This is the last in a series of not-stand-alone posts about my brother Mark and his death, which occurred on Sunday, August 2, 2020 during the COVID pandemic. Long-running, self-indulgent remembering and lamenting in loosely elegiac form is what’s supposed to be happening, but I hope this last one lightens things up a bit.]

Mom has decided to have Mark’s remains cremated and then interred in a box at the local cemetery where her husbands are buried (my dad and my late-life step-dad John), and where she too will eventually be buried. I can’t remember exact why I end up in the cemetery offices, and I don’t even remember if it’s before or after the funeral service, but I think I’m there with my brother Ted and Mom to wrap up some business. We’re sitting down with the business guy (I’ll call him Mr. Burial Business or BB) and he unexpectedly says something like, “Do you want any of the ashes?”

This throws me. What does it mean? Mr. BB explains that I can have 5 percent of Mark’s ashes. This throws me even further. What is the volume of 5% of the ashes of a cremated human being? Why would I want them? How would you give them to me?

If I decide to have them, what exactly would I do with 5% of Mark?

**********

Mark was always adamant about not wanting to be buried in a coffin. Many times he asked me to make sure he was cremated and dispersed. The thought of a full-body burial made him feel claustrophic and sullied. He didn’t want his body drained and preserved and locked in a fancy crate in which it would slowly disintegrate, in a space where people would occasionally come stare down at the grass 6 feet above his encaged remains and ponder memories of Mark.

Mark hated Dad’s open casket funeral. I remember him saying to me, in a mood that was a mix of grieving and glum and slightly disgusted, “That’s not Dad.” And of course it wasn’t. Dad was long gone by the time we saw his painted and well-dressed and cold body at the funeral.

********

I agree to take 5% of Mark’s ashes. It’s a little weird, but together with the 5% my brother Eric takes, it means that 10% of Mark won’t be locked in a box at the cemetery. And that’s the best I can do for Mark, because Mom has a plan. She sees where his box of ashes will be stored in the cemetery complex, in a wall of neatly arranged cubbies, hundreds of cubbies that are slowly being filled in with the ashes of people. She’s pleased, she says, because from where Mark’s box sits, he will be able to look over Dad and John and eventually her. They’ll all be together.

I ask Mr. BB how I’m to receive the ashes. He says I have to buy an urn, or provide an appropriate container of some kind, and then they can give the ashes to me in the container. I have a loose memory of Ted asking about the prices of urns sold by the cemetery, and another loose memory of Ted and me shaking our heads in disbelief at the extortionary prices. Also the urns are huge and Grecian and ornate and fancy, and ugly, and do I really need a container that big for 5% of my brother?

*******

Mark didn’t care for fancy things or, come to think of it, ownership of things. Or obeying laws, for that matter. I suppose he was something of an anarchist. He was also an unbelievable slob. I swear the color of his skin wasn’t a tan but just a thin layer of grime. As a result, he didn’t sunburn. What lived on his skin was more effective than a chemical sunscreen and probably more wholesome than the mineral variety. He was a walking probiotic. I marveled that he didn’t smell. His clothing was messy and torn and stained, his sneakers were always folded over at the heel and didn’t have complete laces, and he didn’t seem to care. He drove a filthy old car, the interior shredded by his dogs. He would feed those dogs by pouring dry dog food out onto the floor in Mom’s garage. Wherever he lived turned into a mess of dirty and broken stuff everywhere. In his day-to day-life, when mom gave him stuff, he accepted. When mom didn’t give him stuff, he also accepted. He was like a stereotype of a homeless person, but with a home.

Mark hated the cost of my Dad’s death. Not only were there hundreds of thousands of dollars in expenses from the heart surgeries and 3-week hospital stay that preceded it (insurance covered the medical costs, and the hospital and doctors made a killing, so to speak), there was also the massive stone-lined coffin and all the other expenses of burial. Mark spoke to me more than once about what a racket it all was, just another way for big businesses to take advantage of people at their lowest.

*********

After some dialogue with Mr. BB, including an acknowledgment that “the container” for Mark’s ashes can be a two dollar tupperware tub with a lid, I decide I’ll go find my own ash pot and provide it to the cemetery.

Where does one buy a receptacle for human ashes? I hit the internet and discover boutique shopping sites dedicated to human remains. It’s a little creepy, and it’s all outlandishly expensive and mostly the options look like cheap flower vases. That won’t do for Mark.

I head over to Amazon. It also has a collection of hideous urns, but I spy a small box made of rosewood and carved with non-religious images. It’s made for cremation remains and is “x-small.” This seems right for 5% of Mark. I tuck a couple of those in my shopping cart (one for me and one for Eric) and start to check out. 

That’s when I notice that these little boxes are for pet remains.

It gives me pause for no more than 15 seconds. They are reasonably priced, they are pretty, and they are for dogs!

Mark would love it. 

*******

Mark’s collection of found dogs, living in a half-feral pack in the yard, was the closest he came to experiencing a sort of ownership. But of course, he didn’t think he owned them. It was more like he was one with them, part of a collection of lost souls finding community with each other and breaking as many rules as possible – not maliciously or intentionally, it’s just that they were untrained dogs. Mark had a lot of dog companions over the years. Buddy, Goldie, Sheba, Girl, Miley; at the end Bailey, Whiskey, Darla and Dolly. Maybe there were two Buddies and possibly a Boy along the way. I’m sure I’m missing a few. 

Mark could come across as emotionally flat or oddly upbeat to folks who didn’t know him, but that was a mask. I knew him to be a person who was filled with pain built on empathy and longing and sarcasm. One year he spent Thanksgiving with us out here in Wisconsin.  We had several families over for the holiday, and the evening conversation turned to dogs. Somehow we ended up talking about our dogs dying, and this turned into an impromptu game I called “My dog died more horribly than yours.” 

(This was a sequel to other games I’ve made up over the years, including “My family is more f**ed up than yours” and “My kids are more f**ed up than your kids.” You’d have to play a round to appreciate how much fun it is. With the right people.)

Everyone took turns, and the tales mounted. There were many declarations of “aww” and “that’s sad” and “I’m sorry.”  

Mark’s turn came. “My dog Buddie ran out on the street outside my house and got hit by a car.  He managed to run back into the house and jump into my arms, and then he died in my arms.”

There was something firm and unforgiving and self-judging in Mark’s voice.  Silence engulfed us for a few moments.  And then someone declared “okay, Mark wins.” Awkward laughter broke out and the game was over.

*******

Eric and I each get a little bit of Mark in a little box meant for pet ashes. The rest of him goes into the designated locked metal cubbie in the cemetery, with his name engraved on the cover. His slot is about 7 feet high, maybe 8 inches square as I recall, though I could easily have that wrong. I find myself staring at it after he’s interred, and I’m seething. He got his cremation but he’s still locked in a box! It’s not right! I want to raid the cemetery at night dressed like a ninja, break the lock and grab 90% of Mark, and set him free somewhere.

I have to remind myself: it’s not Mark in there. It’s just ashes. Mark is long gone. 

*******

Mark visited us in Wisconsin a handful of times over the years. We always took him to Lake Michigan. Along our favorite stretches of the lake, between Milwaukee and Sheboygan, the beaches are thin and beautiful and austere, not like the wide ocean beaches Mark knew from California. The first time Mark visited, we told him we were taking him to “the beach.” When he walked over the dunes and spied the narrow band of sand at our favorite state park, he snorted derisively. “You call this a beach??” 

