle the challenges that inform your choices — whether you’re pushing 17 or 70. Recent Stanford Center on Longevity Visiting Scholar Susan Nash looks at life experiences through an acerbic personal lens, while other longtime writers take the macro view to examine how society will change as the aging population grows ever larger. Check in every Friday to expand your vision of living the long game and send us your feedback, column suggestions and ideas for future coverage to newsroom@baycitynews.com.