Skald, were you the sibling closest to your mother? Because to me, having the one closest to her, or the one who’s most likely to be expressive without breaking down, be the only one who speaks makes a lot more sense than having a string of people there.
Dad died after 3 years of hell for everybody involved and quite a lot of emotional ugliness. When my brother announced that he and his gf had set a wedding date, my parents got upset that they weren’t waiting for Dad to heal; I had to tighten my fists until my nails bit into my palms to keep from smacking the parentals. At the wake, barely 5 months after the wedding, one of the most frequent remarks was “at least he got to see E married!” E was not there; at one point Mom said “and where is your brother now!” and I answered “at home, crying on his wife’s shoulder so hard she’ll need a change of clothes? At a guess.” I was right. Our “baby” brother was just sort of stunned… same as my father’s siblings, apparently 3 years with cancer aren’t enough of a warning… Mom was torn between anger at Dad for having died before he was 65 (don’t ask, explaining would add chapters, she sees this as a betrayal of their compact), sadness and inability to find her own head with both hands. Me… I was the one organizing and taking notes and saying “thank you, thank you”; several people remarked on how “remarkably serene” I was through it all. Like you, I’ve spent so much time learning to bottle myself that now I’m both extremely cool-headed in a crisis and a person who finds it difficult to cry. Lucky for me, my people took it from the good end; hopefully you’ll get the same reactions and not “what a cold sonabitch.”
That was a lovely tribute to what must have been a wonderful woman. Perhaps you’re not crying now, but eventually you will find your own way to grieve but in the meantime, don’t stress about it.
Big hugs to you.
Anyone who times the speeches in a funeral before a family name is said is a doper I want to buy the drink of their choice in the future.
I wish I had some words to help you with the entire speech thing at the funeral, but Catholic’s ( speaking of Emotionally Constipated) don’t do real people on the altar. It’s a total buzzkill, really. Which is why I dropped the entire matter all together.
These next couple of days are going to be very odd and emotionally charged for you. Take them one at a time and remember to breath to bring yourself back to center.
Skald I’m so sorry for your loss. You and your family are in my thoughts and prayers.
That was a lovely tribute to your mother. You were blessed to have her as a mother and she was blessed to have you as a son.
I am so sorry to hear of your loss. I enjoyed your tribute to your Mom and her influence on your life. I wish there were something I could say to make the pain less, but all I can do is send supporting thoughts your way. May whatever gods there be, be with you and your family in this difficult time.
I’m so sorry for your loss. I know what you mean about part of your psychology shutting down. I went through the same feelings when my father died 2 years ago. I was numb for the first 12 hours (also thinking that my family thought I was unfeeling, since my dad and I had a strained relationship) and then I wrote him a letter to put in his casket (forgiving him for his treatment of me during my childhood and that I understood that it was because he didn’t know how to be a father, not that he was a bad person, etc.). It was so cleansing and I finally felt love and loss at the same time. So the dam burst and I cried for the first time and my rage toward the hospital began (they gave him an accidental overdose of morphine after surgery).
I would recommend writing your feelings down and see what happens. When I was a teen, my grandmother died and I was a complete basket case. Two months later, my grandfather died and I shut down. I never cried or grieved his death and I regret it to this day.
My hope for you is that you have the ability to feel the grief that’s bubbling underneath.
That’s a very good idea, so naturally I am going to steal it.
Feel free. It would make me very happy if you did. 
{{Skald}}
I’m not going to repeat what the others have said about your siblings. But don’t let your nephews and nieces suffer for it. Cards and presents on their birthdays and Christmas / appropriate religious festival. Invites when they’re older. Etc. Blood is thicker than water.
Wow. I am so sorry for what you are going through.
But thank you so much for posting it. I still have both my parents, but I guess I am at an age where many people around me are losing theirs. I post on several boards, and a number of people have lost tone of both of their parents this year and written about it.
I can’t tell you how important it is for me to see how people walk through these things. I know that when my turn comes, I can do it like a lady, because you guys have done it like ladies and gentlemen.
It makes a difference. Thank you for sharing your experience with us.
Skald, you have my deepest sympathies. Really. And grief is different for everyone. You will find your way. Just let it happen on its own and in its own time.
–viva, fatherless child as of a few months ago
Well, not really. As I said in my last post, the funeral is this Saturday – i.e., tomorrow – and I’m givng the tribute. I suppose I’m just posting again to vent.
I’ve been staying at my father’s house, since this happened, and every single one of my siblings has been there at one time or another, mostly in the evenings. A good number of my cousins as well. One of my aunts and one of my brothers have been staying as well, and I got up early yesterday to make sure everybody had a good breakfast. Good and hot, because Corn Flakes are the last refuge of the ill-fed. So yesterday morning it was French toast and omelets and sausage and coffee and juice, and tomorrow morning I’m thinking blueberry pancakes and bacon and some fruit bowls and so forth.