But I think Mark learned to see the unique beauty of a great lake shore, especially since my family loves it so much and made him visit it repeatedly. I have weirdly clear memories of him sitting on a log, staring out at the lake quietly. I like to imagine that as he looked on the vast waters, he marveled at how his talented and smart sister, making the big lawyer bucks in a big city, had gone to seed as a full-time mom in Wisconsin.

Stranger things have happened. 

******

Some time after we get back to Wisconsin from Mark’s funeral, we take that little rosewood box made for pet remains, filled with 5% of Mark, to a special place on Lake Michigan.  We walk along the dune boardwalk to a spot with a stunning view in all directions.  Here we will release his ashes.

As we’re standing there trying to feel contemplative and intense, saying meaningless things like “Mark would like it here” and “this is a great spot for Mark”, and I’m trying to figure out how to open the box, and we’re thinking we’ll just step over the rope off the boardwalk a few paces… We spot some people ambling toward us along the boardwalk.  

There are never people here. Who are they and why are they here? Shit.

It’s okay, we’ll go fast because if they get here, the amblers might be freaked out by what we’re doing.  I finally pry the box open, imagining I’ll find a little pile of fine ash inside and will have deep feelings and will sigh and cry.  

But this is not how it goes.

The cemetery has put 5% of Mark in a small plastic bag, nestled in the box.  It’s like a wee ziplock. 

My little bit of Mark is in a dimebag. It makes me giggle.

I pull out that uncouth baggie and open it.  The amblers are approaching steadily so we can’t go off the boardwalk without potentially getting in trouble.  Anthony hurries me along.  “Just do it, just do it, here is fine.”  So I release the ashes gently into the breeze that’s ruffling our hair and those ashes float off across the dunes.  

Nope, that doesn’t happen either. 

It seems human ashes are quite heavy.  

The ashes fall straight down with a little poof in a discolored pile about 6 inches across, on the sand right next to the boardwalk. Shit shit shit.

I reach out a foot and just sort of move them this way and that with my sandal, so they’re less conspicuous.  

Anthony is shaking his head, and I’m trying not to laugh, and the kids are anxious about potentially breaking the law.  We walk away quickly along the boardwalk, pretending we haven’t done anything.  

Somehow, nothing could be more perfect than this send-off for Mark. 

 ********

We’ve walked past Mark’s ash spot many times in the past few years.  I find that I don’t have special feelings about it.  There’s nothing especially holy about the place, nothing particularly spiritual or sanctified. Mark is with me in that spot because of my memories of walking through it with him, not because I dumped his ashes there. I’m grateful that my mind hasn’t made a fetish of the place.

And yet, I still think regretfully of Mark’s remaining ashes, trapped in a cubbie in a cemetery in California.  Someday, if I outlive my mom, I have a loose plan to go back and retrieve them. Legally. I hope to set all of Mark free (save the 5% my brother Eric has).  I can try to create a better ritualistic moment next time.  Maybe I can make it more meaningful somehow, more filled with grief and regret and deep thoughts. 

No.  I take that back. Maybe I can make it more joyful, more full of acceptance.  I can imagine it, whether or not it ever actually happens.  

I’ll walk out of the cemetery business offices carrying a gallon-size ziplock of Mark’s ashes, contained in an X-Large pet box made of rosewood.  My step will be light, spry, relieved.  I’ll laugh out loud as I get in the car and put pedal to metal. 

Mark’s ashes and I will drive out to a river somewhere, maybe the Mokelumne River a bit north.  Mark used to enjoy inner-tubing on it.  I’ll find a quiet spot – no unexpected people, please. I’ll take his bagged ashes out of the pet box and carry the ziplock into the river.  I’ll wade to a place where I’m waist-deep and there’s a solid current and there’s no eddying.  I’ll open the baggie and carefully stand upstream.  I’ll hold the open lip of the baggie just under the water downstream and watch as Mark’s ashes go free.  I don’t know if they’ll sink or float, but it doesn’t matter.  

I’ll say a few words to myself, maybe not even out loud.  Dude, I’ll say. I came through for you. You’re free.  Go be happy somewhere.  I’ll try to do the same right here.  So long, Mark.

I hope I’ll laugh, but maybe I’ll cry a little too. I’ll look up at the sky, at the shores of the river, at the foliage around; I’ll listen to the sounds of birds and bugs, the warble of moving water.  I’ll ponder life and death like a million billion primates have done before me.  

I’ll walk back to whatever vehicle I’m driving.  I’ll be soaking wet and uncomfortable.  I’ll towel off, have a drink of water, and carry on with life until it’s my turn to follow Mark.

This is the sixth and penultimate in a series of not-stand-alone posts about my brother Mark and his death, which occurred on Sunday, August 2, 2020 during the COVID pandemic. Long-running, self-indulgent remembering and lamenting is what’s supposed to be happening here. Almost there, almost done. This one is heavy, but I promise part 7 will lighten up]

On the night before Mark’s funeral, my mom doesn’t want to sleep alone, so she invites my daughter Jesse to sleep with her. Jesse is happy to oblige, as she also doesn’t like to sleep alone. Mom’s bed is a four-poster queen size contraption, with the mattress sitting high enough that she needs a footstool to get onto it.

In the middle of the night, at 2 or 3 am, I wake to Jesse calling out in distress. “Mom! Grandma fell out of bed!”

I rush into Mom’s bedroom and find her lying on her side on the floor next to the bed, holding her wrist and grimacing in pain. After a little investigation, I realize she needs to get to urgent care. My brother Eric has more local road knowledge than me, so he takes Mom to the emergency room. They decide that her wrist is broken and put a quick cast on her, with instructions to follow up. (At the follow up a week later, we learn that her wrist is actually shattered and surgery is required to put in a variety of pins.)

It’s a bona fide fiasco. It means we all get almost no sleep, and we’re really worried about Mom, and it’s hard for her to get dressed for the funeral because of the cast, and she’s in terrible pain. Also, Mom has declared that Jesse pushed her out of bed.

———-

Jesse used to be really good at breaking things, for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes it was tantrums, but there was also always so much distress and self-loathing, and sometimes what she broke was herself.

For a few years, she was obsessed with breaking a particular window in her bedroom. This was not a choice. She has Tourettic OCD and depression and anxiety and body dysmorphia and she’s a survivor of anorexia and oooooh… so many labels. Sometimes things just get stuck in there between her ears.

About that window. She banged on it a lot, eventually cracking it. We put packing tape on it and didn’t bother to fix or replace it. What was the point? We reasoned (and she agreed) that this would only encourage her to break the new window.

Eventually she did the window in completely. I heard a crash one afternoon and then nothing. I called up and asked if everything was okay. I heard Jesse answer from the bathroom in a suspiciously pleasant lilt.

“I’m fine.”

I raced upstairs and she was not fine. She was in the bathtub and there was blood everywhere. She had put her foot through the window; a piece of shattered glass had flayed open part of her foot. She didn’t want my help though; she was fine. I could see it in her face: she thought she had only gotten what she deserved. She fought the trip to urgent care that we insisted upon.

———–

I’m shocked by Mom’s claim, repeated as I help her dress for the funeral, that Jesse pushed her out of bed. A little while later I ask Jesse impulsively, “Did you push Little Grandma out of bed? She says you pushed her out of bed.”

