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LegacyMarch 02, 2006 My mother died 10 years ago Tuesday, on February 28, 1996. It was a leap year: I remember hoping she'd hang on till the 29th, so that she'd have a distinctive death day to go with her distinctive birthday -- Halloween. She died around 8 p.m. at home. My three siblings and I were all there; my father, characteristically, wasn't. So far I haven't lived a life that looks much like my mother's, but the dying at home part is an example I hope I can emulate when the time comes. My mother came close to dying the previous Christmas. We spent most of the day in the ICU waiting room at New England Baptist Hospital, hunkered down with a couple of other families with relatives in crisis. This was nowhere near as macabre or depressing as it may sound, but still -- dying at home is better. I hadn't realized that when someone dies at home, the coroner has to give the OK before the body can be removed from the premises. (Foul play is more likely at home than in a hospital?) No one from the coroner's office actually has to show up, but as I remember the coroner was out on call, so we hung out downstairs in the house we'd all grown up in, along with a police officer who, it turned out, had been the youth officer when my sister was in high school. One story about youthful shenanigans led to another and pretty soon we were in hysterics. Finally the coroner called in, gave the OK to proceed, and the fellows from the funeral home showed up. Possibly they were waiting in the wings -- I can't remember that part, but I do recall that they looked like twin extras from The Godfather and that they almost dropped my mother's body on their way out the door. I think the door had closed before my barely stifled laughter came pouring out. I'd heard enough "when my mother died" stories from friends that even though my mother was not much of a presence in my adult life I half expected to get hit with a delayed wallop. One of my uncles had had a nervous breakdown when his mother died, but their generations weren't in the habit of "working things through" the way mine is, or at least the way I am: my parents bequeathed me enough psychological landmines that I've had to defuse them as I go or risk creative paralysis. So no wallop, either in the weeks following my mother's death or in the years since. During the days leading up to February 28, I thought from time to time that I should or would write something about the 10th anniversary, but I spent Tuesday looking after horses and editing a messy manuscript; the only blog I could manage was about license plates. Yesterday, though -- yesterday night I was thinking about my mother, because yesterday I spent a lot of time fuming. One lesson I've learned (and relearned, and learned again) over the years is that anger is a symptom, like a fever. It means something's out of balance; it means something's struggling for attention. The trick isn't to stuff the anger, or to take a swing at whoever seems to be the cause of it: the trick is to follow it to its source and deal with that. (Take two Serenity Prayers and sort out what you can change and what you have to live with.) Well, I'm working on it, and in the process I'm thinking of my mother, because she had only two ways of dealing with her own vast roiling anger: stuff it or explode (often with alcohol for a detonator). Mustering "the courage to change the things I can" rarely comes easy, but if my mother's life showed me one thing, it's that the cost of not doing it is more than I want to pay. In memoriam
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