MaineCourse

Iron Up Her Back

I don't suppose we'll hear from the teenage tourists again until they reach Managua on Thursday.

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This follows “More Than a Phone Call” , and I don’t think it stands alone. It’s a phone call I had with my mother about the funeral for the husband of my mother’s friend who shot himself in his living room.

“You went to the service for Alice’s husband”?

“We did. It was a beautiful day, seven o’clock in the evening. Not even hot, no hotter than eighty.

“Where was he buried?”

“The cemetery on Oak Hill Road. It’s out 41, on a hill near Whirlpool?”

“There are no hills near Whirlpool. it must have been past the airport.”

My mother loves it when I tell her she’s mistaken about something she knows is true. I think we might have been arguing perceptions.

Patiently, she answered, “If you turn right near Whirlpool you go up a hill.”

“Whirlpool is as flat as the nearby airport runway... .”

“There were about twenty-five people. The cemetery had only markers, no upright stones, and it was touching to see the children and grandchildren running about, playing. Although my father wouldn’t have allowed it. He said stepping on graves was disrespectful. Alice was wearing a black pant’s suit she bought for the service. She weighs eighty-four pounds and her fitter said she was a size zero. I didn’t know there was such a thing.”

“Eighty-four pounds. How tall is she?”

“Not much taller than I, but she started losing weight when George got cancer.”

“A woman who scrubs the blood of her husband off her carpets. I don’t know...I pictured someone bigger. How about Lisa, the daughter he was so close to?”

“She was still pretty tore up.”

My precise mother never says “tore up,” and she’s probably cringing reading this, but it’s more evocative than “torn up.” She said it this time, so it stays.

“Lisa came with her husband and children. You know I always thought she had gay tendencies, but that’s because she had so closely imitated her father’s mannerisms. She walks like he did.”

“Not to be morbid, but you saw them lower his body into the grave?”

“No, no, he was cremated. They buried his urn next to his daughter’s grave, or they sprinkled his ashes on it. I couldn’t tell from where I sat. You remember that is what they did with Mack’s sister, Joan. Her ashes were placed in the ground next to her mother’s. I don’t know what people will do with me. Not that they will listen to what I want.”

Years ago, not long after her brother died, my mother and I argued about her burial. She wants to be cremated and her ashes flung out to sea, or buried in a garden, or enriched with an emulsion of sunflower seeds and fed to the cardinals - anything but a body in a grave. It’s not lying in dirt, it’s the waste of space, of her burden on the environment. I was adamant. I wanted her in the ground, somewhere I could go and talk to her. I didn’t want to be following some nesting song bird just just to say, “Hi.” It wasn’t too long after this conversation that I decided chasing birds wasn’t so bad.

“We listen, you know we do. We’ll do what you want.”

“Just be sure you play a recording of Tess (Brian’s wife) on the Tabla Drums. It’s hard to get people to do what you want. Alice couldn’t get the minister she wanted for the funeral. You know, they weren’t church going people. But she has iron up her back, she told me, ‘ We’re just going to have to do it ourselves.’ “

All right, a little bit of a morbid entry to be putting a comment on for me. But i am just saying hi, and that we safely made it to Granada. We had a good dinner last night, and a great breakfast this morning. And today we are going to masaya to spend a little time in the market place and then head back to granada. Tomorrow sometime in the afternoon we are going to head to managua, to stay at the quaker house. We should have dinner with hils friends, and then thursday morning we depart and do more traveling than is healthy. anway, everything is going very well. And we are excited to be coming home. It has been a great trip, but a long one none the less.
Much love
As always
Mateo

Posted by Matt.

mateo screwed up. he meant to say that FRIDAY morning we depart and do more traveling than we want to, etc etc. i wrote an email to michael that can go on the blog. love and Light, Hilary (party at my house saturday. come over whenever, leave whenever, hang out, eat food, call my parents if you're coming so we know numbers. 978 263 8062. and PLEASE come! i leave again sunday afternoon for quaker stuff.)

Posted by LaChica.

WEll, you evidently missed or forgot her "I'll donate my body to medical school" phase. Which was uncomfortably close to the signed "don't take extra measures" phase when she had some tiny little hole drilled in her back to relieve nerve pressure. It wasn't the operation, but her recovery that she was anxious about. I said, "Helen, for god's sake, they'll just have another cup of coffee and a cig. instead of giving you a thump! to get your heart going again." Maybe donating came BEFORE cremation; Michael didn't understand the "improvement."

Yes, I had pictured the reverse of a diminutive woman.

Posted by peter.

Posted by Michael at August 4, 2004 06:55 AM