Jesse looks stunned at the question, and I immediately regret asking. In my mind, it’s practically rhetorical. Of course Jesse didn’t push grandma out of bed. At worst, maybe she was snuggling. I just want confirmation. But Jesse receives it as an earnest inquiry, and as usual she assumes the worst about herself and gets tied up in knots. I can see it in her face. She loathes herself, because maybe she did. She loathes my mom for the accusation, because of course she didn’t. But she’s been accused of so many things over the years, she’s done so many bad things, she’s broken so many things, why would it not be true that she’s also broken grandma, on the night before Uncle Mark’s funeral?

———

I used to talk a lot about the broken things in Jesse. She had a compression fracture in a vertebra in kindergarten, she broke a wrist a few years later, she had long-undiagnosed Lyme disease and walking pneumonias, she has serious food allergies. These were nothing. The things that I perceived as really broken revolved around the labels, the diagnoses, the anorexia, the sensory crazies, the incredibly difficult behaviors. I pathologized her, sought cures and answers, pushed her to fix and heal and reknit.

The world didn’t make it any easier. So many people said so many mean and unhelpful things to me over the years, and how could I help but internalize it all? Never mind the ugly looks and thoughtless comments from strangers when Jesse was having a hard time in public spaces: the most well-intentioned and therefore most hurtful comments were more intimate, from family and friends. She needs boundaries. She needs to be spanked. Discipline will solve this. She needs freedom. She needs to be swaddled. Sleep training. Co-sleeping. Time. She just needs prayers. She doesn’t need meds. Meds can help. Behavior mod therapy, acceptance therapy, exposure therapy, boot camp. Try essential oils. Have you taken her off gluten? She doesn’t have enough to worry about, that’s why she has anxiety. Try massive doses of vitamin D. Or B12. Maybe E or C. Kale. Triple her antihistimines. Have you tested her for brain inflammation? She should have stopped nursing sooner. She just needs friends. Send her to me for a week, I’ll fix her. There are institutional settings for people like her. Home school. Magnesium supplements work wonders. CBD oil. Bone broth. Probiotics. Elimination diet because leaky gut. GAP diet. Massage, chiropractics, acupuncture, meditation, herbs, candles.

Nothing I did was good enough, no choice I made was good enough.

That’s the tricky bit with calling these things mental “illness” instead of disability. People think there’s a cure, a solution. We imagine an ending, as though there’s an armistice day waiting somewhere ahead, a permanent peace and healing to come. I would see all the potential and intelligence and wisdom in my daughter, and I would imagine her being crushed under the weight of mental illness we hadn’t resolved yet. But SCIENCE and WOO WOO would serve, if I could just… GET… IT… RIGHT. So we labeled and waited and begged and kept imagining something that cannot be: someone other than the person who was standing right in front of us. We crushed Jesse under the weight of our pathologizing, stigmatizing, marginalizing ableism.

Mark didn’t like to talk about what was wrong with Jesse, at least not with me. He would just say, “she’s fine.” He felt my pain as her parent; he was compassionate about our challenges. But he also wanted me to accept Jesse in all her fucked-up glory.

When Jesse was just beginning to recover from anorexia, about a year before Mark died, we made a trip to California. She loved roller coasters at the time, and she was just well enough to have some energy. So Mark took her on a special uncle-and-niece trip to Six Flags. They spent a long day on rides and returned exhausted and happy.

Mark later admitted that what Jesse ate during the 10 hours they were gone was a lemonade and a bag of Doritos. But, Mark insisted firmly, in a way that brooked no argument: “She was fine.” Then a sort of longing came over his face. He described watching Jesse stare at other teens who were there together, as they waited in lines. “I felt kinda bad for her, having to go on rides with her old uncle instead of being with kids her own age.”

I saw a mirror of Jesse’s self-doubt and self-loathing in my brother. I wish I had said to him then: no group of happy teens would have accepted Jesse the way you do. In fact, no one does that except you. She was with the only right person at Six Flags.

———

Mark’s death is brutal for Jesse, and it manifests as really strange behavior at the funeral. Little grandma’s broken wrist doesn’t help. I’m not there to witness all of it because I’ve gone ahead to the cemetery with my mom, but Anthony eventually tells my how hard it was to get Jesse out of the house and into the car to head over. While little Nick cries and takes it all in and acts pretty neurotypical, Jesse tics out and rages and forgets to put on shoes and hides in the trunk of the car at the cemetery. She misses most of the service because she won’t get out of the trunk.

Part of me is incredibly irritated. Jesse is a reliable disruptor in moments like this, utterly incapable of coping with her grief in a way the rest of us can perceive as sane. Much much later, she explains to me that the reason she didn’t get out of the trunk is because her urges were very strong and she thought tics would take over and ruin the ceremony. It’s a bitter pill: she’s made a thoughtful choice, one that hurts her and ostracizes her from an important ritual of shared grief. I don’t know what people see when they look at Jesse, but I think I know what Mark would say. He’d tell me: let it be; that’s just who she is; it doesn’t matter.

———

It’s been three years since Mark died. I’ve spent that time coping (badly) with a lot of grief, learning to navigate new caregiving responsibilities for my mom in his absence, taking on one new challenge after another with Jesse, and not really having a healthy space between my ears. I’ve believed that the deepest grief I feel about Mark’s death – sometimes unbearable – arises out of my sense that a life worth living was lost to all the broken things. When I began writing this episode (3 months ago?), I thought I’d be telling you about the ways Mark was fractured like Jesse, his unmet mental health needs turning him to a life of heart-destroying drug abuse and self-destruction. I thought it would help me work through the traumas of having a brother who lived with such hard addiction and mental health challenges, and the potential recapitulation of that journey in Jesse.

A couple months ago I hit the shrink’s office for my regular check-in. I don’t even remember what set me off, probably nothing important. I found myself talking about the spinning thoughts that addle me – wound-up and twisted-together thoughts about Mark, my mom, Jesse, the childhood traumas that make me scream when I want to be calm, the wacky automatic thoughts about hating my life and wanting to run away. I can’t possibly remember the exact order of conversation, but the gist of it was like this:

I said to my doc, sometimes I feel exactly the same kind of raw grief I felt the day Mark died, it’s like a poison I can’t get out.

Dr. G asked me gently, what was it that Mark gave you?

In great gasping sobs, I found myself saying, “Mark was the one.”

The one who what?

The one who always told me I was good enough. The one I could turn to when everything seemed wrong and I would know he wouldn’t judge me or criticize me or even give me advice. That’s the anchor I lost when Mark died.

I let it all out on the shrink’s sofa, and the next day I had a banal and unoriginal epiphany, important to me nonetheless, that all that brutal grief wasn’t for Mark. It was for me.

———–

We’re currently enrolled in a dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) adolescent program to support Jesse in working through ongoing challenges. Much of the work is for Anthony and me to do. A foundational idea in DBT is that everyone needs validation and radical acceptance, which is singing my song. But of course, it’s easy to say and hard to do. Reflecting on the things we’re learning there, I think of Mark often and I realize that he offered me validation. It was a mighty gift that I didn’t understand until after he was gone, and it was a gift I didn’t know to reciprocate.

Maybe it’s time for me to take that in-house, and maybe I need to start by growing up a little and letting Mark know I don’t need him anymore for that.

