A couple of weeks ago I made a quick trip to Chicago to see my mom. I had not seen her since last April when she fell from an unlocked wheelchair and face planted on the ground. When she was admitted to the hospital, she had a UTI and a MRSA infection and I flew home for what we all thought were her last days. She looked like she’d been on the losing end of a bar fight but recovered, and my siblings moved her to a different facility.
I hadn’t been to see her earlier because of Covid, but those numbers got better and traveling got safer. Then I got Covid which took me longer to bounce back from than I planned. Those were all legitimate reasons for not going, but the real reason was because there was no Mark to call to give me a pep talk before I went into her facility, there was no Mark to talk to when I got home to say she didn’t deserve this outcome, there was nobody to hold me for a good cry. In the union he and I made years ago, I am now the sole emotional carrier of my mom’s current life when that used to be shared by two.
On Sunday morning I went with my sisters to the Shady Acres of the southwest suburbs of Chicago. “Look who we brought, Mom,” my sister said and I pulled my mask down for a few seconds so she could see all of my face. She had the biggest smile and those few seconds alone made all of it worthwhile. She’s declined a lot which I knew from talking with her every week but seeing it on a phone is different from seeing it in person. The chatty, vibrant woman who started her day with several cups of coffee from an old-fashioned percolator now needs someone to hold the cup to her lips so she can take a few swallows. Words come slowly and hesitantly, but she did manage to make us laugh, and what a welcome relief to see a bit of who she used to be left. We spent a couple of hours with her and then wheeled her back to the common area, and just like every time I’d leave her after my dad died, it was hard to turn away and walk out the door.
For many reasons the trip was stressful from start to finish and I ended up leaving after 24 hours instead of staying until the following morning. My younger sister drove me to Midway which used to be the chill alternative to O’Hare but is now busy all the time. In what might be a first ever there, I walked right up to security. Once through, I badly wanted to sit and have a glass of wine but my stomach was in knots and that didn’t seem like a very good idea.
My cousin’s wife died eleven years ago of breast cancer and Mark and I flew in and out of Midway for the wake and funeral. Her death was a sad and shocking blow to our extended family even though it was expected. A friend recently lamented about the older people in our families dying and how they were steadfast attendees of every wedding, baptism, graduation party, and funeral. “They were there our whole lives, sitting with their coffee and gossiping about the family, and it never occurred to me that one day they would be gone,” and I think that’s how we all felt about Carol’s presence in our lives.
Growing up my grandma and her cousin lived on the same block. If I was staying at my grandma’s in the summer and got bored I’d go down to Belle’s house to hang out. She lived on a second floor apartment across the street from the cathedral. The bells would chime and rattle the house and the view outside her windows seemed mysterious and magical. Sometimes you’d get a glimpse of a group of nuns gliding through the grounds as if they were on air – straight up The Sound of Music stuff. At the time her son, Hal, who was in high school, would sometimes let me hang out with him and his best friend, Frank. I was all of about twelve years old and enamored with Frank.
As the years went by and I met Mark, got married and had kids, I’d ask Hal and Carol about Frank who came to their house most Sunday mornings for breakfast. “I was so in love with him then,” I told them and always said to tell him I said “hi.” For me it was a long running joke until Carol died and at the funeral home Frank made a beeline straight for me. He hadn’t changed much and we chatted in the awkward way you do when you hadn’t seen someone in forty years and never really knew anything about them besides their looks. Throughout that day and the next he kept looking at me which was weird and made me uncomfortable. He saved his move for the luncheon after the funeral, and as I was saying goodbye to everyone, Frank came up to me, hugged me, and whispered, “You need to ditch your husband and be with me.” I was horrified and nothing came out of my mouth due to pure shock, and then my sister came along and rescued me so her and her husband could take Mark and me to Midway. It was far earlier than we needed to be there but we were okay with that. “Good people watching,” Mark said, and once inside and through security we decided to go to a bar and have a couple of beers. As one tends to do after a funeral, we were processing everything that had happened in the last two days, how Carol left such a mark as a music teacher, how much she’d be missed, how Hal was going to fare without her. And then Mark asked me, “Who was that dude with the dark hair that looked like he came off the set of Starsky and Hutch?” I told him that was Frank and filled him in on the backstory of how I had a mad crush on him before I even needed a training bra. “Guy said the weirdest thing to me when we were leaving. Told me I needed to let you go to be with him,” and the shock I had when Frank said that to me was times a hundred that he had the audacity to say that to Mark. “Oh god,” I said, “he said the same thing to me but, jeezus, I can’t believe he said that to you.” I felt sick to my stomach at the thought but needn’t have worried. When I asked Mark what he said back to him, he took a swig of his beer and said, “I gave him a long up and down and decided I didn’t have a thing to worry about,” and I burst out laughing because it was so absolutely perfect.
We spent another hour at the bar talking about life and how weird funerals can be, that maybe hitting on someone’s wife in the midst of the collective grief of a life gone too soon might win top prize. Then we got on the plane and both fell asleep, and Mark’s was the only shoulder I ever needed to rest my head on when everything got to be too much.
