Hymn to Her, Part 2
Driving down to New Jersey, my mom's many eras, Crying Hugs, and flower arrangement names.
As I write this, a couple of dudes are on the roof of the cabin we have in our backyard. My mom loved our little cabin. It came with the house, and its existence is kind of mysterious. Mom and my stepdad, Bill, would come up to visit, and it would be the first place we’d go to hang out.
She loved the cabin, I think, for a couple of reasons. At first, I thought it was because Mom could smoke there. I’d play old songs on my 8-track player, we’d have some wine, she’d smoke, and suddenly we would be having a party.
But lately, since she died, I am thinking there were other reasons. For years growing up, mom held down the fort, making sure my sister and I had enough food, clothes, and just things. Imagine being a single mom in the 1980s in the middle of a recession, and your truck driver husband just up and leaves you with a mortgage and two bratty high schoolers?
Mom hustled to keep the house after dad left. She got an executive secretary job in Fishtown, borrowing money from my grandparents until the paychecks started. She scooped the last of her lipstick with her pinky.
Decades later, not only did her son live in a house, but he had yet another house, a cabin. Maybe he didn’t have a second home down the Jersey shore or whatever, sure, but he did have a “Dan cave,” as she called it.
She thought it was cool, but I also think she liked the idea that her son had more than he needed to have, on some level.
Inside the cabin, I smoked a cigar, and she’d drink Fireball. We were ballers.
I lasted maybe 18 hours at home before I decided to drive back down to New Jersey. My stepdad and aunts and sister were planning the funeral. I was given the job of putting together the obituary, and collecting photos for the slide show they would show in the funeral home.
My oldest daughter posted an Instagram story of her as a baby in my mom’s arms, Adrianne Lenker’s “sadness as a gift” playing in the background.
That did it. I needed to get back down to Jersey.
I had to get a black suit because I didn’t have one, so it was off to Men’s Wearhouse before I got on the road.
For those first 36 hours, it was all phone calls. I was detached from my mother’s death, by distance and also by just not being in South Jersey, breathing the air where I grew up.
At first I thought it was going to be some instance where I was going to have a delayed reaction, that I’d go through the whole funeral and wake in some kind of detached daze, and only when I got home I’d sob and mourn by myself. But that was not the case.
Almost immediately, sitting down at my Aunt Terry’s place in Merchantville, I lost it. I think I cried before then, driving down the Turnpike, but there, after just talking about the funeral home and the logistics of where my mother’s body was, and looking at my mother’s two sisters, it hit me: mom was gone.
Crying feels so much different when you’re a fully grown person. I remember crying when I was a kid, and it was like a whole-body affair. Kids just let their body go when crying. I think about how I’d just flop on the bed after something happened that drove me to despair—there was a lot of that when I was little—and the crying just went down to my toes and back up. But as a full-grown adult, someone who feels thiiiiisclose to having some sort of meltdown, I have learned to keep that shit to myself.
So that first cry at my aunt’s table, a cup of afternoon coffee in front of me, It was one of those neck-up cries where I just folded my head down.
Maybe I was just pacing myself because I knew there was going to be more crying in the days to come.
If my mom were around, I’d be calling her right now to tell her about how we’re getting a new roof for the cabin, a decision made by a large Pine branch that pile-drived straight down into the cabin’s roof. The week after the funeral, a March snowstorm knocked out power in our town, and we didn’t have electricity for two days. Trees were down everywhere.
This is how spring comes to Upstate New York: with a wet, sloppy snow.
I had thought I was going to start a job the week before, an hourly writing job that I thought would get one more line on my resume, something that would prove to the world I wasn’t just some elbow-patched academic. So when I was offered the job, I said yeah, sure.
The whole arrangement was through an agency based in India, and frankly it didn’t feel legitimate. Not because of the India thing so much as the way the agency people communicated with me. If they needed the smallest bit of information, three people would text, email, and call me, all at the same time, until I answered them. And then, when I needed something, like the start date for the job, I’d get nothing.
I was set to start on March 11, two days before I drove down to visit my mom after her stent procedures. But I got no confirmation from them, and I expressed my frustration with the agency people about their silence. I don’t think my frustration even registered with them, as I think of it now. They didn’t even answer.
I made a judgment call: with that start date not happening, I now couldn’t start until after the Easter break, April 1, Sincerely, Me.
And that got a response, finally, from them. The client finally got back and that start date worked. This hourly job was actually going to happen. I would be working as a freelancer while I was still teaching, and things were going to be really busy.
A few days later, my sister called to tell me our mom died.
I would like to say that the viewing, where there was a line down the block in the funeral home, with a couple hundred people coming to pay their respects, was a testament to my mom, Patty Little Nester Dudek McCabe, and how many people’s lives she touched, and leave it at that. I would like to tell you about the tens of people from high school, our church, our neighborhood, people from Maple Shade, scores of my sister’s friends, my step dad's friends from golf and senior softball, old friends of mine from Camden Catholic and Brooklyn, relatives from Philly and down the shore.
I really would like to say that the viewing, where the receiving line—is that what it’s called?—consisting my my stepdad, me, my sister, my aunts on the other side, standing in front of the open casket with my mom’s body, was this was this Frank Capra-type event that lifted my spirits and made me feel, you know, blessed.