It hurts so bad to even put those words down. It feels like betrayal. But Mark isn’t here now, and he’d want me to stop the blubbering that’s going on here. So I’ll say something to him right here in simple terms, and it’ll be okay.

——–

Hey Mark. I don’t know what you are anymore. Maybe you’re just a pile of soulless ashes, or maybe your wraith is haunting someone, or maybe you’re at peace somewhere, or maybe you were reborn as a happy dog, or maybe the photons and energy and itty-bitty invisible things that made up you are finally free and spreading out through the universe, exploring. I think you’d like the last option, so that’s what I wish for you. Probably this world just wasn’t a good fit for you.

I’m realizing that you weren’t as broken as I thought, because you surely helped me stay in one piece. I’m so sorry that I always thought of you mostly as fractured. I should have spent more time telling you all the ways you were amazing. I want to remember the whole things about you, the beautiful and whimsical and funny stuff that made me look forward to every conversation with you. I want to remember your strength. After all, you made it 58 years before giving in to all the hurting you endured. It was an accomplishment.

I’ll try not to need you anymore. I’ll try to love and accept myself the way my big brother Mark did. If I can follow your lead, that’ll mean you really aren’t gone all the way, so that’s a good thing. I’ll try harder to give my kids the sort of acceptance you gave me. I think that’s what you would wish for me.

I’ll try to be whole, and that’s the best memorial I have to offer you.

[This is the fifth in a series of not-stand-alone posts about my brother Mark’s death, which occurred on Sunday, August 2, 2020 during the COVID pandemic. Long-running, self-indulgent remembering and lamenting is what’s supposed to be happening here. But there seems to be less lamenting and more healing in my heart with each installment.]

On the day of Mark’s funeral, the sun is shining and the air is warm. We get to be outside at the cemetery for the service, and this is much better than a stale-aired in-door experience. It feels casual, like Mark would have preferred, and Mother Earth is coming through with a beautiful day.

Our eldest brother Ted shows up in shorts. I mock him for this, but he has the right answer: they’re nice shorts, and it’s really hot today, and Mark would prefer everyone to be comfortable. Mark was the consummate slob and, as far as I could discern, did not care in the slightest about decorum and formality.

——–

Mark dropped a million balls in his human life, but he rarely let down the little creatures of earth he decided to care for. The hummingbirds who resided in the trees in Mom’s yard made his list. He kept hummingbird feeders on the patio, and they were always properly stocked. He would sit outside in the mornings, contemplative, often stoned, and make observations. The hummingbirds were very important to him.

He observed the neighborhood hummingbird patterns with curiosity and childhood wonder. He knew where they lived, which trees they descended from to visit the feeders. There were several different breeds that frequented the feeders, Mark explained. They took turns, in a particular order and at different times of day, like a timeshare. He liked that they shared instead of arguing and battling all the time.

Occasionally, I would be outside at the right times to observe some of the action. Watching the wee blurred figures — flitting around too fast to see clearly for more than a split-second at a time — I could understand Mark’s love for them. They lived ephemerally, grateful for what was given, not greedy in their behaviors, too flighty to stick around for any attachment, little puffs of whimsy.

More than a bit like Mark.

———-

The funeral service is what it is. There are Korean pastors (did they speak any Korean? I can’t remember). There are prayers and readings, there is some form of sermon. There is eulogizing by brother Eric. There is an unscheduled, pretty bizarre, and overly-long share by Mark’s friend and fellow pot-grower J-. Is there singing? I don’t remember, but probably.

I’m sitting in the front row of seats next to Mom, holding hands, sniffling, trying to remember that my dress is short so I need to keep my knees together and sideways on this uncomfortable folding chair. She hasn’t been able to shed eye tears since her stroke, but her bitter sorrow is weeping from every cell of her body. I remember that at some point I’m sitting next to Eric too, and he’s also suffering badly, but was he between me and Mom or on my other side? I simply can’t place the order of things, it’s all muddled in my head. My memory is a mosaic, not a line.

But I think that doesn’t matter, as I sit here more than two years later. I’m beginning to understand that what matters is the mythology we build as we rescue ourselves and each other from the moments of deepest grief, a combination of actual facts and wishful thinking. Technical accuracy isn’t important.

And so this one true thing happens as I sit uncomfortably in the front row of chairs on the cemetery lawn, trying not to get bored or distracted or irritated by ritual banalities, keeping my knees together so folks won’t see my underpants:

A perfect red-headed hummingbird flies up to the floral wreath sitting on the easel next to the speaker dais. It stays for much longer than a hummingbird should.

It is a moment of pure, breathtaking magic.

I gasp. Eric startles. We look at each other in wonder and actually smile.

Maybe it’s just coincidence. Or maybe hummingbirds are everywhere all the time and I just never notice, except today I’m under duress and everything is pouring into my perception because lots of crazy chemical things are happening in my body. Maybe the whole of life on earth is an empty, chaotic anarchy with no meaning at all.

But that won’t do.

The mythology begins to spin up in an instant. Mark’s spirit send the bird. Mother Earth sent it to say goodbye to him. It’s Mark himself, come to tell us he’s okay – a parting gift from my fay, sweet, gone brother.

I can shape the myth any way I like. Whatever myth I choose, I see that there is a piece of what made Mark beautiful in it, and there’s as much joy as there is grief in that.

[This is the fourth in a series of not-stand-alone posts about my brother Mark’s death, which occurred on Sunday, August 2, 2020 during the COVID pandemic. Long-running, self-indulgent remembering and lamenting is what’s happening here. Onward, and perhaps some odd humor in this episode.]

Mark was a natural born gardener. He loved to grow edible things: tomatoes, cantaloupes, zucchini, watermelon, green beans, cucumbers, marijuana.

He kept gardens at my mom’s house and at one of her rental properties, where his friend J– was a tenant. He was devoted to his plants with a wonder and joy that infected me. He watered, fertilized, even occasionally weeded. He loved bringing vegetables into the house for mom and sharing them with others. Mom would give his beautiful vegetables to church members and neighbors, proudly bragging that her son had grown them. He’d get on the phone with me and go on and on about his plants and his harvests, the excellent pickles Mom had made, the delicious salsa J– made.

If I was in town at the right time of year, he and I would head over to the local nursery and buy seedlings for him to plant. When I built and established our own vegetable boxes out front, early in the pandemic, I thought of him as we filled the boxes with soil and chose the plants to grow. I didn’t know how much the simple pleasure of growing and harvesting vegetables in my yard was connected to him, until he was gone.

——–

There’s a quirky issue I decide to deal with while we’re in Stockton for Mark’s funeral: all the marijuana.

Mark has collected 6 or 7 plants in large black plastic nursery pots. I think only three of those are legal. There are rules and limits in California for how many plants a non-dealer can have. Based on my experience with Mark’s poor decision-making, I am certain he has exceeded those rules and limits. Mark also has a couple plants in the ground, among the vegetables. Having weed in the ground in a personal residence is definitely illegal, as far as I know.

I infer from the placement of the in-ground plants that Mark has been tactical. The bigger of the two plants towers at about 7 feet tall, its diameter exceeding my 5-foot wingspan significantly. It is magnificent, and it’s also begging for a police visit. But he’s got it next to the pole beans, which tower even higher and wider in a dense, thriving thatch that makes it nearly impossible to spy the weed from the road.

Well played, Mark.

