the habit of being

My mother and I came home from the nursing home to find my grandfather sitting in front of the computer with his hand over his eyes. I followed her into the other room.

“I think Granddaddy’s crying,” she interrupted me.

I turned. It was the first time I’d ever seen him cry, though that hardly occurred to me at the time, when we were all crying, together or in shifts, quietly or in the midst of conversations.

“You go,” she said.

I went.

I leaned over the leather office chair and hugged him. He smelled pretty bad, which was weird to me. He was wearing mismatched blue pajamas (plaid top, striped pants) and his nose was running and he was sobbing.

“He never gets dressed anymore,” my mother had told me earlier, “no matter who’s there.” When I first entered the house that morning, he was sitting at the kitchen table with the funeral director, dressed in those same pajamas. It was a couple days later when someone finally told him there was a hole.

There was an email open on the screen, from my uncle Al. .. and I knew I was the apple of her eye, but you were the whole tree. That’s how much she loved you. He told me to read it, and after my mother showed up with Kleenex, he read it out loud. He called them Al’s words in a very reverent tone. We assured him that was how it really was, and it’s true, and I rubbed his shoulder and didn’t even cry.

When Al made it down from Delaware with his fiance, he wouldn’t let them, both over 40, sleep in the same bed in his house, because he had to “set an example.”

I edited the obituary, taking out her age and fixing the sentence structure as best I could while not leaving out any of the obscure names of survivors Granddaddy insisted needed to be there, to attract the most people to the services, none of which, not even interment, would be private.

The whole funeral was so wrong that if she hadn’t been dead, it might’ve been comic.

We didn’t argue with him for What She Would Have Wanted, only comforted ourselves with the knowledge that she’d never know, and came up with dream funerals where everyone took a long hot bath and then laid down on the couch or drank some coffee, had a cigarette and a good dessert. Her handbags would be on display, and we’d talk about when and where she got each one and how long she waited before she took it out of the bag and used it for the first time. We’d read her favorite passage from The Love Book, the one she wanted read to her all the time. She’d be buried in her best white nightgown and robe and slippers.

There would be none of this open casket stuff. There’d be none of these supposed relatives who made her nervous staring at her, with her hair all wrong and her face fixed up to look like some Ordinary Old Lady’s, while those who knew her best cowered in a corner trying our best not to see. (After she finally had to go up, when everyone else was gone, to leave a note and an origami crane from my little brother, my mom said into my hair with the most heartbreaking love “her fingernails are still the same, but one of them needs filing.”)

Making it through the wake was a nightmare for us, introverts like her, what with scary Aunt Peggy’s plastic shoes and red toenails, people who came up saying “you remember me!” rather than introducing themselves, as if it were some sort of test, second cousins once removed who’d never even met HER, let alone us, and others we did not want to be emotional around. Granddaddy, the extrovert running the show (or, “first class operation,” as he called it), glowed. All he needed was to get around people, tell them every detail of her illness and everything he had done for her, how much money he had spent, how much the pants she’d be buried in had cost so many years ago, how hard it all was, how he hadn’t gotten much sleep last night. It helped him, and he needed it, and who were we to interfere. (Let us have the most compassion for the one who has the most guilt.)

Mom’d overhear Granddaddy telling about six different people what a comfort I was, citing the email incident as proof, and he’d ask people how pretty I was, and call me his girl, and whisper in my ear that Betty didn’t love anyone the way she loved me.. except maybe him. I don’t know why he latched on to me that way, maybe because he thought I didn’t know the things that other people knew, or because he didn’t realize that everyone else felt genuinely sorry for him too. I don’t know what I did that was helpful, except listening, which my mother has been doing so much more of for so much longer and to so much more anguish.

We worried about whether we were acting right, and forced ourselves out of our seats to shimmy around the room with our backs to her corpse reading the names on the flower arrangements for thank you card purposes. Among them were the sunflowers we’d picked out, with the kitten I’d drawn on the card, and the roses that said they were from us, which we’d never seen (my grandfather had taken the liberty), and arrangements from Granddaddy’s old business partners in Delaware.

. . .

At the funeral, my great grandmother remarked “Katharine looks so sad… is she sick?” and my mother replied “No, she’s sad.”

Back in my own city, I’d realize it was the first healthy sadness I’d felt in years. At the time, I cried and held my mother’s hands and listened to some church lady friend of my grandfather’s mother’s sing some song about going home to the Lord, and some lady preacher named Katie talking about eternal life, saying “Betty” in a wrong tone, and putting in as much as she could (not much) about the life of a woman she’d never known, picked up from her husband and children, into a cookie cutter sermon. A very private person, entirely devoted to her family, enjoying the small pleasures of worldly life but always working on her spiritual life, not suffering now, definitely going to the good place. It didn’t matter what she said. It didn’t take anything to get us all teary, my mother passing tissues along the pew. She’d tell me that night she hadn’t heard much of it at all.

My stepfather made for a faulty pallbearer, showing up late for official pall bearing duties, when they’d tell him he had ten minutes and they didn’t really mean it.

They buried her in the wrong cemetery, in a plot right by the curb without even a tree, a plot my great grandmother had bought in her cheap morbid obsessions. Betty’s people are in a pretty place with hills and trees, where she and my mother had walked when Mom was a child, talking about the relatives buried there. This place was flat, with little flower holders poking out like bristly hairs missed while shaving - a match for the funeral home, not an old house with a wrap-around porch where the introverts could escape, but a bland square place with new-looking falseness, a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, a place she’d be uncomfortable alive.

On the top of the vault that’d cover the coffin, “Berry M. Kemp” was engraved.