It wasn’t until a week and a half later that Gail thought about her mother’s leg. When she stopped her truck outside the funeral home, a tremble went down to her own foot, she traced it from thigh to calf to ankle to toes, and she tromped down hard, even though the truck was already at a stop. She was there to pick up her mother’s ashes, encased in the urn Gail so painstakingly picked out, trying to find a balance between her mother’s love for bright color and her need for subtlety, for taste. In the end, Gail chose a brass urn, an urn that resembled a very shiny brick. It was rectangular and smooth and glossy, with her mother’s name and dates engraved in a swirly, yet not showy, script. The brass would appeal to the color; the simple shape and lack of angels and rainbows to the subtlety.
But what about her mother’s leg?
Gail put the truck in park, turned off the ignition. Since her mother’s death a week and a half ago, there were so many things to get done. Gail kept two lists, one of chores she needed to do to keep her own life going, and one detailing how to conclude her mother’s. And now, she realized she had her mother cremated without her entire body there. Her right leg was missing, amputated just above the knee, twelve days prior to death. Gail never thought about asking for that severed leg, so that her mother’s entire body could be reunited and incinerated together.
Gail shuddered.
In her head, she’d pictured her mother whole again, in whatever afterlife there was. Wherever her mother was. Up, down, somewhere in the middle in a purgatory that sounded worse than Hell itself. But could she be put together again if her leg wasn’t there with her?
Gail flipped open her cell, started to call the hospital, the phone number she now knew by heart after two grueling weeks in the ICU. But then she stopped. Better to talk to the funeral director first, to see if it was even possible to cremate the leg now, to add it to the ashes in the brass brick.
Gail started to step out of her truck, but she had to stop for the hailstorm of grief that left her legs wobbly. Hailstorms were always unexpected; whenever she heard the sudden rattle of frozen stones from the sky, Gail stood at the window and watched as the hail bounced on the ground, shiny marbles that seemed out of place and alien. Sometimes she ran out and grabbed the largest one, to measure and make over before it melted down her kitchen drain. Mostly, she just watched the hail flail in the grass until the skies broke out in sun or sent a downpour. This new hailstorm, that left her body shaken and her eyes aching, was no more expected than ice marbles from heaven. The hail first arrived after the amputation, and it showed no signs of abating, even after her mother’s death. Especially after her death.
Waiting until the shaking stopped, until she could dry her eyes and know they would stay that way, at least for a little while, Gail got out of the truck and headed in to the funeral home.
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