What I can’t fathom is how Mom has never noticed. The scent alone is unmistakable. Then again, maybe she did notice but simply admitted defeat.

——–

Mark used to sit outside at night in the darkness on Mom’s patio, surrounded by his pack of semi-feral dogs, smoking and playing poker on his phone. When we were in town, Anthony and I would frequently join him. We haven’t smoked anything in decades, but we would bring out our drinks and catch the fresh air, talk a bit. During one of these moments, Mark chattered happily about his pot plants, in his superficially cheerful way. They were growing well, the buds were going to form up soon, these were special cultivars that were intended for a certain type of high, he could only have this many or that many, these pots were the right size, he had a couple extra over what the law allowed but that was okay, if he got the good harvest he expected he’d be able to share with friends, he promised he wouldn’t sell any and get arrested, he told mom they were tomato plants.

Hold on now.

You told her what?

Yeah, he laughed. She asked what they were, and I told her they were tomato plants.

I was filled with dissonance. Mark was caregiver to Mom. He wished her well. How could he lie to her like this, possibly endanger her with the law by having too many pot plants on her property? He relied entirely on her for income, room, board, clothing, basic needs, everything. What was he thinking?

I always struggled to find my way through my feelings, in moments like this. I was angry at Mark for the selfishness of the situation, and yet I also knew him not to be selfish. Maybe addiction played a role, but it felt like more than that. He had been a crank dealer early in his adulthood, and maybe he was a little too comfortable with the idea of making a bit of side money that didn’t come from Mom. Maybe he was compelled to do risky things as a sort of middle finger to Mom. Maybe growing excessive quantities of pot brought him a gardener’s happiness. Maybe he liked having gifts for friends. Maybe he was just a walking sack of unadulterated impulsivity and nihilism.

Where I inevitably ended up was, maybe he deserved my compassion and acceptance, because his life was pretty shitty. Maybe all those unanswered needs swirling around his mental health, all the stigma attached to his life’s journey, all his failures and stumbles and falls, all his loneliness… Maybe all of it felt a little further away when he looked at a bunch of thriving weed next to the beans and zucchini.

The next day, I sat outside with Mom and Anthony in the morning, enjoying the patio’s warmth. We were all facing the array of potted plants.

Mom remarked, “Mark is growing those tomato plants, but there are no tomatoes coming in.” She looked puzzled.

Anthony and I glanced at each other and tried not to laugh. Anthony commented dryly and quietly, “Those aren’t tomato plants.”

Mom was oddly firm in her reply. “Yes they are. Mark said so.”

———

As the funeral day approaches, there are in fact authentic tomato plants in Mom’s vegetable bed, and they are in fact bearing fruit. I’m going to leave those of course, but Anthony and I decide to get rid of the false tomatoes for Mom’s sake. We dig the plants out and throw them street-side, roots and all, hoping someone will just take them and that the police won’t drive by at the wrong moment. The guy next door takes a couple of the pots of pot, and the remainder we give to Mark’s friend Doug. I think Doug ends up taking the dug-up plants too; he has to use his trailer to fit them. It’s a bonanza.

Later on, I stand and stare down at the hole left in the vegetable garden, shaking my head and trying not to turn it into a banal metaphor for the hole Mark’s death will leave in my life. I pick green beans and tomatoes and zucchinis, all planted and watered by Mark in the months before he collapsed. There are so many that we’ll never be able to eat them all, but I don’t know how to leave them on the plants to wither and die.

I carry piles of vegetables into the house. Mom and I marvel at the bounty Mark has left behind.

This is the third in a series of not-stand-alone posts about my brother Mark’s death, which occurred on Sunday, August 2, 2020 during the COVID pandemic. Long-running, self-indulgent remembering and lamenting is what’s happening here. Onward.]

Preparing for a funeral is an odd business, especially in the COVID era. There are no vaccines yet, and we have no idea how any of this is going to go. Mark’s funeral has to be outside, and it can’t have very many attendees, and there will be no modern screen on which to stream photos, and scheduling it takes some time. But that is all in other people’s hands. The only thing I can add is empty whimsy. I do this by putting together a couple foam-board photo displays and ordering flowers.

The photo foam-boards are very low-rez, low-tech, and low-skill. Before we leave Wisconsin, I rifle through my physical photos and grab a random assortment of old Mark pics. I spend a bit of time on my computer and print some more recent pics onto regular paper, because that’s all I’ve got. I throw that all into an envelope and the envelope disappears into the cavernous rented minivan. In Stockton, I buy a couple poster-size foam boards and I use a glue stick to stick photos on them. I hand-write some words – birth date, death date, brother, friend, son, that sort of thing.

I get Mark’s birthday wrong but no one even notices until after the funeral.

It’s not well done, but it’s done well enough. Mark would appreciate the effort and laugh, I think.

——–

Many many years ago, while I was still practicing law and experiencing unholy levels of stress and anxiety, I did a lot of knitting. It was neurotic and intense, of course. I made original-design Irish fisherman sweaters covered in extreme cabling for Anthony and lace blankets for various babies, working from a couple encyclopedic book collections of stitches. Once I made Anthony a sweater out of a gorgeous nubby grey-brown wool, but the dimensions didn’t come out quite right for him. I took it with me to California that Christmas and offered it to Mark.He put it on. The sweater didn’t reach the top of his pants, and the arms went halfway down his hands. But he claimed he loved it. I sort of believed him.

Eventually, Mark admitted to me that he wore the sweater occasionally as a novelty. He would put it on when friends were over. He demonstrated for me.

“Do you like this sweater? My sister knitted it.”

<A perfectly timed pause as he looks down and takes in the overlong arms and short torso:>

“She’s a lawyer.”

——-

In addition to the photo posters, I remember to order funeral flowers. I go to FTD.com and look through the funeral wreaths. I want to get one of those big ones that sit on an easel. But as I stare at the bleached-out white-flower samples, I just can’t. It’s all so blank and cold. Through the computer screen I can practically smell the stink of lilies, the stench of death rites. If I get one of these wreaths, I’ll feel it grimly judging Mark and me and all of us. Mark deserves something more joyful and glorious to send him off. He doesn’t need to be judged anymore.

——-

Back in 2001, there were a lot of flowers at my dad’s funeral, and a lot of flowers were delivered to mom’s house as well.

I didn’t understand the scope of it until Anthony and I went over to Mark’s house a couple days after the funeral. We walked into a sort of wonderland. Mark had taken home as many of the funeral flowers as he could. He disassembled them and filled every vase, bowl, and glass, every flower-capable vessel in his house, with his own re-arrangements of flowers, large and small. Every table and shelf was covered in flowers, hundreds of flowers, no exaggeration.

I don’t think Mark was using crank at that point in his life, but he might as well have been. He was buzzing, mentally and physically, like a bee in the heart of summer. He pottered about the rooms in a nervous fuss, describing what he was thinking about with the arrangements, adjusting flowers, moving containers from here to there, checking the water, describing to us his artistic thinking and decisions. This flower here because its color goes with that flower; this blue arrangement, this yellow arrangement, these tall, those short.

I thought it was a very beautiful and very, very strange way to cope with the grief of watching his father die.

——-

The flowers for Mark’s funeral have become weirdly important to me too. After spending unreasonable amounts of time making a decision, I order a multi-colored easel wreath through FTD.com, to be delivered to the cemetery.