It’s easier for me if I can keep busy. I’ve been as domestic as a straight boy can be and if I get any more so I’ll have to start wearing pearls and complaining about Eddie Haskill. Yesterday I laundered everything I could think of so I’d have something to do till it was time to make dinner. While I was putting load three or four in the dryer my dad, with whom I have a profoundly ambiguous relationship, thanked me for doing so much, and I lost it then and started crying, which was, at least, cathartic. My father, though, wanted to comfort me, to talk to me. Ordinarily I’d have told him that I’m not a yammerer, but I couldn’t; I just begged him to leave me alone.
Eventually I ran out of laundry. I was the only one in the house, as my brother, father, and aunt were all running errands, so I filled the time trying to fax my cousin a document from the funeral home so he can get a discount on his plane ticket when he flies in tomorrow. That was so frustrating I nearly screamed. I did, in fact, end up screaming at a telemarketer calling to persuade Mom to vote for Harold Ford Jr. for Tennessee senator. I tried to be calm; I meant to be calm; but after getting out the words, “Please listen closely,” I just bellowed that she was dead and that they should take us off their damn list and live stop calling.
I also realized late in the day that I’d screwed up. I had two client appointments and one prospect meeting, for people I’m trying to get writing work out of, but I had completely forgotten about them. Beth saved me, happily, by borrowing my planner and calling the clients and telling them I had a death in the family, so by the time I realized I had screwed myself, she had unscrewed me.
Last night I got around to taking **Nutty Bunny’s ** advice about writing a letter to my mother to put in the coffin. For no reason that makes any rational sense I went and bought some nice stationery, as if it matters, and a couple of new pens. I’m on five pages now and still going. The contents vary – one paragraph of love, one of regret, one of bile, repeat until pen runs out of ink.
Wow, this is disjointed.
As I said all the siblings have been gathering each at Dad’s house. I am thinking about strangling at least two of them. But that would be bad.
Tonight’s the visitation, or as my folk like to call it, the wake. It’s not an Irish-type wake, unfortunately; no booze is involved, as the non-Skald Rhymers belong to a holiness, pentecostal, born-again church that teaches that drinking alcohol is nearly as bad as getting the gay on you. No, it’ll just be people going to the funeral home to look at the embalmed body and saying Gee, Rhymers, we’re so sorry for your loss but at least she’s not suffering any more. She didn’t die, you know. God called her home. She’s in the bosom of the lamb. I am *not * looking forward to that by any stretch of the imagination, because it will take all my strength of will to not say this:
NO SHE ISN’T, YOU MORONS. SHE IS GONE. MOM IS DEAD, AND THAT BODY YOU ARE LOOKING AT IS NOT SHE. MOM WAS AN EMERGENT PROCESS CREATED BY NEUROLOGICAL PROCESSES AND ONCE THOSE NEURONS STOP FIRING, MOM CEASES TO BE. THAT IS NOT MOM. THERE IS NO MOM ANY MORE, SO SHUT THE FUCK UP!
That would not be conducive to a pacific wake.
But I’m going anyway. I’m going because I’ve decided to pick my battles, and I am definitely going to skip out on the post-funeral ritual fireezing frenzy at the church. This s another ridiculous element, by the way. The church is my sister’s, in south Memphis. We’ll have the funeral there at 1300 and it should last about 90 minutes. Then we drive across town in stupid goddamn ostentatious limousines for 45 minutes to the grave site, then do the burial. If the burial lasts for half an hour, say, then allowing for making our way to the cars we’ll be back in the goddamn limos at 4 o’clock, drive back to the church for the meal. This menu consists of nothing I am going to be able to eat, being a diabetic. Stupid fucking macaroni and cheese. Goddamn glazed ham. And tons of desserts. Yes, I can eat all that and then pop off to the hospital for a insulin shot. So my plan is to leave the house early for the ostensible purpose of doing a private visit at the church, so my car is there waiting for me when we get back from the burial, and then burning rubber out of there.
Okay. Deep cleansing breath.
I’m going to hit submit and then do something else. Thanks for giving me air to vent.
Take all the air you need, honey.
My condolences on your loss, Skald. (hug)
Remember we are here for you if you need to vent further or a shoulder to cry on.
I am so very sorry for your loss, Skald. You wrote a lovely tribute to your mother.
I know there is nothing I can say that will make things “better”. Please know you’re in my thoughts.
I’m so sorry for your loss, Skald. Please stop back and tell us how things went today. And feel free to continue to vent.
GT
This is 19-year-old Library Beth? Hmmm. I may have been wrong about the young lady.
