The Joke That Will Outlive Our Entire Family
Our mom’s gravestone is a punchline, and she’d love it.
I have been meaning to tell you about my mother’s grave.
Don’t worry. The story’s mostly funny. Mostly.
We begin at mom’s favorite sushi place. The fact that Patti had a favorite sushi place at all blew my mind. Growing up, we ate Steak-Umm and Shake ’n Bake. We’d get takeout from China Star on Route 38, but for the most part we were a Acme groceries-with-double coupons family.
The name of mom’s favorite sushi spot, located near her old house in Laurel Springs, NJ, was Ta Keone.
That was the name of it (pronounced TA Kay OH Nay). Or so she thought.
I wasn’t in the room the day mom said “Ta Keone” out loud. It was said to my stepdad, Bill, used in a sentence to the effect of “Let’s go to Ta Keone and get some tempura rolls.”
To which Bill replied: “Ta Keone? What the hell is Ta Keone?”
The two retirees did go to Ta Keone that night, and when they arrived, my mother, whom I am a blood relation to, pointed at the sign that read “Ta Keone.”
“There,” she said. The sign for my favorite sushi place.
No, Bill quietly explained. That’s the sign for the takeout menu holder, as in “Take One.”
I’m lying about the whispering part. Bill probably used the words “you simple ass” and laughed and mom immediately laughed and also knew what would be coming down the pike: this would be a story told to our family, and we would re-tell it, again and again.
Mom took Ta Keone to be some kind of transliterated Japanese name, and partly out of reverence for other cultures and partly out of insecurity for mispronouncing words, mom tried too hard to get it right, and in so doing, mom said Tah Kay Oh Nay.
Never mind the bright blue sign above the restaurant that read Samuel’s and Chef Chan’s Chinese Cuisine Sushi Bar (see Google Maps photo, above).
“In my defense,” she said, taking a drag on a Vantage Ultra Light 100, “the penmanship was so damn bad.”
The Legend of Ta Keone spread, and for years, we asked Samuel as he walked around the tables if we could have or buy the Ta Keone sign-slash-dispenser, much to his confusion. He must have been wondering why the hell his regular customer was asking.
A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting on the floor of Moynihan Train Hall, waiting for Amtrak announcements, when I spotted a former colleague. We said hello, and then just sort of sighed together—the kind of sigh that says yeah, this still fucking sucks.
We used to teach at the same college, the one that shut down last year. She landed at another school across the Hudson, one that scooped up a bunch of our old programs and, in the process, got a nice little enrollment boost. The machine keeps running. Students still enroll. But for those of us who put decades into the place, it’s not that simple.
We talked about how the trustees—the ones legally responsible for keeping the college afloat—just walked away clean. No accountability, no consequences. They get to move on with their lives like nothing happened. Meanwhile, the rest of us are left picking up the pieces. That’s academia for you. The house always wins.
The thing is, a year later, a lot of us still don’t really talk about it. Not because we’re in denial—we saw it coming from a mile away—but because what do you even say when something that shaped your entire life is just... gone? You can’t just slap a label on it and move forward. It’s not closure, it’s not acceptance. It’s a void.
And maybe that’s the hardest part. Figuring out what the fuck to do with that void.
I was texting my sister the other day. We exchange messages more often these days. I think my sister, if she is reading this, would agree we are both on similar but also different paths to the grief of mom’s absence. We’re different people, for starters. Growing up, people always thought she was the older one, since she had, like, poise and boyfriends and toughness, and I was the mouth-breather with sweat spots and no girlfriends. (More than once, my own freaking daughters have asked if Aunt Meri is the older sibling, and when I clarify that I am the older one, they revel in my Succession scene-level rage.)
These days, I do feel more like an older brother, and I don’t know exactly why. Maybe it’s because she’s living her best life in Philadelphia and I am trying to keep my shit together, what with losing a job and interviews and resumes and LinkedIn Premium. Or I just want to protect her and she’d never needed my protection.
Anyway, I was texting my sister, and she told me how something I wrote affected her. It always surprises me when something I write affects someone else, especially if it’s my badass sister. What we have in common is a lot, starting with the Ta Keone and dealing with the same grief.