When I get to the funeral site, under a small tent on the lawn at the cemetery, the wreath has already been delivered. It’s huge and fantastic and colorful. There it sits, monolithic and perfect next to my sorry-ass foam board photo displays.

The humans at the funeral look at each other meaningfully and cringe through the awkward moments and touch each other for support and cry and hug and breath. The wreath does not care.

After the funeral, the wreath heads on to Mom’s house, where it gets set up poolside. I finally take a closer look at it and see there’s a card. I open the card.

It’s not my wreath.

This enormous, gorgeous, rainbow wreath has been sent by a thoughtful cousin who lives in Seattle. My $300 wreath has not arrived. Damn. But apparently, I’m not the only one who understood we shouldn’t say good bye to Mark in all-white flora. So that’s good.

I call the local florist and there’s been a mixup. She thought the funeral was tomorrow. There is sadness in her voice. I know what Mark would do, and it’s the same as what I do: I tell her to send the wreath over to Mom’s house. We can enjoy it poolside along with the cousin’s wreath.

My wreath arrives on its easel a few hours later. It’s beautiful and colorful and all the right things, inane and whimsical and I don’t know why we do so much with flowers when a person dies. Why? Why cut a bunch of beautiful living things off from their mother plant and send them to people grieving for a death, just so we can watch more things wilt and die? Why can’t we do something more permanent, more… alive?

——-

A couple weeks ago, for about 20 seconds Mark was still alive. Sometimes this happens with me, and then I have to say goodbye to him anew. This is how I remember the most recent round, through the hurricane haze of emotions:

I was going somewhere or coming from somewhere, in the car. I pulled into wherever I was landing. I was thinking about all sorts of things in my racing-thoughts way and a thing came into my mind that made me chuckle and roll my eyes. I reached for my phone, thinking, “oh this’ll make Mark laugh, I think I’ll give him a call.”

I had the phone in my hand before I realized there is no longer a Mark I can call. I experienced it physically, just exactly like I’d been punched lightly in the gut. My shoulders hunched and I bent forward a little, and my breath left me in a small puff. I put the phone back down and tried to re-arrange my mind to reality. When I succeeded, I wept for a little while and then carried on.

[This is the second in what will be a series of not-stand-alone posts about my brother Mark’s death, which occurred on Sunday, August 2, 2020 during the COVID pandemic. Long-running, self-indulgent lamenting is what we’re talking about here, with a loose idea of building this lament in elegiac past/present prose couplets as a meaningless and misguided nod to meaningless classical forms. Because I think this last bit would have made Mark laugh at me, in wry puzzlement and love.]

I had plans to visit Mark and mom back in March of 2020, by myself. I had arranged the trip months earlier, before the COVID-19 pandemic blossomed. My intent was to take a short break from my own parenting responsibilities, going on 15 relentless years, and to provide some respite to Mark, who was surviving also-relentless years as mom’s caregiver. Mark had a couple heart attacks over the prior few years, and I could tell that he was emotionally bone-weary. He would often make comments about being okay with dying, being ready.

This was mildly terrifying.

I wanted to visit with Mark in person and offer some gratitude to him for the daily grind he put up with. I intended to give him some rest, and to spend some child-free time with him and mom. But the pandemic hit and no one knew what was going to happen. With mom’s age and Mark’s heart health, we couldn’t risk bringing the disease to them via air travel. (The first vaccines wouldn’t be available until late 2020.) After a brief discussion with Mark in February, I cancelled the trip.

—-

About half an hour after learning of Mark’s death, some five months after the cancelled trip, I start mulling the bitter fact that coronavirus took away my last chance to see him alive, my last chance to hug him, sit with him in the yard looking at stars at night or watching hummingbirds in the morning, make a good meal for him, potter in his vegetable garden with him. Even worse, I start thinking about whether a week’s respite for him, back in March, might have changed the outcome I was staring at: my brother collapsing in sudden death on the kitchen floor, probably after dipping into crank despite the state of his heart.

Foolish to imagine I could have made a difference, but I’ve survived half a century fighting off the sense, in the manner of OCD, that I’m responsible for everyone and everything that goes wrong on earth. Even worse is the simple fact that I can’t remember my last conversation with Mark.

—–

About that crank – not crack, but crank.

Meth, speed, ice, poor man’s coke. It was an addiction Mark faced off with for much of his adult life. When he was on it, he had what I called raccoon eyes, unnatural dark patches under his eyes that were a giveaway. I remember first noticing them at my wedding, then for some years they were gone, and then I saw them again the last couple times I visited him in person.

Meth is a really bad idea when you’ve had two heart attacks and need some repair work on your heart. Thus, I hypothesize that meth played a significant role in causing Mark’s death. But that’s a superficial, non-philosophical way of looking at this story. The more important questions are humanistic, not anatomical. Why did Mark turn to crank? Why did he struggle with addiction? Why would he use a drug that he knew could kill him?

In the last few years of his life (it’s still very hard for me to say that, so different from “recently”), Mark and I would dance around the subject of mental health. He was bound up by stigma, well-trained by my mom and our culture to evade the painful likelihood that depression, anxiety, stress, and maybe some other labels were in play whenever his life fell apart. I was walking a different path, following my daughter Jesse’s massive mental health challenges to a stuttering awakening about myself, my history of depression and anxiety and trauma, and my ongoing need for therapeutic supports. I didn’t know how to invite him to cross the bridge with me, without coming across as arrogant or bossy or smug.

I would occasionally ask Mark, as gently and indirectly as I could, whether he was doing okay emotionally. He would inevitably say, “I’m fine, I’m okay.” But he would yell at my mom over little things and then hate himself for it. He would pretend he was okay with his life, but I could see his self esteem was in the toilet. He lived a strange life, with a handful of half-feral rescued dogs to sleep with at night, fully dependent on my mom’s financial support. Instead of seeking the help of a therapist, maybe making some tough decisions to extract himself from a very unhealthy co-dependent living arrangement with my mom, I think he turned to crank. It was probably easier than the Herculean task of overcoming stigma and false shame. I wish I had been able to offer him a stronger hand to hold. I wish I could have smashed stigma for him, with him, before it was too late.

—–

Mark’s death during a pandemic, 2000 miles away, has us in a pinch. COVID-19 has made common things like travel and funerals difficult. Air travel is not an option – there’s not a chance my kids are going to make it through a 5 hour flight, wearing masks, without personality-annihilating emotional and behavioral explosions.

But I have an extraordinary husband who resolves all the questions. Monday morning, less than a day after Mark has died, Anthony announces that we need to make the 30+ hour drive to California to be with my family and attend whatever funeral can be mounted under COVID strictures. We’ll eat out of coolers along the way and stay in clean, national-brand hotels with safety protocols that meet our standards.

By the end of the day Monday, we’ve made boarding arrangements for the dogs, set up caretaking visitations to our gardens and fish, packed, and rented a car.

We have to rent a larger car because we will gouge each others’ eyeballs out if we have to spend 30 hours in our little station wagon, over the course of just three days. Anthony exceeds my expectations, which are for an SUV of some sort.  He comes home from the rental agency in an enormous minivan, with three rows of seats spaced so far apart that we can meet CDC social distancing guidelines in one vehicle. We fill available storage spaces with two coolers, one big suitcase, a bag of shoes, random sundries, pillows and blankets, 50 electronic devices and charging cords, and two Razor scooters.