Do what you need to do to get through the day. As for putting a letter in your mom’s coffin, I think that’s sweet. Both my kids asked if they could put something to be cremated with Grandpa…my son, a solution to one of his magic tricks, and my daughter, a piece of guitar sheet music.
I don’t know how I missed this till now… anyway, I am damn sorry, Skald- my thoughts & prayers are with you, for what they’re worth. I hope you got through yesterday as well as possible.
Or, “What happened at the wake and funeral”
The wake was Friday night. I had told myself I wasn’t going to go to it, because I wanted to keep working on my tribute to mother: I tend to multiple-edit everything but SDMB posts. But I changed my mind at the last second and went, and in fact I was the first of my immediate family to get there. Yay me. I’m so wonderful.
Anyway, I was the first of the Rhymers on the scene and arrived a couple of minutes before the stated beginning time of the viewing. But even so I wasn’t the first guest overall, not even close. there. The parking lot of the funeral home was so full I had to park in back; partly that was because there was another viewing of a body going on, but partly because my mother’s more distant relatives and many of her friends were already there. So I didn’t get the couple of minutes alone with her I’d hoped for. So I went into my supportive mode because it’s easier than talking about how I feel or showing anybody in the 4D world my true self. I showed late arrivals to the casket, and I walked to the casket with two of my cousins because they needed someone to run interference between them and my aunts, who would tell them they shouldn’t be crying in public.
I love my aunts. I really do. But damn, I wish they’d stop that. God damn it. Let people fucking cry already. There’s no damn need to make any more emotionally constipated Skalds. Can’t they fucking see it’s killing us?
Anyway. In short order my sisters and brothers arrived. There was a lot of general milling about and chatting and so forth. Sister #3 of 4 broke into tears when she saw Mom’s body in her casket, the first person to do so, and I tried to comfort her to no avail. I’m not even sure she was there. Her daughter, my favorite niece, was holding up one of her cousins as she approached the casket. Favorite niece, 14 years old, wasn’t crying, and I wasn’t sure whether to be proud of her strength or worried that she was buying into the Rhymer family crap about not showing your feelings. I know FN loved my mother, her grandmother, passionately, and I’m certain her grief was greater than her cousin’s, who after all had only lost a great-aunt she saw maybe once every three months, not practically two and three times a week like FN. But her cousin, having managed to escape the pernicious myth about never crying in public, was getting her cathartic weep in, while FN was exposed to me for too long while she was young.
Anywhistle.
I’m sick of talking about the viewing. After it was over I went back to my father’s house, where I’m staying in a vain attempt to be helpful. Every single one of my siblings was there too, even my idiot oldest brother. I wasn’t feeling sociable. I tried to work on my tribute, timing it; I didn’t want to go over 15 minutes and 10 was the target. I had a little ethical problem here. The non-Skald Rhymers, along with my aunts and cousins and practically all my mother’s friends, are Pentecostal Christians: biblical literalists apt to believe or say they believe that the death of a “saint” is a homecoming, that Mom is in Heaven. But I don’t believe in life after death (which is not to say that I disbelieve in it) and I didn’t feel comfortable saying that I did. But the notion of seeing Mother again was a comfort to the rest of them, I knew, and I wasn’t speaking just for myself: I was representing the family. So I had to walk a line.
Time passed. The next morning came. I went out early and drove about, putatively to find a copy place but in fact just aimlessly. Returning to Dad’s I showered and dressed and arranged with one of my younger cousins a signal he could give me during the tribute if I were going too fast, or if I seemed to be getting low in the blood sugar without noticing it. Then it was time to wait for the limousines, which were supposed to arrive an hour before the service was to begin and which were, of course, late. Luckily the church was only 5 minutes away. So I kept working on my letter to Mother, and when I was done I sealed it and burned rubber away, hoping for some alone time; I got to the church half an hour before anyone of my family.
But those Pentecostals were already assembling. Again no alone time. Nothing to be done for it now, so I went up to the casket and stood there for a while. I’m not sure what I said, except for one thing: I quoted a poem by Madeleine L’Engle. Here’s a few lines:
I kept having to shoo people away who wanted to comfort me or support me. I know they meant well, but they weren’t helping I just needed five fucking minutes alone with my mom, or what was left of my mom. I managed to tearfully gibber that out.
So now it was time for the funeral. I went outside to wait for the other Rhymers, riding in the limousines. I go back into dutiful supportive son mode and walk some old ladies in to the church. The other Rhymers arrive and the pallbearers assemble and we go in. I argue with Sister #2 of 4 about whether I should give her my coat. She says hand it over, you can’t be a pallbearer carrying it and you don’t want to wear it. I say I need it because the overcoat, unlike my suit coat, has big enough pockets for my diabetes kit: blood glucose monitor, emergency sugar, etc. I don’t go anywhere without that. She gets mad and waves me off.
