Gail didn’t like her mother. She wasn’t even one of those people who could say, “I LOVE my mother, but I don’t LIKE her very much.” She didn’t love her, she didn’t like her, she could even say she hated her, often without feeling a bit of guilt. Often, but not always. She felt she was justified as she dealt with memories of a childhood where abuse was doled out in daily doses, the way most mothers hand out chewable vitamins. And she felt she was justified as she lived through an adulthood stabbed intermittently but deeply by her mother’s jibes and fierce name-calling. But then came the two weeks in the ICU, seeing her mother come out of surgery writhing in pain, waving her leg that ended shockingly at the thigh, looking into her hollow morphine eyes. Gail wished now for the stormy skies of hate. Rain and thunder and lightning were so much easier to deal with than the pinprick pain of ice that pelted out of nowhere.
****
The funeral director was in with someone else, but the receptionist said she could help Gail. Gail sat quietly while the young woman went to retrieve the urn. Gail could see through the open door into the coffin showcase room. All the coffins had their lids open, an odd half-lid that encased a body from the waist down, leaving the torso and face exposed. Gail wondered why they didn’t employ mannequins to show the desired effect, but on second thought, she was relieved they didn’t. The white puffy quilted comforters, pulled back and arranged over each lid in a neat triangle, seemed so luxurious, far more luxurious than anything Gail slept under. She wondered idly if the display coffins were ever sold at a reduced rate. If there were scratch and bump sales. She wondered about guarantees and if there were ever any returns, and for a moment, she smiled.
The receptionist returned, carrying what Gail assumed was the urn, covered in a rich burgundy crushed velvet knapsack. “Here she is!” the receptionist said, and led Gail to a back room. Setting the knapsack on a mahogany table, the receptionist carefully untied the gold braided drawstrings and then shimmied the sack down in a sensuous striptease that Gail’s mother would have hated. Gail carefully examined the urn, as she knew she was supposed to, and she wondered what she was expected to say. “She looks good!” or “What a great job!” just seemed so inappropriate. Her mother’s name was spelled correctly, the dates were in order. “This is fine,” Gail finally said.
“Oh, and you’ll really like this!” The receptionist pulled out an envelope. Inside was a stiff certificate, printed on heavy paper, complete with a gold embossed seal. “This is her certificate of cremation!”
Gail held it and again wondered what to say.
“It shows she was cremated at Vallhalla!”
As opposed to where? Gail’s mother never won an award before, other than a few ribbons at a small county fair. Gail knew that those ribbons, three blue, two red, and a white, all for sewing, covered five different years and were still in an envelope in the bottom right dresser drawer in her mother’s silent apartment. There was still so much to sort through. “I suppose…I could frame it and put it next to the urn.”
“Oh, yes!” The receptionist beamed. “That would be lovely.”
Framing. Gail wasn’t even sure what she was going to do with the urn, let alone the certificate. She watched the receptionist bundle her mother back up in the burgundy velvet, and then she remembered the leg. “Oh, I need to ask you…”
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