The scooters are Jesse’s idea. There’s room for them, so we say yes instead of arguing.

I’d like to say the drive goes smoothly. But Jesse in a car for 30 hours in three days is impossible to describe, bordering on unbearable. It is a test for her and everyone around her. Verbal and physical tics, emotional jags, anger and fear and rage, sorrow for the loss of her uncle, cruelty and loneliness and desperate need are all bound up in one little volcanic wisp of a 15-year-old body. Add two exhausted and grief-filled parents and one pissed-off little brother, and it’s not pretty at times.  

There is much yelling. Everyone feels awful afterwards.

Still… at some level, it does go smoothly. All eyeballs are accounted for by the time we reach Stockton, California. The scooters pay off, because the kids use them at longer rest stops to loosen up and get rid of some energy.  We never get lost, and we find good hotel stops along the way. We drive through extraordinary western landscapes. The weather is good to us. We keep trying to get along.

It almost feels like a mini-vacation at times, though that fiction always fizzles for me. We’re on our way to bury my brother.

[This is the first in what will be a series of not-stand-alone posts about my brother Mark’s death, which occurred on Sunday, August 2, 2020 during the COVID pandemic. Long-running, self-indulgent lamenting is what we’re talking about here, with a loose idea of building this lament in elegiac past/present prose couplets as a meaningless and misguided nod to meaningless classical forms. Because I think this last bit would have made Mark laugh at me, in wry puzzlement and love.]

It’s a Sunday evening in the summer of 2020, in the heart of the COVID pandemic. I’ve called my mom because I’ve just gotten word from my brother Ted: my brother Mark, who lives with and looks after mom, is being rushed to the hospital after collapsing. I need to find out what hospital Mark’s being taken to.

Mom responds to my query with clarity: he’s not going to the hospital, Carla.

I’m confused.

“He died.” She blurts the two words out in a gasping whisper. Her voice is so quiet I can barely hear it. Mark died, he’s right here, he collapsed in the kitchen and I couldn’t wake him up. He was warm and then he got cold, the paramedics tried to wake him up but they couldn’t.

“Oh no oh no oh no.”  I hear the words but don’t quite know that my own body is speaking. I gag as I push down sobs and the crushing feeling I remember from 19 years earlier.

——————

In 2001, two days after 9/11 and on my birthday, my dad died. He had endured an emergency heart surgery and several weeks in the ICU. Mark hated seeing him that way, suffering and hooked into a phalanx of machines in a corporate complex full of strangers, wires and tubes and whirring and beeping and everything that isn’t human and home. When dad finally experienced full systems crash, Mom and Mark rushed to the hospital and quickly signed whatever needed signing to remove life support, and sat with dad while he took his last breaths.

A few moments later, Mark called me from the bathroom in dad’s hospital room, where he had taken refuge from whatever weird things mom and an uncle were doing. I thought he was calling to wish me a happy birthday, but no. When I finally understood the message he was delivering, grief engulfed me with heaving animal noises. Mark waited me out peacably. For years after, he would remark on my reaction with what seemed like bemused wonder. It always surprised me that he recalled it so clearly, through the filter of his own loss in that moment. He would mention it, shake his head, and laugh ruefully. “Dude, that sucks that dad died on your birthday. That just sucks.”

———-

These memories flick through me in a heartbeat, 19 years later. I know I have to be present and calm for mom, because she’s more than 2000 miles away, an old woman in her house with her son’s dead body, paramedics doing paramedic things, her closest family more than an hour away. So I push it down.

Mark showed me the way. I’ve got this.

Mom and I manage a moment of shocked, shared grief, and then we agree that I need to call Ted and Eric, my alive brothers who think Mark is still alive. I hang up and gather myself, sitting alone in my bedroom, leaning into the corner of the house so I don’t fall down. I know Anthony and the kids can hear me from downstairs, I know that they know something is terribly wrong.  I heave with sobs for a few minutes, breathe deeply and slowly in the way years of therapy have taught me, and successfully avoid vomiting.  I push it all down and wipe my face off.

My mind is racing as I make my first call to Eric, who is just 14 months younger than Mark. Eric and Mark are tight.  I’m remembering how hard it was for Mark to get me to understand that dad had died, how much that frustrated him; and so I won’t be using euphemisms like “gone” and “passed” and “at peace.”  I have to get the message through quickly, like a Deacon Jones head slap off the line.

Eric answers the phone and busily lets me know he’s busy getting ready to go down to Stockton for Mark and mom, and I think he asks me about hospitals.  I can’t remember all the words, because I’m pushing so much down emotionally. I think I ask him if he’s in a safe place so that we can talk, and then I tell him. Mark isn’t going to a hospital.  He died.

“WHAT?”

Mark is dead. He died. He’s in mom’s house right now, in the kitchen.

Eric breaks into feral, grunting sounds, animal noises of suffering grief that I recognize. As my heart shatters for him, I finally understand Mark’s remarks through the past two decades, about my own reaction to the news that dad died. It wasn’t bemusement Mark felt. It was responsibility – for a moment when he caused me so much pain. I hold onto that connection and it calms me. Mark did so many hard things. I can do hard things too. I need to cause another brother pain now.

I call Ted next.  He’s on the road to Stockton already, still believing Mark is alive and en route to a hospital. I deliver the news.  His grief expresses itself quietly, like a shift in the breeze, a whisper; but it’s still a sledgehammer. He pulls over to the side of the road.

I keep pushing it all down, and we get to the practical business of dealing with the messy fact that Mark is lying dead in Mom’s house.

———-

I loved living in Seoul, Korea as a little girl. It was a vibrant, third-world urban mess with family and a grandma who doted on me.  I hated living in Stockton, California, where we moved when I was 10. I never felt like I fit in there, and I was very lonely.  Life was complicated because of my parents’ volatile marriage, financial insecurities, and sibling challenges. Belatedly, I see that racism also played a heavy hand in my youthful American experiences.  So I went across the country to college, and other than a brief year after getting my undergraduate degree, I left California and never looked back.

If I was the prodigal daughter, running as far away as I could, Mark was the son who stayed. Stockton was the place for him, near my mom and dad and his childhood friends.

With Ted, Eric and me in more distant locales — I the furthest away — Mark carried on best he could with the increasing obligations of caring for aging parents.

Mark visited dad every day in hospital at the end.

When mom had a stroke some years after, Mark was the one her husband John called. Mark called 911, got her to the hospital, tended her through her recovery, managed her medications and doctors and therapists.

When mom fell out of bed and broke her hip, and John was too out of it to know what to do, Mark was the one who figured out something was wrong and, once again, called 911, got mom to the hospital, took her through another long recovery.

Mark was the one mom called when John died in mom’s home — the same home where Mark would die. Mark gave John CPR until the paramedics arrived, though the effort could not save John’s life anymore than the EMTs could safe Mark’s.

Mark was the one who moved in with Mom after John’s death, because Mom couldn’t successfully live alone anymore.  

When mom was hospitalized for two or more weeks during the pandemic for fluid around her heart and lungs, Mark would drive to the hospital every day and just sit outside by the entrance. He wasn’t allowed in, of course. When I asked one day why he went there anyway, he replied, “I don’t know. Maybe I can get in today. I need to be here.”