It is strange how it pops up these days. We’re getting on a year later, and who knows how I am going to feel when that happens. In Curb Your Enthusiasm scene terms, we’re halfway to the two-year “sorry window” closing.
Usually me and Meri keep it light on our texts, peppered with things like “I miss mom.”
Over the past year, my sister’s texts have covered a wide range of subjects:
A text with funny headline (“Astronomers Found Something Cold and Wet Near Uranus”).
A text covering a dream about mom in which she returns to our childhood home on West Woodlawn Avenue, where we haven’t lived since the late 1980s, and mom wasn’t there.
A text that includes the word “twat waffle.”
Another text that uses “slut burger” in a short sentence.
Another text about a dream, very detailed this time, about pecans.
A screenshot from a web search for what pecan dreams represent (“wealth and financial security”), accompanied by a photo inside the Nuts to You Shop, with a sign for a mix called “Meredith’s Mess.”
An Amazon listing for the “Brasstache,” the “original clip-on mustache” for trombone mouthpieces.
The other week I was in physical therapy for my shoulder, just lying on a table behind a shower curtain, electrodes stuck covering my upper body. Over the stereo the “continuous soft rock station” played Luke Combs’ cover of “Fast Car.” And I instantly welled up.
The Tracy Chapman original is better, much better. The cover did the job, though. I lay on the table, face directed at posters of muscles and joints, and fucking lost it for 30 seconds.
Just then, I got a notification for texts from my sister. She had been to a funeral. The “Catholic Church songs”—“Gift of Finest Wheat,” “Make Me a Channel of Your Piece,” “Ave Maria”—was too much.
“No one prepared me for the first funeral after the worst one,” she writes.
Mom was our champion, defender, book publicist, first-to-like-a-social poster, emotional backstop, family get-together debriefer, interaction bufferer.
I am not someone who believes in synchronicity or sibling telepathy. We’re one year and one week apart, Catholic twins, the same gene pool. Call it confirmation bias, but the fact that I ugly-wept to “Fast Car” before my therapist twisted my arm also happened at the same time as my sister losing it in a church 220 miles away, that’s something.
Last Thanksgiving, eight months after mom died, we went to visit mom’s just-installed gravestone up Route 130.
I’m not a big grave visitor. I visited Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris, and saw a couple hippies swigging from a bottle in Père-Lachaise. I read a couple of my bad poems outside Walt Whitman’s tomb in Camden, NJ. In both instances, I tried to summon up some sort of feeling of it being an important moment where I could catch some spark from the air. I felt nothing, except for the notion that I had checked off a box of places I should visit, only to be able to write this paragraph I am writing right now.
But mom’s gravestone was different. First, it was mom’s. But also we had a hand in composing the inscription.
There it was, two nonsense words in stone, “TA KEONE.” Just tacked on at the end. I had to smile.
We had to go through several drafts and mock-ups with the gravestone engraving people to get it right. The CLUMSY ALL CAPS FORMAT of gravestones doesn’t lend itself to the kind of typographic “Ta Ke One” confusion mom had. We wanted those characters in there, maybe “TaKEONE” or “TAKe ONE”—we had to settle for “TA KEONE.”
I took a picture. I thought about texting it to my sister, but I didn’t. I don’t know if she is ready to go there yet. I am still figuring out what the fuck to do with that void, the jokes. Everything.
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 just buy me a coffee.
I am the William on the grave marker above. I had the honor of being Patti's husband for almost 18 years. After attending our high school senior prom together and breaking up shortly thereafter we reunited 38 years later. This reunion occurred when her husband passing away on my birthday and my divorce being final on her birthday (only two days apart) resulted in a mutual friend gettiing us communicating again.
Patti had the gifted ability to turn even the most difficult situations into humorous ones. The fact that even in death she still brings a smile and often outright laughter at her gravesite is a tribute to that ability. She passed that wonderful sense of humor on to my stepson Daniel.
Takeone my love!!!
This was really well done. Thanks.