But that wouldn’t be accurate. Sure, it was great to see all those people. But I was on the verge of losing my shit the entirety of the two- or three-hour thing.
I strategically selected people I would use as what I would call Crying Hugs. These were people, I figured, could hold a 200-plus pound man while he cried hysterically in his arms and not drop me.
First up: my cousin Tom, the eldest son of my uncle Tom and aunt Terry. I think it’s fair to say he didn’t know he had it coming. I went up to hug him and didn’t let go, and boom! Crying like a sack of sand in his arms.
Tom is pretty strong, and I think there was a moment when this master electrician lifted me up off my feet. Or at least it felt like it. I didn’t cry into his shoulder for that long, but I figured he could shield me from people looking at me while I let it out. And I was right. It just looked like two large besuited male first cousins in some mafioso-type embrace.
There were more Crying Hugs, the last one I’ll tell you about would be Mike. Mike is my high school friend, the one I kept in contact with the most since moving to New York City. Mike and his wife, Shari, still live in Park Slope, where we lived last in Brooklyn, and seeing them both that night, driving all the way down to Merchantville, I was just so touched to see them. Plus, Mike is like six feet two, so it was off to the Crying Hug position I went as he made his way up to us. I don’t think Mike expected that I would cry when we hugged, but he let it happen.
My wife and daughters watched me from the seats the whole evening. Once in a while, one of our daughters would bring up a tissue or water. My sister and I worked together to say hello to people as they came up, and we thanked each person for coming.
I can’t speak for my sister, but it felt like we were on some level propping each other up, two middle-aged siblings having one last rodeo in front of mom.
Mom left no will, no directions for a funeral. Two days before the funeral, at my aunt’s table, I said my only mildly controversial thing of the week: that, to my recollection, I didn’t think mom would have wanted a viewing and a whole-ass funeral. It was fine we were doing all of it, I said, but I could have sworn she told those things to me. I was nervous to speak up, since the machinery of the funeral arrangements had already engaged, and it wasn’t like I was doing any work. But I felt it needed to be said. Everyone acknowledged what I said, and we moved on. No drama. No arguments. I’m glad I said it.
The more I mulled it over, I think mom said it to me because she was listening to me go on about how I didn’t like viewings and long funerals. She was maybe just agreeing with me?
I would say one lesson from this, dear reader: put down in paper what you want for your funerals. And make a damn will. It’s not that hard.
At Penn Florist on Route 38, about a mile from my old high school, I went with Bill and my aunt Chrissy to pick out arrangements. Picking out flowers for your mother’s funeral at 10am on a Monday in Pennsauken was not how I imagined I’d spend my last weeks as a professor, but that’s what was happening. Under-caffeinated, half-crying, and clueless about picking flowers, I sent screenshots to my wife.
I wanted to make the joke that all of names of the flower arrangements in the catalog could easily be porn star or stripper names:
Cotton Candy. Perfectly Pastel. Farewell Spray. Soft Lavender.
My mom would have loved this bit. She thrived on taboo jokes and suppressed laughter. I would have had my mom in stitches telling her how in college I dated an exotic dancer named Precious Pink, which was also the name of an arrangement for Mother’s Day.
We got our flowers, the garlands for the casket, Bill just hanging on by the thread.
As we stepped out, the florist gave me a couple sets of rosaries to give to people. One set of beads now sits next to my cigars in the cabin.
While my aunts were meeting with the priest, I was given the job of making the photo displays for the funeral home.
Writing about this weeks later, it feels like Patty’s no-plan plans for the funeral worked out perfectly. It became a collaboration between her sisters, her husband, and her two kids. Each of us had a job to do, roles to play, and we all got our stuff done.
Growing up, mom would make sure we took care of our stuff. Pick up your things, she’d say. She would have loved the teamwork. She would have loved how we kept ourselves busy.
I was presented with a couple of poster board sets, the kind kids use for their science fair presentations, and stacks of photos of my mom through her several eras: her sixties beehive era, her seventies handkerchief gardening era, her gamine Twiggy crop era, her 80s Donna Mills Knots Landing era, her 90s curled and highlighted era.
The one photo that wasn’t included was the last photo taken of her that I know of. She sits in her recliner, a sporty blue metal wheel-walker in front of her. She’s got paperwork and mail beside her, she’s opening up an envelope, and she looks up to smile. I can tell she’s tired but happy to be home, out of a scary hospital bed. She is happy to not be flying up in some helicopter. An episode of a classic television show is probably playing on the television to the left, out of frame.
Above her, through the glazing at the top of the door, an aura of light shines through. It appears directly above her head.
Now, I could try to say to my family that this light in the photo is the result of a prismatic effect or refraction, that the light is not a divine sign. But that would be a wasted effort. Also, the more I look at this photo, the more I think the light above her is in fact something, something mystical. It’s some sign that my mom was being watched over somehow, and that she would soon be at peace.
As I stood there, making a collage of mom’s many eras, all I thought about was hoping I didn’t mess it up. Once the photo displays were done, and the slideshow photos were uploaded, and the obituary was written and posted online, all I had left to do was mourn. That’s when the hard part started.
to be continued
Thank you for reading, as always. I apologize in advance for any typos. They drive me crazy when I spot them after I send this out.
Or maybe buy me a coffee.