Mark wasn’t perfect and he dropped balls and he had lifelong addiction issues. But he was always there. The rest of us came when we could, and left when we needed to. Mark’s world was with dad and then John and always mom, in a cycle of co-dependency.  It was a burden and journey that I imagine broke his heart.

——–

Back in Stockton, Mom’s at home with her dead son and a couple paramedics, and Ted is still more than an hour out.

A paramedic has told me they’re going to leave before the coroner’s office gets there, so mom will be alone with Mark’s body and needs to not touch it. I try not to lash out as I explain the obvious to him: you can’t leave an elderly mother alone in a house with her dead son and expect her to leave his body alone! What are you thinking?

I make some calls, Eric makes some calls, we start working all the things out. I ask my alive brothers to please drive safely. I can only lose one tonight.

For decades, Mark has been the one who navigated with mom through the impossible moments. Who will do it now?

---

Mom, let’s go apple-picking. Have you ever been apple-picking?

Mom looks at me with curiosity. “What, apple-picking?”

Yeah, apple picking. We go to an apple orchard, and we pick our own apples. We do it every year.

“Yah, let’s go apple-picking!”

Nick and Anthony aren’t very interested this year, so on a Friday when Jesse doesn’t have school, the 3-gen girls hit the road, two daughters and a mother, all of us no taller than the 5th percentile of height in America.

Mom is enthusiastic about doing something new. “On Hildreth [her old street in California] someone every year had this, you could go pick apples, but I never did it.”

88 years she’s waited for this experience. I am providing. It’s fun, I tell her, low key but fun. The apples are so fresh, pick one and bite into it, even a bad apple fresh off the tree is better than the best apple at the supermarket. Mom nods. We make plans to pick way too many apples. She can give some to the workers painting her house and to church friends.

I’ve read news on the website for the farm we’re going to: the Honeycrisps are ripe and ready for pick-your-own as of Thursday. I love Honeycrisps, and this is Friday. We’re getting there before the weekend so the pickings should be good. But when we arrive at the farm, the lady handing out bags tells me that, in fact, the Honeycrisp harvest stinks. There’s almost nothing on the trees.

We adjust. Pippins are nice. We drive down the dirt lane, past several other apple varieties I’m not interested in. The Pippins are at the very end, two rows of trees, and just one other car is parked there. Mom looks very curious as we pull up.

The trees are dripping with ripe apples. Mom is ooh’ing and aah’ing. Jesse is sixteen, so I have to tell her to put down her phone and grab a bag. We march down the row of trees, at least half way down so we can get to trees that fewer visitors have touched.

Mom starts out quick, pulling the closest apples she can reach and muttering ruefully about the apples that have already fallen to the ground. I haven’t seen her this young in decades. She’s laughing out loud about the abundance of apples, chattering about how she never got to do this before, how beautiful it is here. I suggest she slow down — choose the biggest, best ones, be picky. Mom, Jesse and I take juicy bites out of a shared apple and stand still under the blue sky for a bit, savoring the fresh tang.

As we gather apples, we take note of the often-paired ones, nose to nose – you pick one, the other of the pair falls off. So you have to take them both, or what a waste. Like twins, I say. They’re married, Jesse says. Like brother and sister, little grandma says.

We wander slowly up and down the row, trying not to pick all our apples from just one tree. I manage a couple pictures, but it’s an extremely low priority. Our hands are full of apples most of the time.

(Those aren’t Jesse’s natural cheeks by the way. Those cheeks are absolutely stuffed with apples in this picture. It was just too delicious for her to stop eating for the photo op.)

I walk away with purpose and spy from a distance. What a wonder my bookend girls are, my mother and my daughter. Jesse gets maternally protective, giving me the occasional stink-eye for not watching over her little grandma more carefully. The henpecking is gentle, responsible, loving. Grandma, be careful. Grandma, don’t go in there. Grandma, let me hold that for you. Grandma, what are you doing? Little Grandma seems to enjoy the attention. Jesse looks bemused as mom walks right into the center of a tree, among the branches, and comes back out laughing and carrying too many apples the size of softballs in the crook of her arms. Jesse helps pick them up and put them in the bag as little grandma drops them here and there, giggling all the while.

When our bags are overstuffed, we walk back down the row of trees to the car. We’ve picked 60 pounds of apples, no exaggeration. Mom wants to carry a bag holding about 10 pounds, and Jesse fusses about this decision. After a moment, she marches next to Mom’s wobbling form and gently insists on carrying the bag for her, but mom refuses to give it up. I invite them to each hold a handle on the bag, so Mom can carry it with Jesse’s help. This solution hits the spot, and they walk slowly, side by side to the the car.

In my world, filled with noisy emotions and needs and conflict, and years of mental health challenges and dangers and struggles for my kids, It’s all so strangely peaceful for this moment in the apple orchard. There’s nothing for Jesse to scream at. There’s no one to goad her. There are no triggers. There’s nothing to fail at. There’s just… apples and Little Grandma.

We spend the next couple hours being together. We make plans to come back to the orchard in a couple weeks for more apples. We get gas. We get lunch. We go to the grocery store. We get ice cream. It’s all slow and easy.

We take Little Grandma home. She wants to keep 20 pounds of apples. Before I think, I argue gently and unnecessarily. What are you going to do with 20 pounds of apples, Mom? They’ll go bad before you finish them.

“I love apples. I can eat them all.”

I startled awake from a strange dream this morning.

I was at a family gathering of some inchoate nature, in a house that was an amalgam of several homes I’ve known. My brothers were there. I looked up from the living room and saw all three of them – Mark, Eric and Ted – standing outside on the deck chatting happily. I stared at them; it took a moment for me to realize what was amiss.

Eric came inside, looking excited and relieved. “Mark’s back! He didn’t die. He just went somewhere, and now he’s back.”

Ted joined him, looking slightly irritable but also very happy. “Mark just went somewhere. He’s not gone. He’s back now.”

I didn’t understand. I knew they were wrong. After an awkward moment, I replied, “But… Mark’s dead.”

Ted and Eric cheerfully insisted to me. No, he’s here, look. We were mistaken.

I shook my head in disbelief, but there Mark was, standing right there, looking at me sheepishly, in a stained t-shirt and beat up shorts, just like he always looked. I started to feel excited myself. We approached each other, and I saw that his eyes were the wrong color, a pale eerie blue unrelated to his own gentle brown eyes.

I said aloud, “This can’t be. Mom saw the body. She saw Mark die. Mark, you’re dead.”

But there he was. We embrace each other in a bear hug. I was holding my brother again, tight. Could it be real?

And then his solid substance dissolved. My embrace passed through him. He stood looking at me quietly, a wraith, and I said, “It’s okay Mark. You can go. We’re okay.”

*********

As we drove to physical therapy this morning, I told mom about the dream. I cried a little as I got to the end. Mom stared impassively out the window, and we had a little conversation. I tried to get her to tell me about Mark as a baby, but I think the dream had thrown her for a loop. She struggled to engage and pull the words.

It wasn’t a sad dream, Mom, while I was in it. I’m crying now because I miss Mark, but the dream itself, I didn’t feel sad in it.

It’s a nice dream. Mark hasn’t come to my dreams.

You don’t dream at all anymore, do you.

No, I don’t dream anymore, not one dream.

I don’t know if it was a nice dream, Mom. It was weird.

You’re lucky Mark came to your dream.

Why was I lucky to dream about Mark?

Because you got to see him again.