Little Sister #3 loses it at the casket again. And so, to my surprise, does my brother Johnny. He’s always been the rock of the family, the leader, the first-born in every way but actual birth order, but he loses it. I have never in my life heard him cry. Not when our grandparents died when we were kids. Not when his life left him. If someone told me he never cried as a baby I wouldn’t be surprised. But at the casket we all heard a new sound in the universe as he wept for his mother.
The service begins. One of my mother’s two surviving sisters coordinates it. The first-cousin Rhymers make a little mini-choir and sing several songs in tribute to my mother. There are some nice remembrances. My eldest brother–not the one who’d just wept, the one doing his goddamn Spock imitation, the one who could never be bothered to come visit Mom – taps me on the shoulder and thanks me for doing what I’m about to do. Sister #2 of 4 does a reading from God’s Trombones, “Go Down Death.” During one particularly moving song from the Rhymer cousins, the church goes all Pentecostal and several people get “moved by the Spirit.” They start “shouting,” which, if non COGIC types saw it, would get called dancing, except of course they don’t dance. That’s up there with smoking and boys kissing boys in the litany of sins.
Then it’s my turn.
I go up to the pulpit and read my tribute. The smartest thing I’ve done this week, I discover, is going to the church early. If I hadn’t had my cathartic cry I’d never have made it through. But I do it, and the mourners seem to think I did well; I even get an ovation once I’m done. I also start shaking, not from emotion, but from low blood sugar. I’d checked my BG level before doing my tribute, and it was 90, so I ate half a dozen pieces of peppermint. 15 minutes later, after I’m done, I check it again because my left leg is numb and my right arm is starting to shake, and it had hardly moved. Usually stress makes your blood sugar go high, not low, but apparently I am a mutant. I go into that hypoglycemic haze where my brain isn’t working. I try to catch my young cousin’s eye but I can’t remember his name, but I get one of my older cousin’s attention and he whisks me to McDonald’s and gets me fed and back to the service. He’s diabetic too and we use his meter to make sure mine isn’t all wonky, and the readings agree. Yep, I’m a mutant.
When we get back I put my overcoat on before going in. I get cold easily, and when I get cold I tend to go hypoglycemic. We get back in time to hear the tail end of my pastor-uncle’s eulogy. I am fact glad I missed that, as, during the portion I hear, he manages to work in an anti-gay marriage dig. You see there’s an anti-gay marriage amendment on the tennessee ballot this election, and naturally since God hates fags so much it is his duty to inveigh against the evils of buggery and carpet munching at my mother’s funeral. My blood sugar is higher now so I leap up and in an outstanding display of ninja skills rip his head clean off.
Okay, not really. I just thought about it.
My uncle proceeds to do an altar call. Can’t miss an opportunity to get some converts. Then we do the recessional and drive out to the cemetary for the burial. We take the most circuitous route possible without actually driving backwards. Either the limo drivers are paid by the meter or we are, unbeknownst to me, being pursued by flying spaghetti monsters and are obliged to take evasive manuevers.
There’s not much to say about the burial. No, one thing. In addition to the ornate coffin there’s a vault, a steel casing the ground into which the coffin will be lowered and sealed. No dirt will actually touch the casket. Can’t have that. No sir. Can’t have the natural processes of decay reclaiming mother’s body. After all she needs to be whole when the rapture comes so Jesus can call her bodily up to heaven. Of course she’ll be trapped in a 3-inch think oak box inside a steel vault underneath two meters of topsoil so she might be delayed a little bit. On the other hand if Mother’s death was actually the result of vampiric attack this will prevent her from rising and going on a killing spree, a good idea since neither Buffy nor Angel live anywhere near here.
Yeah, the vault pisses me off. And the embalming, and the grotesquely ornate casket. I don’t believe in life after death, but I believe in the circle of life, and I was finding some comfort in the notion of Mother’s body becoming part of the Earth again, of her protoplasm finding expression in flowers and grass, which would in turn nourish birds and squirrels and other animals. But no, the non-Skald Rhymers are Pentecostals. We don’t believe in history, decay, or evolution, or the circle of life. Humans are unique in the universe, they think, so you can’t have them connected to this corrupt material world except to prey on it.
Deep breath.
Beloved Brother and Sister 3 of 4 both lose it again at the graveside. Eldest Brother is still imitating Mr. Spock complete with chopped Latinate responses to every question, though his ears need bobbing if he’s serious. Dad–well, I don’t really understand Dad. I haven’t talked about him much because of that. I know he loved Mom more than can be calculated; the dictionary entry on “uxurious” should just have his picture by it. But I don’t know what he’s thinking, except presumably that he’ll see her again once Jesus comes, assuming Jesus has a transporter to beam her out of her steel prison.
Okay, I’ll stop now. Thanks for listening to me.
Skald the Blatherskite